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Obituary: Kurt Von Schlippen

Kurt Von Schlippen (6 March 1926 — 26 July 2006) was a German actor who appeared in over 160 films and made numerous television appearances. He was cast mainly because of his aristocratic good looks and his German ancestry.

Von Schlippen was born in Cloppenburg but grew up in Schleswig-Holstein, the eldest son of a wealthy brewer. He hoped to study medicine but caught the acting bug after appearing in a school play. He quickly enrolled in drama classes in Hamburg during the summer holidays.

The young Von Schlippen's first film was Der Gute Rowdy (The Good Hooligan), an anti-semitic piece about a Jewish child who takes a whistle into a football ground to disrupt the match in the hopes that it will be abandoned and the (Jewish-controlled) Pools Panel will sit. Von Schlippen played the leader of a gang of street urchins who bludgeons the Jewish child to death with a football-rattle after the "Schalke 04" game at "FC Hockstetter" is declared a home win. His performance was widely praised in Nazi circles and won him the coveted Joseph K Goebbels Award for Services to National Socialist Film.

Von Schlippen's next film was a tear-jerker in which a boy discovers his father is a Communist and so betrays him to the Gestapo. After an emotional performance in the witness box he is allowed to pull the lever that hangs his father and in the final moments he is seen receiving an Iron Cross and a bag of Werther's Originals from Heinrich Himmler. It was this film that made him a star in Germany and he toured Europe and the United States in 1939 making a large number of personal appearances mainly in émigré German communities.

At the outbreak of WWII, Von Schlippen was trapped in London with his mother and, without access to his bank accounts in Germany, was reduced to poverty. He came to the attention of the authorities after he had to be rescued by the police when an attempt to busk to an East End crowd of blitz evacuees by singing the "Horst Wessel Song" caused a near riot. On realising they had a child prodigy on their hands and sensing a major propaganda coup, Ministry of Information recruited Von Schlippen to play "Adolf" the Nazi milk pixie who causes poorly refrigerated milk to sour. He continued in these short information films, including his most famous work Hun From Above where he plays a very young Red Baron, complete with monocle and waxed moustache, who rides a nightmarish fire-breathing dragon in a film apparently about the dangers of improper solvent storage proceedures in the workplace.

As the Ministry of Information expanded its wartime propaganda role, Von Schlippen appeared variously as a fanatical bomber pilot in Death from Berlin, a homicidal paratrooper in I Murder Babies and a blood-thirsty U-Boat officer in I killed Jack in which his character bites the hand of his rescuer ("Jack") thereby casuing a wound which goes septic and kills the plucky Brit.

After the war, Von Schlippen remained in Britain and continued his acting career. His first post-war role was as a sentry at the Arnheim Bridge in Theirs is the Glory (1946), followed by the part of the SS officer who shoots David Lodges' character in The Cockleshell Heroes (1955) and an short appearance as an uncredited AA battery commander in 633 Squadron (1964). In 1977, he reprised his sentry role in A Bridge Too Far, delighting the production crew by bringing along the uniform he had worn 31 years earlier.

In the late 1970s he found parts harder to obtain as the vogue for war films declined and he reached his fifties. During this period he tried to move away from type and was delighted to be offered a part playing Britt Ekland's father in Murder Cartel — a 1979 episode of The Return of the Saint. Von Schlippen believed this was his first ever non-Nazi part until he saw the episode some years later and realised he was actually playing a post-plastic surgery Josef Mengele.

He also tried his hand at comedy and appeared as "Hauptmann Hiccup" in an episode of Spike Milligan's Q8. This role was unique as he appeared to be playing an anti-Nazi conspiritor who was trying to poison Milligan's Hitler with a plate of mothballs disguised as sprouts. This fails because Hitler doesn't like them as "ze give me ze gas!" At this point, Milligan held up a metal drum with the words "Zyklon B" on the side and was promptly attacked by Jewish cast member John Bluthal. It was several minutes before the studio audience realised this wasn't scripted and the police were called. Although no charges were brought, BBC executives insisted the sketch was removed from the episode and Von Schlippen's performance ended up on the cutting room floor.

He continued working until old age and his last TV appearance was as Wernher von Braun's still living twin brother in the 1999 X-Files episode Dreamland.

Kurt Von Schlippen died on 26 July 2006 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of a stroke just days after completing voice-over work for "MechaHitler" — a highly destructive robot in Namco's PSP game Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection.

Previously

• Professor Von Seuss to release feature film
• Vets' fury at WWII commemoration slur
• Hitler slams anti-euro cinema ad

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