Hardy Krueger in Luftwaffe uniform, for the 1950's movie "The One That Got Away"

**Bob Lyons** · 10-21-2013, 01:40 AM

One of the few movies of that era that show what appear to be mostly genuine WW2 period German tunics, the movie is about the capture
and eventual escape (from Canada) of Luftwaffe P.O.W. Oblt Franz von Werra, and it is still a great movie that stands up against the test of time.

I think this is a great studio publicity shot.

Bob

**Espenlaub Militaria** · 10-21-2013 01:40 AM

We also buy and trade your items and full collections!

**HPL2008** · 10-21-2013, 12:34 PM

The photo does feel a bit as if it could be an actual RKT portrait, doesn't it?

Let me add two bits of information for trivia- and movie buffs:

Hardy Krüger's film career actually started during the Third Reich era, and in a film that also had to with German military aviation: In the 1944 propagandistic film Junge Adler [Young Eagles], the teenaged Krüger played an apprentice in an aircraft factory building bombers. (The film can be found in its entirety on YouTube.)

The last months of the war then saw him in a German military uniform for real: In March 1945, at 16 years of age, Hardy Krüger was drafted into the Waffen-SS and saw action with the last-ditch Nibelungen division. Unable to bring himself to shoot at U.S. soldiers who were close enough to clearly see their faces, he was court-martialled and very nearly executed for "cowardice in the face of the enemy". He was saved by a sympathetic officer who made him his personal messenger.

Bet it must have felt odd for him to don the uniform of an SS general for "A Bridge Too Far"...