He is most known for being the father of Monika Ertl, the Communist guerrilla who assassinated Roberto Quintanilla Pereira, the man responsible for chopping off Che Guevara's hands.
[1] In the mid-1950s, after an arrest by the Allies[2] and being banned from working professionally in Germany,[1] Ertl fled to Chile[2] and finally resettled in Bolivia,[1] where he made two feature-length "expedition film"-like documentaries.
He embarked on a third but ceased after his tractor crashed through a wooden bridge with two-thirds of the uninsured exposed footage on board.
Frustrated, he then decided to become a farmer and retired to La Dolorida, a piece of semi-jungle land in eastern Bolivia,[2] where he was known as "Juan".
[2] He rarely returned to Germany, where he felt cheated out of an important film award, but days before his death he reportedly asked his daughter Heidi, who lived in Bavaria, to send him a bag of German soil.