Horst Caspar

He took acting lessons at the school of Ilka Grüning and Lucie Höflich, along with future stars of German cinema such as Lilli Palmer, Inge Meysel and Brigitte Horney.

He was taken up by the director Saladin Schmitt and became a leading man at his theatre in Bochum, where he performed in plays by Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller.

[1] Under the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, Caspar was classed as a Mischling (mixed race) of the second degree.

This was regarded as a "rare and special privilege" for a part-Jewish actor in a city where all Jews had been purged from cultural life.

[3] In 1943 Caspar was engaged by the director Veit Harlan to play the young August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, who in 1807 defended the Prussian fortress town of Kolberg against the French during the Napoleonic Wars, in Kolberg, an epic film produced on the orders of Goebbels.

His last role was as a reporter named Peter Zabel in crime film called The Orplid Mystery, produced in 1950.