Hardy Kruger, actor in international adventure films, dies at 93

Mr. Kruger starred in the 1957 British drama “The One That Got Away,” which was based on a true story about a captured German fighter pilot who stages daring attempts to escape the Allies and, as the title suggests, finally succeeds. The film, tautly directed by Roy Ward Baker, drew excellent reviews and elevated Mr. Kruger’s cachet in English-speaking cinema.

His charm, blond-haired, blue-eyed good looks and the fact that he deserted from the Nazi army toward the end of World War II — while still in his teens — helped Mr. Kruger land further roles at a time when Germans of his generation were still eyed with suspicion abroad.

Once again in the role of a former fighter pilot, Mr. Kruger starred in the French movie “Sundays and Cybèle” (1962), which won an Academy Award for best foreign film. It was the story of a friendship that forms between an injured veteran with amnesia and a 12-year-old girl who is abandoned by her father at an orphanage. New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther praised the “exquisite, delicate charm” of the movie and its performances.

Mr. Hardy starred with John Wayne in the safari movie “Hatari” (1962) and appeared in the all-star cast of “The Flight of the Phoenix” (1965) alongside James Stewart, Richard Attenborough and Peter Finch. He also had roles in “Barry Lyndon” (1975), “A Bridge Too Far” (1977) and “The Wild Geese” (1978).

In later years, he focused on making travel films for German television, writing books and the occasional stage performance.

Franz Eberhard August Krüger, the son of an engineer, was born in Berlin on April 12, 1928. While attending an elite Nazi boarding school, he appeared in the 1944 film “Junge Adler.”

It was intended as a wartime propaganda movie, but Mr. Kruger said his encounters with older actors on the set exposed him more fully to the horrors of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship. As the war turned against Germany, Mr. Kruger’s Hitler Youth unit was drafted into the newly formed SS division “Nibelungen.”

Mr. Kruger, who was 16 at the time, found himself fighting experienced American troops in southern Germany.

In a 2006 interview with German daily Bild, he recounted that he and his school friends were sent to the front “as cannon fodder” in Hitler’s futile attempt to halt the Allies’ advance. “I knew the war was lost,” he told the newspaper. “I knew that there were concentration camps and that the Nazis were a bunch of criminals.”

Mr. Kruger deserted, was captured by the Allies and spent some time as a prisoner of war. After the war, he returned to acting, first in theaters and then in Germany’s re-emerging movie industry.

Ambition led Mr. Kruger to Paris and London, where he studied French and English, and dropped the umlaut in his surname, in the hope of landing more-glamorous roles in foreign films.

His breakthrough came when Baker picked Mr. Kruger for the role of Luftwaffe ace Franz von Werra in “The One That Got Away.” Mr. Kruger managed to fit the archetype of the blond German soldier without appearing cold and superior — thereby avoiding being cast as the villain in the war movie roles that would inevitably follow.

“I had no interest in playing the war criminal,” Mr. Kruger said in a 2003 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, adding that he wanted to portray the many Germans who found themselves unwilling participants in the war. In later years, Mr. Kruger supported campaigns to educate younger generations about Nazi crimes and confront neo-Nazi groups in postwar Germany.

An avid traveler, he once owned a farm in Tanzania at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro.

His marriages to Renate Densow and Francesca Camarazzi ended in divorce. In 1978, he married Anita Park. In addition to his wife, survivors include three children.