During the World War II era many German actors fled the Nazi regime and
emigrated to Hollywood, where they often played evil SS officers or
murderous Nazi spies. Some of them came to resent being typecast that
way, but Kosleck--who was born in Germany to Russian Jewish parents--had no such compunctions. An outspoken
anti-Nazi in the German film industry, his activities earned him the
enmity of Josef Goebbels, who became the Nazi Propaganda Minister. When
the Nazis finally took over Germany, an arrest warrant was issued for
Kosleck. He learned that he had already been tried in absentia and
sentenced to death, and he escaped Germany as an SS hit team was
tracking him down. The experience only deepened his hatred of Adolf Hitler
and Nazism, and he once told an interviewer that his playing Nazi
killers and exposing people to the evils of Nazism was his small way
of paying back the Nazis for what they had done to him and his country.
