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Georg Haentzschel was a graduate of the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, and during his early twenties, at the end of the 1920s, made his living as a pianist and arranger in various dance orchestras, and for the Berlin Radio Hour. During the 1930s, he emerged as a composer on radio and subsequently joined the German film industry as a composer during the late '30s, beginning with Die Jette Gottliche (1937). Several of the films that Haentzschel scored did get distributed internationally during the late '30s, including The Strife Over the Boy Jo (1937) and Stars of Variety (1938), but much of his early-'40s work involved movies that were only seen within the Third Reich. He was especially closely associated throughout his career with director Josef von Baky, who employed Haentzschel on many of his movies during the 1940s and 1950s. Some of Haentzschel's music from this period achieved lasting success in Germany, including work in two of von Baky's films, the Lullaby from Annelie (1941) and the Intermezzo from Munchhausen (1943), which remained popular light classical works for years afterward. And at least one of the movies that Haentzschel scored during the Nazi era, Via Mala (1944), went unreleased in Germany until 1948. Haentzschel's film work came to a halt at the end of the Hitler era, and he didn't score another movie until 1949. He was, however, one of the leading composers and conductors of light classical music in Germany during this period and for years after. He returned to scoring movies during the early/middle 1950s, which turned out to be his busiest decade in the field, and his final film soundtrack was for the 1959 feature An Ideal Woman. In 1993, the year after his death in an earthquake in Cologne, Capriccio Records issued a CD of new recordings of some of Haentzschel's best-known and most-beloved film music.