AllMovie

On American stages since 1927 and in Hollywood from the mid-'30s, Stuttgart-born Hans Schumm was well situated when the inevitable calls for German-accented actors came at the onset of World War II. With his piercing eyes and sculpted face, Schumm played some of the worst offenders of Nazi atrocities, real or Hollywood-imagined, in scores of war melodramas that included everything from the ludicrous Spy Smasher (1942) to the sensationalistic Hitler's Hangman) (1943), in which he was Heydrich's chief henchman. Roles inevitably got scarcer after the war and Schumm returned to Germany in the 1950s, playing, among other roles, Curd Jürgens' father in Wernher von Braun (1959). His final credited performance came in the low-budget Captain Sindbad (1963), an American production filmed in West Germany.