Biography

His decision to appear in the Nazi propaganda piece 'Jud Suess' (1940), led to Goebbels naming him an 'actor of the state' and appointing him vice president of the Reich Theatre Chamber. Though he claimed after the war to have been coerced into playing the part, he was convicted in court as a minor war criminal, fined and forced to move to Austria. This effectively curtailed his film career and thereafter, he only appeared occasionally on stage in Vienna until his rehabilitation to Germany in 1954.

He was just thirty-five at the time he filmed Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but his heavy makeup made him seem older.

Krauss was an unapologetic anti-Semite who supported the Nazi party and its ideology. In 1933 Krauss joined the Vienna Burgtheater ensemble to perform in Campo di Maggio (German: Hundert Tage), a drama written by Giovacchino Forzano together with Benito Mussolini, where-after he was received by the Italian dictator and also made the acquaintance of German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

Adolf Hitler rated him as a cultural ambassador of Nazi Germany.

Son of a postal worker, on stage from 1903, ten years later joining Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Film debut in 1914. Specialist in complex, obsessive or tortured characters. Became a key interpretor of villainy in the German expressionist silent cinema, noted for his bravura performances in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), as Jack-the-Ripper and Spring-heeled Jack in Waxworks (1924) and as the mephistophelean Scapinelli in The Student of Prague (1926).