- Born
- Died
- Karl Ritter was born on November 7, 1888 in Würzburg, Bavaria, Germany. He was a producer and director, known for Furlough on Parole (1938), Patriots (1937) and Pour le Mérite (1938). He died on April 7, 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
- The Soviet Union demanded in 1945 that he be tried for war crimes because of his propaganda and militarist pictures.
- Beginning with Pour le Mérite, Ritter's films are characteristically fast-moving and episodic. He prepared them in detail using storyboards.
- After the end of World War II, Ritter was declared a Mitläufer (fellow traveler) at his de-Nazification trial. In 1947, he emigrated to Argentina via Portugal; there, thanks to Winifred Wagner ( the English-born wife of Siegfried Wagner, the son of Richard Wagner), he was able to make El Paraiso. In the 1950s he returned to West Germany and ran his own production company there, declaring a wish "to restore the strength of the German cinema", but his project of remaking Pandora's Box fell through, and he went back to Argentina and died in 1977 in Buenos Aires.
- John Altmann estimated that 6 million young boys had seen and been influenced by his films between 1936 and 1939. His Zeitfilme such as Stukas have been provocatively seen as forerunners of modern military thrillers such as Roland Emmerich's 1996 Independence Day.
- As an early member of the NSDAP since 1925 he also shot several propaganda movies.
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