Farewell to Dr. Horst Claus (1940 – 2024)

HORST CLAUS  (1940–2024 † )

We are saddened to report the recent death of  Dr. Horst Claus, He was born in 1940 in the historic city of Worms in the German Rhineland. German film researcher and author William Gillespie never had the opportunity to meet Dr. Claus in person, but they enjoyed lengthy and a robust correspondence between 2012 and 2018. These remarks cannot begin to do justice to the film research and publications Dr. Claus contributed over the decades, but instead focuses on the area of overlap between Dr. Claus and Gillespie as regards Karl Ritter and Hans Steinhoff.

He was a Professor at the University of the West of England, Bristol  and wrote many German film articles and authored or contributed many film publications over the decades. He was a leader in the restoration of the silent films of Director Hans Steinhoff, and curated a cinema retrospective on the director in 2014 at the Deutsches Historisches Museum  Zeughauskino in Berlin. 

His monumental biography of Steinhoff was published by Filmarchiv Austria in 2013.  The book, titled Filmen für Hitler: Die Karriere des NS-Starregisseurs Hans Steinhoff  took over fifteen years to research and Dr. Claus was fortunate to have been able to interview a number of persons who knew Steinhoff well, such as Henriette von Schirach, daughter of Hitler’s official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann and wife of Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach. His incredible research provided for the very first time a comprehensive biography of this very private man. Dr. Claus discovered the site of the April 1945 plane crash that killed Steinhoff south of Berlin, and Dr. Claus even found the one survivor of that crash. This information allowed his book to disclose for the first time the true story of Steinhoff`s mysterious death and the location of his remains in the common grave of the plane’s crash victims.  

Dr. Claus wrote the short biography of Jürgen Ohlsen found in the CineGraph Filmlexikon, and contributed to those entries on Steinhoff and also Karl Ritter, amongst others.

Dr. Claus and I began corresponding via email in early 2012 after he learned of the publication of my biography on Karl Ritter whilst he was finishing the final proof of his Steinhoff biography. Sadly we had not known of one another’s respective work at opposite ends of the globe, so his book was too far advanced to allow any original full–colour Steinhoff film posters from the Third Reich era to be used from this Collection. Instead the book has black and white images from film programmes.  More importantly, his surmise in the book that Karl Ritter had played the key role in Steinhoff’s appointment as the Director of Hitlerjunge Quex had been confirmed by Ritter’s private diary entries cited in my Ritter biography, but again it was too late to change  the Steinhoff book galleys.  

In June 2012 we compared notes on Karl Ritter’s dire November/December 1932 situation as he had not been paid by his Reichsliga film studio employer for three months and the Ritter family had been evicted from its apartment in Munich. Dr. Claus had reconstructed these facts in his manuscript, whereas I had done so independently from Ritter’s diaries. Dr. Claus wrote that his narrative “shows Ritter's introduction to Ufa from a different perspective than the one you are presenting by quoting from the diaries. Because yours reflects Ritter's personal situation at the time, it is far more interesting and exciting than what I have written, and it brings Ritter's character and personality to life. Indeed - and this was supposed to be the beginning of the mail - I very much enjoyed reading your book.It's objective, factual and contains interesting visual material!!!“

I have quoted from his correspondence with me in these years as regards Hans Steinhoff and Karl Ritter in my latest book on Hitler Youth Quex, as well as cited some biographical and filmographic facts from his Steinhoff book. 

In closing, I recall that Dr. Claus explained early in our correspondence that he had wanted to write a biography on Karl Ritter as he found him far more interesting than Hans Steinhoff, but he had been unable to locate the Ritter diaries, and even had he done so, he would not have had the means to travel to Argentina to study them. He therefore turned his efforts to Steinhoff instead.

Had Dr. Claus been sucessful in accessing Karl Ritter's diaries his Steinhoff biography would undoubtedly never have been written, and his Ritter biography would have diminished the interest I had in pursuing research on Karl Ritter and in tracking down the Ritter diaries, and the subsequent publication over the past twelve years of the four Ritter–related books I have written.  So all is well that ends well.  Farewell, Dr. Claus!

He will be missed.

William Gillespie,   April 2024