Klaus Detlef Sierck (1925 - 1944)

For some reason I was looking on Internet Movie Database at a long long list of child actors from the early 20th century. I found myself looking at the year each one died and calculating how old they were when they passed away, something I've heard old people tend to do. I found it depressing because a lot of them didn't live very long. Then I started noticing a flurry of deaths in the early 1940s. There was a French child actor I knew about who had been in the French resistance. The Germans arrested him and took him to Germany where they tortured and murdered him. 

There was an Australian child actor who died in Holland of undisclosed causes in 1944. It was a little strange that they wouldn't just say so if he died fighting the Third Reich so it made me wonder what happened to him. Maybe I misread it. Was he Australian or Austrian?

And there was Douglas Sirk's son, Klaus Sierck, a child actor in Germany killed in action at 18 or 19 in the Soviet Union in 1944. You can visit his grave in Ukraine if you want. 

I didn't even know Sirk was German. His Hitler-loving son distanced himself from him because Sirk's second wife was Jewish. The young fellow's mother was a Nazi Party member.

As I was looking this up, that AI thing started up, was giving information about it.

It said:

Klaus Detlef Sierck, the son of screenwriter and film director Detlef Sierck (Douglas Sirk) and actress Lydia Brincken, was a young actor who appeared in approximately 13 films during his brief career. Born on March 30, 1925, in Berlin-Mitte, Germany, he tragically lost his life while serving in the German infantry on the Eastern Front during World War II. He died just before his 19th birthday.

Klaus Detlef Sierck’s burial site is located at the Soldatenfriedhof Iwaniwka in Lutsk, Volynska, Ukraine1. This solemn resting place serves as a memorial for those who sacrificed their lives during the war.

May his memory endure, like the echoes of a distant film reel, capturing moments frozen in time.

He "tragically" lost his life, eh? Odd that AI is neutral on Nazism. But Wikipedia wasn't much better, praising a Nazi propaganda film:

One of Sierck's greatest roles was Kadett Hohenhausen in Karl Ritter's Kadetten in 1939. The anti-Russian propaganda film about Prussian cadets captured and abused by inhuman Cossacks during the Seven Years' War.