Wolfgang Langhoff

German theatre, film and television actor and theatre director, also known for his autobiographical memoir Rubber truncheon. Being an account of thirteen months spent in a concentration camp. After it was translated by Lilo Linke into English it became one of the first internationally known eyewitness accounts of brutality in the Nazi concentration camps. Langhoff spent 13 months in the camps, from 1933 to 1934, and was subjected to severe torture by the SA.

Three months later, in June 1934, he fled to Switzerland, just before the closure of the border. At the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, he found shelter and work as a director and actor.

Langhoff played Eilif in the first production of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, which opened at the Schauspielhaus Zürich on 19 April 1941. He also performed in the first production of Brecht's Life of Galileo, which also opened at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, on 9 September 1943.

He played Ernst Mehlin in Konrad Wolf's film Genesung (1956), von Geir in Nikola Korabov's Tyutyun (1962), and Professor Holt in Joachim Kunert's Die Abenteuer des Werner Holt (1965); he also appeared in Kurt Maetzig and Günter Reisch's Das Lied der Matrosen (1958). On television, he appeared in Hans-Joachim Kasprzik's mini-series Wolf Among Wolves (1965).

It is on the strength of his productions of classical texts at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, a theatre which he led from 1946 to 1963, that Langhoff's fame as a director rests. His notable productions there include Goethe's Faust (1949 and 1954, productions in which he also played Mephisto) and Egmont (1951), Schiller's Don Carlos (1952), Shakespeare's King Lear (1957) and Lessing's Minna of Barnhelm (1960).

Wolfgang Langhoff was married to the actress Renata Edwina Malacrida, who bore him two children, Thomas (1938) and Matthias (1942). He died on 25 August 1966 in Berlin, aged 64.