Horst Tappert

Horst Tappert was born on 26 May 1923 in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal), Germany. His father, Julius Tappert (1892–1957), was a civil servant; his mother was Ewaldine Röll Tappert (1892–1981). Following high school and at the age of 17, Tappert was drafted into the German Army during World War II. Aged 19, he was, according to his widow against his will, transferred from the Army to the Waffen-SS, where the author of the Derrick series, Herbert Reinecker, had also served. Initially a member of a reserve anti-aircraft unit in Arolsen, he was listed as a grenadier with the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf in March 1943. In 1945, he was briefly a prisoner of war in Seehausen, Altmark. Following the war, he was hired as a bookkeeper at a theatre in Stendal, Germany, and became interested in acting. He took acting classes and gave his stage debut in Stendal, playing Dr. Stribel in Paul Helwig's Die Flitterwochen. In the following years, he changed employers several times, and in 1956, started working at the Kammerspiele, Munich. An independent actor since 1967, he worked as an actor until he died. In the late 1950s, Tappert started taking part in movie and television productions. His big breakthrough was in 1966 with the three-part television show Die Gentlemen bitten zur Kasse, in which he played train robber Michael Donegan. In 1968, he changed sides by playing Scotland Yard detective Perkins in Edgar Wallace movies. In 1970–71, he co-starred in three crime dramas directed by Jesus Franco, She Killed in Ecstasy, The Deadly Avenger of Soho and The Devil Came from Akasava. When the second public television station in West Germany, the ZDF, started planning a new mystery series with a different type of investigator in 1973, he was chosen for the character of detective Stephan Derrick, with sidekick assistant Harry Klein (played by Fritz Wepper). The character Stephan Derrick became a cult figure. The series was licensed in 104 countries and was popular with audiences in China, Japan, and Italy (and even Pope John Paul II). The last of 281 episodes was filmed in 1998, when Tappert reached his self-imposed age limit of 75 years old for being a television actor.

Divorced twice, he last lived in Gräfelfing near Munich with his third wife, Ursula Pistor (married in 1957). He was the father of three children. Tappert enjoyed fishing and hunting. He had a summer holiday home on the coast of northern Norway, a country where he also became a popular visitor, as Derrick, as well as a private person. Tappert and his wife Ursula had a cabin in Hamarøy Municipality in Nordland from 1990 to 2008, when due to his age and failing health, they had to sell the cabin. His wife Ursula Pistor is also an actor, a graduate of the same acting school in Berlin as Ellinor Hamsun, daughter of Knut Hamsun. In interviews and his memoirs, Tappert did not elaborate on his World War II career, claiming to have served as a company medic in the Wehrmacht, after which he became a prisoner of war. In April 2013, he was revealed to have joined the 3. SS-Panzergrenadier-Division Totenkopf, then deployed on the Eastern Front, in March 1943. Historian Jan Erik Schulte, an expert on the history of the SS, said that the circumstances of Tappert's membership in the SS and the question of whether he was pressured or coerced into joining remain unclear. Following the discovery of Tappert's service with the Waffen SS during the war, German broadcaster ZDF dropped all repeats of Derrick. Similarly, Bavaria's interior ministry said it was considering stripping the late actor of an honorary chief police inspector title awarded to Tappert in 1980. Tappert died on 13 December 2008 in Planegg, Germany at age 85.