Peter Sturm

Peter Sturm
Peter Sturm as Walter Model in the 1970 film Liberation: The Fire Bulge.
Born	Josef Michel Dischel (1909-08-24)24 August 1909 Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died	11 May 1984(1984-05-11) (aged 74) Berlin, German Democratic Republic
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1936–1983

Josef Michel Dischel (24 August 1909 – 11 May 1984), known by his adopted stage name Peter Sturm, was an Austrian and an East German actor.

Dischel was born into a religious Jewish family in Vienna. His father was a tailor, originally from the Polish regions of the Habsburg Empire, and died in 1915. His mother was born in Hungary.

Dischel had taken up an apprenticeship as a textile merchant, but abandoned it. He then decided to become an actor, and began taking drama lessons from renowned Austrian performer Raoul Aslan. While studying, he worked as a radio mechanic. After completing his studies, he assumed the stage name Peter Sturm. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria when he was nineteen years old, and later turned to an active member of the Communist Party of Austria, that was declared illegal by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. In 1935, he was convicted of high treason and condemned to two and a half years in prison. Sturm eventually served eighteen months, in the and in the Wöllersdorf detention camp. In 1936, subsequent to his release, he joined the cast of Brettl am Alsergrund, a political, left-leaning kabarett in Vienna's Alsergrund district, that was managed by Leon Askin and commonly known as Das ABC Kabarett. The actor was one of the cabaret's three declared communists, alongside Jura Soyfer and Robert Klein-Lörk.

In May 1938, after the Anschluss, Sturm was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp. In August, he was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was held in the same barrack with actor Fritz Grünbaum. He was registered as an Austrian political prisoner. In April 1939, Sturm was released from Buchenwald and allowed to leave Germany. He emigrated to Italy, spending three months in Milan. Then, he illegally crossed the border into France, settling in Marseilles. After the Second World War broke out in September, he was interned in the Camp des Milles, where he acted in the camp's makeshift theater. On 27 June 1941, shortly after France surrendered to Germany, the camp's residents were to be evacuated on a train to Bayonne. Sturm managed to escape. He lived in Marseilles until August 1942, when he was deported to the Drancy internment camp, from which he was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was held in the Blechhammer sub-camp, where he was forced to serve as a barber. Occasionally, when the guards authorized it, he participated in theater evenings. In January 1945, the prisoners were evacuated to Buchenwald in a death march. Sturm survived it and wrote an account on the march shortly after arriving in Buchenwald. He joined the camp's communist underground organization. While in Buchenwald, he was a member of the building detachment headed by Robert Siewert. During the Holocaust, his mother was murdered in Auschwitz. Buchenwald was liberated on 11 April 1945.