The stage, film and television actor Erwin Geschonneck was one of East Germany’s most popular performers. Brought up in poverty in Berlin, he became a Communist, endured exile during the 1930s purges in the Soviet Union, spent several years in Nazi concentration camps and was one of the few survivors when a ship containing thousands of former camp prisoners was bombed by the RAF at the end of the war.

After 1945, already in his forties, he built an acting career in first West, and then East, Germany, starring in Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble before defying Brecht to turn his attention to film. His relationship with the communist authorities in East Germany was turbulent. Communist loyalties led him to support the regime broadly and even collaborate with its secret police. But the films in which he starred sometimes fell foul of the censor in their challenges to idealised images of communist society.

Erwin Geschonneck was born in 1906 in East Prussia, the son of a cobbler. While he was a child the family moved to one of the poorest districts of Berlin. His mother had died and his father, an alcoholic, earned a meagre living as a night watchman. Geschonneck’s working life began early with temporary jobs. Work in a bank was ended by the hyperinflation of 1923, and he found employment as everything from a domestic servant to a sandwich delivery boy. He joined the German Communist Party, the KPD, in the late 1920s, and in 1932 he was

an extra in Slatan Dudow’s film

about unemployment, Kuhle Wampe, scripted by Brecht.

Any thoughts of pursuing an acting career were interrupted by the Nazi assumption of power in 1933. Geschonneck fled, initially to Czechoslovakia and then to the Soviet Union, where he was involved in exiled German theatre until he was expelled by the secret police, the NKVD, in 1938.

Returning to Prague, he was arrested by the Gestapo after the German invasion there, in 1939, and spent the next six years in a succession of concentration camps, including Sachsenhausen and Dachau. At the end of the war liberation seemed close. But he was one of thousands of prisoners loaded on to the former ocean liner Cap Arcona, moored near Lübeck. In what appears to have been a tragic error by RAF crews, the ship was bombed and strafed in May 1945. Geschonneck was one of only a few hundred to survive. He later acted in a film about the event.

He resumed civilian life in Hamburg, working in local theatre, radio and film. His breakthrough came in 1949 when Brecht cast him at the Berliner Ensemble as the chauffeur in his play Herr Puntila and his Man Matti. He also played the chaplain in Mother Courage. Theatrical acclaim brought him to the attention of DEFA, the state-owned film studios in East Berlin, and in the 1950s he began, despite Brecht’s disapproval, to turn his attention to film-making. This, and his later career in television, made his face, often with distinctive trim moustache, instantly familiar to millions of East Germans.

Early film roles included many focusing on the staple fare of postwar East German cinema, such as the evils of the Nazi regime and the heroism of the anti-fascist resistance — led, of course, by communists. But his performances were seen as subtler than mere agitprop. In The Axe of Wandsbek he played a slaughterhouse worker who is coerced by the SS into executing communists. In Naked Among Wolves he was a prisoner at Buchenwald who helped to shelter a Jewish child, a controversial subject for East German cinema as official accounts of the Nazi period downplayed Jewish suffering. He also had a role in Jakob the Liar (1975), portraying life in a Jewish ghetto in Poland during the war — the only DEFA film to be nominated for an Oscar.

In films depicting life in East Germany, Geschonneck played roles broadly sympathetic to the aims of the communist state but sometimes critical of how society was actually run. There were films highlighting environmental damage caused by ruthless industrialisation. And in Berlin Around the Corner (1966), portraying the sensitive relations between the generations, his character sympathised with impatient younger characters, and, while broadly supportive of state-owned enterprises, was critical of flaws in the socialist economic system. Government censors prevented the film from being shown until 1987.

Geschonneck sometimes challenged such rulings, protected by his popularity and solid communist background. In other respects, however, he was loyal to the regime, even working as an informer for the Stasi secret police. And he was never tempted, as other actors were, to seek work in West Germany. When the East German regime collapsed in 1989 he was resentful, and became a prominent supporter of the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the Communist Party. He continued to act in the 1990s, including a television film directed by his son, Matti, but spent more and more time at home in his flat, near to the district where he had grown up in Berlin nearly a century before.

He was married five times, and is survived by his wife, Heike.

Erwin Geschonneck, actor, was born on December 27, 1906. He died on March 12, 2008, aged 101