Herbert Reinecker

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Herbert Reinecker (24 December 1914 – 27 January 2007) was a German novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Born in Hagen, Westphalia, he began writing stories as a student and moved to Berlin in 1936, where he became editor of a youth magazine and helped write Jugend in Waffen. During the Nazi era he joined the Nazi Party and worked on propaganda projects related to the Hitler Youth; he also served in a Waffen-SS propaganda unit. He wrote plays and a novel in the early 1940s, and in 1944 he wrote the award-winning screenplay Junge Adler.

After World War II he worked in radio and television and wrote screenplays for popular German crime films and TV adaptations. In the late 1960s he and producer Helmut Ringelmann created a German detective series, Der Kommissar, which began in 1969 and became very successful. In 1974 they started Derrick, another hit series that ran until 1998. He was married twice, first to Angela Schmikowski, with whom he had two children, Rita and Hilmar, and later to Brunhilde Schubert. He stopped writing due to macular degeneration and died near Starnberg in 2007 at age 92.