Dieter Richter

Dieter Richter (played by Alfred Burke) is the Kommandant of Guernsey, who was an academic in peacetime in Enemy at the Door (1978-80).

Biography
From Wiesbaden, and has served with General Beck and admires Erwin Rommel. He is married to a translator, Anna Richter (Swedish is one of her languages). No children are mentioned. He worked as an academic before the war and once spent some time in Cambridge, living on Trumpington Street where, he says, there were "cherry trees all along." He is conscientious about doing his duty, but is opposed to Nazi ideology and sometimes frustrated about being confined to an island that rapidly becomes a backwater in terms of active theatres of war.

He has a fairly immediate respect for Philip Martel (and his family) and acts on at least one occasion to save his life. He also strikes up what becomes a solid friendship with his fellow officer, Ernst Freidel, and has increasingly difficult clashes with the SS Officer, Klaus Reinicke.

Behind the scenes
The tie-in novel includes the information that Richter was a doctor of Philosophy in his academic life. It also introduces him as follows: "'Richter had a capacity to charm that might cloud a man's judgement... Richter was too quiet, too urbane, with a face of that ascetic cast which is acquired by saints, librarians and autocratic confidence tricksters... Perhaps aware of this himself, Richter had grown a beard, but it did little to hide his saintly expression, merely covered the lower part of his face in a gingery stubble."The characters in Enemy at the Door were not (with one exception) based directly on any real life people, but the storylines seem to have been generally carefully researched and based on freely fictionalised versions of historical incidents. In Richter's case, several such storylines seem to have been borrowed from one of his real life counterparts, Baron von Aufsess, including the academic Anglophile background, saving the life of a member of the Controlling Committee (Ambrose Sherwill) and having his wife arrested by the SS. (von Aufsess survived the war, handing the Islands back to the Allies and ending up as a prisoner of war in Britain.)