In a British POW camp in 1945, a teenage German paratrooper stood naked in the freezing night, ate cigarettes and drank his own urine to get sent home sick. It did not work, but it was the blueprint for Klaus Kinski. This episode follows him from his 1926 birth in Zoppot and the childhood poverty he invented, through capture on his second day of combat, a torpedoed transport ship, and camp variety shows where he learned to hold a room hostage, to a bombed-out Berlin where he was orphaned and quickly fired from theater companies.

We examine the 1950 assault on a theatrical patron, the psychiatric hold and diagnosis of psychopathy, his reinvention as a touring monologist reciting Wilde, Shakespeare and Villon, roles in Edgar Wallace crime films, Doctor Zhivago and spaghetti westerns like For a Few Dollars More and The Great Silence, and the five volatile films with Werner Herzog including Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu the Vampyre and Fitzcarraldo. Then the abuse allegations from daughters Pola and Nastassja published decades after his 1991 death, and the question of whether the tortured-genius myth made audiences complicit.

• How Herzog’s investigation exposed Kinski’s fabricated origin story
• The gun standoff in the jungle on Aguirre and the tribal chief’s offer to kill Kinski
• Why he turned down the villain role in Raiders of the Lost Ark
• The 1988 autobiography’s claims and why Herzog dismissed them as invention
• Why only one of his three children attended his funeral