Captain Kloss

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Captain Kloss (Kapitan Kloss) is a fictional WW2 secret agent appearing in the 18-episode 1967-1968 Polish television series Stawka większa niż życie (Direct Translation: More Than Life at Stake; DVD Movie Translation: Playing for High Stakes), following earlier live television theater plays. It was, and still is, widely popular in Poland.

He is actually a Pole, named Stanisław Kolicki, working for Soviet Intelligence, who impersonates a Nazi Abwehr officer, Hans Kloss, of whom he is a look-alike, in order to wreak havoc inside German intelligence services and armed forces. The switch is accomplished after the real Hans Kloss is arrested spying behind the Soviet front lines. Following appropriate preparation, the look-alike Kolicki is allowed to "escape" back through the front lines and return to Abwehr service. While there, he hurts the German efforts in all sorts of inventive ways. Throughout, he manages to make himself appear trustworthy and advance in the German ranks, while at the same time making the Germans suspect each other about being defectors, traitors or agents themselves, often resulting in their executions.

Kloss is played by Stanisław Mikulski, who became somewhat typecast following this role.

The various episodes of the series are unconnected, apart for advancing in time over the period of war; certain actors even return in different roles. The pilot (Wiem kim jesteś - I know who you are) explains the basic premise.

A recurrent supporting character is Hermann Brunner, a Gestapo officer, played by Emil Karewicz, whom the audience loved to hate, a bit like what happened with the J.R. Ewing character in the Dallas series, or Alfred Bester in Babylon 5. Although Brunner only appeared in 5 episodes out of 18, he usually stole the show. One of his "trademark" sayings was "I hate the view of a man being beaten... unless I am giving the beating myself".

During the series' first run a German magazine published a front page picture of Mikulski, in his Nazi outfit, with a subtitle it considered funny "this is the man Polish women are crazy about", the Polish public was not amused by such jokes.

Captain Kloss is generally thought to be a direct inspiration for the 1970 Soviet television series about Stirlitz. Of course, he is himself inspired by Konrad Wallenrod and James Bond, albeit much less directly.

Except for the pilot episode, the series does not reveal exactly which intelligence service Kloss is working for, as in the other episodes he receives his instructions from an unspecified Centrala or Central Control. Hence, the viewer is left to wonder whether it is the London-based Polish government in exile or some Soviet intelligence organisation, for example the GRU military intelligence. At the time the series was made, when Poland was still a Soviet satellite state, this deemphasizing of a possible Soviet connection made the character of Kloss more palatable to those Poles who resented Soviet domination, and hence preferred a fictional secret agent not associated with the disliked apparatus of Soviet Intelligence. Overall, the series was relatively free of communist propaganda, unlike some other series made at the time dealing with wartime events, and hence remains highly watchable today.

Although the settings are extremely precise, the series is pure entertainment and the main characters in it have no historical basis. His code name was J-23.