Kurt Hälker was born into a catholic family in Duisburg during the Franco-Belgian occupation. By the time he left school the French army had left the Rhineland: he undertook and completed an apprenticeship as an upholsterer. Shortly after that, however, in 1941 he was conscripted into the army. He was sent to Paris, which had been under German occupation since the previous summer, and trained for work as a naval radio operator. Hälker had managed to live the first nineteen years without taking too much interest in political developments, and his initial reaction to being sent to Paris as a member of an army of occupation was delight that he would become a "god in France". Half a century later, in a television interview, he recalled how the daily experience of Nazi occupation, including the frequent shooting of hostages, progressively transformed "essentially unpolitical people" such as himself into committed opponents of the war.