Werner Heubeck, who has died aged 85, served in Hitler's Africa Korps during the second world war, but made his real mark in quite a different arena of conflict – by keeping the buses running in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles.

Shortly after Heubeck moved to Belfast in 1965 to work as managing director of the publicly owned bus company, his vehicles became a prime target for rioters and terrorists. They were hijacked and burned on the streets, or badly damaged along with their depots. A distinctive figure in his customary trilby hat and raincoat, Heubeck believed in leading transport staff from the frontline and, at times of crisis, he took to the wheels of vehicles on some of the most volatile routes to reassure staff.

After the Belfast vehicle-free security segment was created in 1970, buses were still allowed to traverse the area after being searched, so it was inevitable that the facility would be exploited by terrorists trying to smuggle bombs into the area. However, army bomb disposal teams on their way to "ventilate" his vehicles, as they put it, began to find themselves beaten to the scene by Heubeck, who had frequently removed the devices by the time they got there.

On one occasion, I watched as he pushed against the throng of people fleeing from yet another scare, boarded the bus and emerged a few moments later with the suspect device, declaring it to be safe. This time it was a bag left behind by a forgetful passenger. One morning in Londonderry, he removed a beer keg from each of three buses abandoned outside the local police headquarters.

On another occasion, an army bomb disposal team got a shock when, lining up their Wheelbarrow robot to fire a pressurised water disrupter, Heubeck came into sight on their viewfinder, walking along inside the target bus. As they watched in astonishment, he calmly moved the device to the street and asked the army to neutralise it there. Disposal teams came to regard him with a mixture of annoyance and reluctant admiration.

The vast majority of the terrorist devices he moved were indeed hoaxes, but he was not to know that at the time. He must have been well aware of the risks, for there were many tragic cases of people dying while trying to remove bombs planted on their premises. It is astonishing that Heubeck survived unscathed. He would never talk about his derring-do. "My job is just to run the buses," he would say modestly.

By the time he retired in 1988 it was calculated that despite the loss of 1,100 buses and the deaths of 11 transport staff, Heubeck had personally cleared close to 100 incidents. He was widely seen as a hero by the public. His work was twice recognised by the Queen, with an OBE in 1977 and a CBE 11 years later.

Heubeck was born in Nuremberg, the son of a municipal gasworks engineer, and was conscripted into the German armed forces in 1942, serving first with the Luftwaffe, then as a soldier in France and Italy before joining the Africa Korps.He survived an air attack on his transport ship off the African coast and, with some 60 other survivors, managed to swim four miles to shore. He was captured by Allied forces and shipped to a prisoner-of-war camp in Louisiana, where he spent the rest of the war.

After he was repatriated to Germany in 1946, he helped to rebuild the family home in Nuremberg before landing a job with the US army. He later became a translator and proofreader at the war crimes trials which were taking place in his native city.

His future wife, Monica, a fluent German speaker, was also attached to the war crimes tribunal after serving at the Bletchley Park code-breaking station during the war years. In 1949, despite the bureaucratic difficulties facing a German citizen entering Britain, they married and settled, first in her native south Wales and then in Aberdeen, where he managed a paper mill. He became a British subject in 1954. His next move was to Belfast to run the bus company where, despite the travails of the Troubles, he introduced driver-only buses and renewed the ageing fleet.

By Northern Ireland's conservative standards, he was seen as quite eccentric. He had an enthusiasm for physical fitness long before it became fashionable and practised many forms of exercise, encouraging his senior colleagues to join him for rigorous swimming sessions.

Upon his retirement, the parting gift he requested was a large quantity of wood. During the years after he settled in Co Antrim, he hand-carved numerous artefacts and furnishings, many of them commissions for more than 40 churches across Ireland. Later he moved to Shetland, where one of his three sons is a professional ornithologist, and became well known in the community there for the supply of more than 100 handmade cushions to charity shops and the distribution of his fruit cakes at Christmas.

He is survived by his three sons. Monica predeceased him in September.

• Werner Wolfgang Heubeck, bus manager, born 24 October 1923; died 19 October 2009