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Hogan’s Heroes and the Holocaust:
The Association That Just Won’t Go Away

Click here to read Robert Clary's letter to me about this paper.

by

Leslie Campbell Rampey, Ph.D.

April 14, 2000

Barbed wire, guard towers, attack dogs, low-slung wooden huts, and pre-dawn roll-calls all are images from a collectively remembered past that remind us that during its twelve-year reign of terror the German Third Reich took many prisoners for many reasons -- from "asocials" to political antagonists to labor slaves to victims marked for genocide. For seven of those years, Germany was at war, which meant that prisoners-of-war also found a place among the burgeoning population of the Nazis’ inmates. Stories both fictional and non-fictional of all those classes of prisoners have been told in many ways innumerable times on both the large and small screens – from documentary films to feature-length movies to even television mini-series. Given the real life atrocities experienced by untold millions of those prisoners, one hardly could imagine that an appropriate format for one of those stories would be a weekly television situation comedy. Yet, the U.S. television sitcom Hogan’s Heroes tried to do just that – tell a story about some prisoners of the Third Reich, specifically Allied prisoners-of-war. For a dramatic vehicle that almost everyone agrees has nothing at all to do with the events that came to be collectively labeled as "the Holocaust," through the years the show has remained a curious flash point of perceptions about it. That Hogan’s Heroes is both confused and associated with events of the Holocaust is due in part to historical images that the show evokes and also to a number of extra-textual ironies that continue to swirl about its periphery.

Thirty-five years ago in 1965, just 20 years after the end of World War II, the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes premiered. In a genre not normally associated with controversy, at least not yet in those days, the show raised a firestorm from its very inception. Set in a luft stalag (prisoner-of-war camp run by the German air force) during World War II, the show’s premise elicited howls of protest because critics imagined that Nazism somehow was going to be depicted in an amusing light and thus that the dark realities of its genocidal atrocities would be trivialized. Even people who eventually benefited greatly from the highly-rated show’s long run and subsequent syndication had their initial doubts. CBS president William Paley found the idea "’reprehensible’" (Royce, 21); title lead actor Bob Crane was at first incredulous (Graysmith, 118); and co-star Werner Klemperer was "’totally stunned’" and thought the creators "’out of their minds’" (Royce, 82). These people, however, were intimately connected with the production of the show and grew comfortable with and confident in the premise, but among the general public unfavorable rumors abounded. Not only was there a general feeling that the lot of POWs was not humorous, as Brenda Scott Royce points out in her book about the show, but she further attributes the dismay to confusion of "prisoner-of-war camps with concentration camps, where millions of inmates were starved, treated inhumanely, and murdered" (xi-xii).

Only 20 years after the end of the war – and the end of the Holocaust – that was an understandable confusion. After all, as Tim Cole states, "It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that the nature of the Holocaust began to be grasped by both the academic community and the general public in the United States and Europe" (p. 2). Ten years earlier Alain Resnais in his documentary Night and Fog makes no distinctions between extermination camps and concentration camps, nor between the Nazis’ political prisoners and their victims marked for genocide. Little wonder then that in 1965 a U.S. general public who encountered Hogan’s Heroes -- replete with those images of the barbed wire, guard towers, and dogs -- might have thought the similarities to the newsreel footage of concentration camps and survivor testimony to be a little too close for comfort. One does have to wonder why the association with popular movies such as Stalag 17 (1953) and The Great Escape (1963), both of which depicted POW camps, were not the associations generally made with Hogan’s Heroes. Apparently, however, it was the announced comedic treatment (although Stalag 17 did contain muted instances of black comedy) that caused the outcry and the subsequent confusion of Hogan’s Heroes’ POW camp setting with that of concentration/death camps.

The controversy was not helped by a pre-debut radio ad for the show quoted in Newsweek: Question: "What are some of the amusing ingredients?" Answer: "German police dogs, machine guns, the Gestapo… shall we say, ‘If you liked World War II, you’ll love Hogan’s Heroes’" ("Fun with the Nazis," 64). Royce reports that the ad, to say the least, did not go over well and that star Bob Crane who supplied the voice later regretted it (xii). That ad, however, failed to capture the more detailed premise of the plot that got lost in all the pre-debut controversy. What took a while to be understood was that Hogan’s Heroes was at its heart a grand adventure series. The plot set up the Allied prisoners – the "heroes" under the command of USAAF Col. Hogan – as espionage agents and saboteurs operating from within the German Reich. Their POW status, of course, is their perfect cover. Achieving their goals, however, requires them to keep their Luftwaffe jailors off-guard. From there stems the comedy. And Hogan’s Heroes is in the best broad-stroke tradition of comic opera. The main theme is how political, cynical, and corrupt Nazi Germany is when presented in stark contrast to the U.S., British, and French prisoners’ wholly patriotic and altruistic war effort.

Sadly, however, that theme often was ignored by people who just could not seem to get over the Holocaust confusion – or wanted to exploit it. In his 1987 Television Turkeys, Kevin Allman’s chapter on Hogan’s Heroes mentions nothing at all about the show’s plot or theme, but he does call the distinction between a POW camp and a concentration camp "dubious" and says the show was about as "tasteful" as would be a "situation comedy about a merry band of child molesters" (50). Taking the confusion a step further, Mad Magazine, shortly after the show’s debut, parodied it. Dubbed "Hokum’s Heroes," the piece is not up to the highest standards of Mad’s satires and is, in fact, exceedingly crude. Good parodies demonstrate an intimacy with their subjects, but this one blatantly ignores the show’s actual plot and theme and instead concentrates on some surface silliness ("secret Water Polo matches, " for example) scarcely related to the show as written. At one point, an irate Col. "Hokum" bursts into Col. "Klunk’s" office and announces he wants out of the show because it is so successful that soon the networks will be drowning with copycat POW shows. "I just think this Prisoner of War Camp bit has had it! So, I’m taking my men and we’re getting out! We’re going into another show! A much funnier show!" (Siegel and Davis, panel #16). Well, the "another show" turns out to be "Hochman’s Heroes," billed as "And here it is… The brand new weekly TV situation comedy featuring that gay, wild, zany, irrepressible bunch of World War II concentration camp prisoners… Those happy inmates of ‘Buchenwald’ known as Hochman’s Heroes!" The (mercifully) single-panel section of the piece depicts bald inmates in striped camp uniforms uproariously lounging in bunks and drinking from champagne glasses, and the text includes shower and gas puns. The satire is crude, but it plays on the general confusion about the show and suggests that Hogan’s Heroes really is just one step away from making light of the Holocaust.

And that same confusion stubbornly persists. As recently as 1999, in a newspaper article announcing the acquisition of Hogan’s Heroes by the cable network TV Land, Star Tribune (Minneapolis) writer Rob Owen begins, "Here’s the pitch: A wacky comedy set in a World War II concentration camp with Nazis!" (p. 10E). A few sentences later, Owen does "dispel a few common misconceptions about Hogan’s Heroes," beginning with his opening line and makes clear that the setting was a POW camp. Still, even 34 years after this misconception was supposedly cleared up, Owen or his editor apparently thought it made good copy to repeat it. The confusion seems still to carry weight.

Almost as recently, the confusion has been made in the other direction. Some newspaper articles about Robert Clary, a series regular who himself was imprisoned in a number of very real concentration camps, read as though the reporters are not at all clear about the distinction between concentration camps and POW camps: A 1989 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch opens, "The little Frenchman who slithered around Stalag 13 on TV’s war situation comedy Hogans Heroes, actually had a similar prisoner-of war experience in World War II" (Cox, p. 3) (emphasis added). Even more blurred is a 1994 St. Petersburg Times article that headlines "Robert Clary recounts real POW experience" and continues, "Actor Robert Clary, perhaps best known for his role as prisoner-of-war Louis LeBeau on TV’s Hogan’s Heroes, will speak on the topic of his own Holocaust experiences at the Yom Hashoah…." (p. 7B) (emphases added). Both articles, probably inadvertently, equate the POW experience with the Holocaust, a confusion that doesn’t speak well for the general public’s level of historic awareness.

Other than the mistaken confusion of the POW setting with that of concentration/death camps, Hogan’s Heroes transgressed another situation comedy boundary, a transgression that also could contribute to a hovering unease about the show. Military sitcoms are a recognized television sub-genre, depicting aspects of service life from the humdrum of the barracks (The Phil Silvers Show and The Soldiers, both debuting in 1955) to the glitz of the space program (I Dream of Jeannie, 1965) to the graphic results of frontline fire (M*A*S*H, 1972). Of all the military sitcoms, however, only a handful have been set during wartime: McHale’s Navy, Broadside, The Wackiest Ship in the Army, Mr. Roberts, M*A*S*H, and Hogan’s Heroes. That low number probably reflects the inherent artistic riskiness of setting a situation comedy in wartime in the first place. And of those very few that transgressed that far, only one features regular and recurring enemy characters. That single wartime sitcom is Hogan’s Heroes.

The situation, then, was that barely a generation after the end of World War II, television viewers every week were being asked to welcome into their homes German military and/or Nazi characters -- at times a fine distinction that is a bit more of an intellectual leap than most TV sitcoms require viewers to make. That fictional intimacy created a perceptual dichotomy of unease and fascination. Germans/Nazis were supposed to be awful people, right? "Awful," however, becomes a relative term as familiarity grows. Awfulness breaks down into a hierarchy, and the Hogan’s Heroes writers did a good job of providing viewers with the rationale to create that hierarchy in their own minds. The character Sgt. Schultz was developed as a mostly benign German ("Myself, I’m bipartisan," he announces in one episode, indicating that the outcome of the war is of little importance to him.); the commandant Col. Klink is perceived to be at the most a quasi-Nazi, mouthing the party line for the sake of expediency; and the Gestapo Major Hochstetter is the personification of malice and cruelty, always lending a sinister edge to the episodes in which he appears. For better or worse, here they were – the enemy, the German perpetrators of whatever degree of atrocities the television audience perceived them guilty. And they were there with us in the living room every Friday night, and we were enjoying seeing them forever bested by middle-American Col. Hogan and his loyal band of Allies. The Germans, however, usually were not bested because they were stupid but because "we" were so much smarter and, perhaps more importantly, less corrupt. Still, to make the Germans a convincing and worthwhile enemy, we had to see what they were about, and Hogan’s Heroes was the only place the television viewers had an ongoing look inside Nazi Germany.

However distorted that look might have been for comedic purposes, it was quite detailed. In addition to the aforementioned visual images of the prison camp, there are "Heil Hitler" salutes; historically accurate swastika-bedecked uniforms; portraits of the Fuehrer; jokes about "strength-through-joy" picnics, Mein Kampf, and Berchtesgaden; knowing references to Eva Braun, Goebbels, Himmler, Goering (particularly the latter’s penchant for fine art); the increasingly disastrous news from the Russian front, etc. Producer Ed Feldman is said to have researched works such as William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Royce, 41). It is easy to believe that someone did do a lot of research because the visual and verbal context of the show is incredibly detailed.

Yes, this is Nazi Germany, or at least as close to it as a half-hour sitcom reasonably could be expected to come. Writer Richard M. Powell, who set the show’s tone in the first script and went on to write 29 of the 168 episodes, explains that rather than trivializing Nazis his purpose was to show them "’in a highly unfavorable light…. I tried to show that the whole Nazi regime was based on fear’" (Royce, xv). One subject, however, apparently was either explicitly or implicitly forbidden – the attempted genocide of Europe’s Jews. No episode of Hogan’s Heroes mentions Jews, deportations, ghettos, concentration/death camps, or mass murder. On the other hand, references to "the Master Race" are common, and allusions in many episodes do lead viewers to the distinct conclusion that the Nazis indeed are engaged in far more atrocious behavior than we see onscreen.

So, while confusion of Hogan’s Heroes with the events of the Holocaust probably is unjustified, association is reasonable. In a (very) informal survey of television viewers who do watch or have watched the show, about three-fifths of the respondents said that it did make them think either occasionally or often of the Holocaust.¹ Most of those who chose to comment on the question displayed an acute awareness of the difference between the POW and Holocaust experiences but also noted that it is difficult not to think of the Holocaust when the subject of World War II comes up, particularly in a dramatic environment rich in Nazi visual images and verbal references. Others, reasoning from the text, thought it logical that the regular and recurring characters probably had little if any knowledge of the Reich’s genocidal ambitions. A few commented that if Hogan’s Heroes had been an hour-long show and/or went on the air just a few years later than it did (a la M*A*S*H), the events of the Holocaust might reasonably have found their way into some of the more edgy plot lines. One insightful respondent, however, doubted that Hogan’s Heroes and the Holocaust would be a good thematic fit. His reasoning is that the show belongs in the genre of heroic legend, in which it is required that the good guys win. The good guys did win World War II, so the show as legend works. Despite that, the Allies – the "good guys" – were not able (or willing) to prevent the utter disaster of the Holocaust, and overwhelming failure is not the stuff of legend.

Several respondents, recognizing the potential sensitivity of dealing with Nazism in a comedic way, echo co-star Werner Klemperer who believes that it is unlikely that Hogan’s Heroes could get on the air today in the current "politically correct" environment (Owen, p. 10E). Objections, similar to the original ones of 35 years ago, recently were aired on the occasion of rumors that a movie of the show is to be made. "JUST SAY NEIN," protests Renee Graham of the Boston Globe. "Call this political correctness if you like, but under no circumstances should a film of Hogan’s Heroes be made. For those who don’t remember, this was the 1960s World War II comedy … that presented the Nazis as the biggest cutups since the Keystone Kops. Let’s be clear here: Nazis are never, ever funny. Ever" (p. M7). Graham’s description is erroneous because there was little Keystonesque (that is, slapstick or sight gags unrelated to plot or theme) in the show’s depiction of Nazi characters, but her objection demonstrates that the association between Hogan’s Heroes and the Nazi’s darkest deeds is as persistent as the confusion.

The connection between the show and the historical event is strengthened by several extra-textual ironies. Most astonishingly, all four of the show’s regular or recurring German military or Nazi characters – camp Commandant Col. Klink, sergeant of the guard Sgt. Schultz, Klink’s superior Gen. Burkhalter, and Gestapo Major Hochstetter – were played by Jews; and, in three of those cases, Jews who understandably might never have wanted to have anything to do with Nazi Germany ever again in any shape or form.

As has been told many times since Werner Klemperer first took the role of Klink, his family first fled their native Germany to Austria and then to the United States in order to escape the Nazi regime. Austrian John Banner (Sgt. Schultz) also fled to the United States in the late ‘30s. (Both men served during World War II in the U.S. Army.) Another Austrian, Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter) was not as fortunate. His promising stage career was interrupted when the Nazis rose to power. He fell into the hands of the Gestapo who beat him, and he spent the war in a French internment camp (Royce, 119-20). Ironically, the actor who played the most menacing of the German characters, Howard Caine (Gestapo Major Hochstetter), was from a southern U.S. Jewish family (Royce, 124) and, so, fortunately had no such experiences in his background.

From the beginning, both co-stars Klemperer and Banner were asked the "How-could-you?" question – how could they possibly, given their backgrounds, work in Hogan’s Heroes? Werner Klemperer’s answer in essence never varied: "’I am an actor by profession. If you can play Richard the Third, you can play a Nazi’" (Graysmith, 145). John Banner’s response was to ask, "’Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?’" (Graysmith, 128). Banner’s character Schultz, however, was completely unmilitary and non-partisan. In an interview he said, "’I see Schultz as the representative of some kind of good in any generation’" (Royce, 89).

If one can understand how those two victims of Nazism could come to peace with their backgrounds and play their roles as German captors with equanimity, it is a far more difficult to comprehend how another Jewish actor could put himself in the position of playing a prisoner of the Third Reich. Robert Clary, who plays French POW Cpl. Louis Lebeau, was in real life a prisoner of the Nazis – and not a POW as was erroneously stated in some newspaper pieces quoted above. Clary was taken from his Paris home at the age of 16 and spent the next three years in various concentration camps, finally being liberated from Buchenwald. He considers himself luckier than most of his immediate family of 14 whom, he surmises, were gassed in Auschwitz. Although Clary’s Holocaust background was never a secret, it was something that, like many survivors (Clendinnen, 29; Coles, 2), he didn’t choose to speak about for a long time. "’Once I became a human being again, I did not want to relive the 31 months I spent in hell,’" he told an LA Times reporter (Arkush, B3). Instead, Clary concentrated on forging a career in entertainment. It wasn’t until 1980 when he was 54, nine years after Hogan’s Heroes ended its long run, that Clary decided to speak of his experiences; and as a lecturer for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, he has told his story to many audiences. As his reasons finally to speak out, he cites increased incidences of antisemitism and the rise of the "revisionist" historians who deny that the Holocaust took place. Because of his Hogan’s Heroes fame, Clary’s story surprises his audiences. Of course, the first thing they want to know – "Always," he says – is, "’How could you have done Hogan’s Heroes, which dealt with Nazism?’" (Royce, 97). Clary’s answer is essentially the same as Klemperer’s – that is, that he’s an actor who played a character who never existed in real life. Clary is careful, however, to make some additional distinctions. Despite the hardships he acknowledges that POWs experienced, "’they were not killed, they were not sent to gas chambers’" (Royce, 97).

(It should be noted, however, that not all actors were so easily able to compartmentalize their acting from the show’s content. Leonid Kinsky [the longest surviving cast member of the film Casablanca] appeared as a Russian prisoner in the pilot episode but claims to have turned down a continuing role because, "’The moment we had a dress rehearsal and I saw German SS uniforms, something very ugly rose in me. I visualized millions upon millions of bodies of innocent people murdered by the Nazis. One can hardly, in good taste, joke about it’" [Royce, 31]. That the show never in any way jokes about the millions murdered by the Nazis begs the question. The association, however, apparently was just too strong for this actor.)²

Just as the actors’ real-life biographies provide ongoing extra-textual associations of the TV show with the Holocaust, so does some hard work of loyal fans. At least since the Star Trek phenomenon of the 1960s, TV shows have spawned a peculiar literary genre known as "fan fiction" ("fan-fic") – that is, stories or sometimes whole novels produced by fans who borrow the characters, setting, and basic premise of a TV series as a taking-off point and create entirely new plots. Originally, such fan fiction was very occasionally professionally published or more often reproduced in "‘zines" that circulated from hand-to-hand. More recently, the Internet has been a logical outlet for such literary talent. Hogan’s Heroes certainly has inspired its share of such amateur fiction ("amateur" in its best sense from the root "to love"). Some of it is freely available on the Web, some is for sale by mail-order, and some is available only on a waiting-list hand-to-hand basis. One particular novella-length story, obviously wrought with great care, is titled "There’s Something Hogan in the State of Denmark" by Doug Fowler. The story involves the Hogan’s Heroes characters in the historic event of the rescue of the Danish Jews that took place in October 1943. Some surprising new dimensions of regular characters are revealed. Cpl. Louis LeBeau (the part played by Robert Clary in the TV series) admits that his especially intense antipathy toward the Germans is because he is a Jew. And Sgt. Schultz is not the "dummkopf" he’s been pretending to be – rather, he and his wife are clandestine rescuers of Jews and others needing an escape from Nazi Germany. It is through the latter that the regular characters become involved in the Danish plan. And it was a hinted-at but untapped depth in the character of Sgt. Schultz that prompted Doug Fowler to start exploring this story line (Fowler, private correspondence). Indeed, the story fits in with what the questionnaire respondent mentioned earlier said about Hogan’s Heroes being of the genre of legend. The rescue of the Danish Jews was a spectacular success with more than 90% of the country’s Jews successfully eluding the clutches of the Nazis and thus plays right into the legendary theme of Hogan’s Heroes.³

Other extra-textual associations of Hogan’s Heroes with the dark period of the Holocaust continue to crop up in astonishingly ironic ways that no one ever could have predicted. For decades it’s been natural for TV show producers to hope for the pot of gold in never-ending syndicated re-runs, both in this country and in overseas markets. Hogan’s Heroes was no different, and it’s been a huge success in syndication, probably never absent from the world’s airwaves at all since its last original episode aired in 1971. The last place, however, that anyone ever expected the show to find an audience was Germany. Indeed, it wasn’t even tried there until 1992, and then it was "a ratings flop" (Cowell, 4:3). It was determined that radical surgery was what was needed, and Hogan’s Heroes now flourishes in Germany under the title Ein Kafig Voller Helden ("A Cageful of Heroes"). But what a different Hogan’s Heroes it is. It is: (a) nothing its U.S. audience would recognize; and (b) everything that its original 1960s critics feared it would be.

"Creative dubbing" is the term most often used to describe the German-altered text of Ein Kafig Voller Helden. Creative, indeed. While no translation from one language to another reproduces the original one hundred percent accurately, "bombs" usually are not translated as "condoms." Yet, that’s what the Germans of the German version of Hogan’s Heroes drop on London. In keeping with post-war Germany’s preference for avoiding "Heil Hitler" salutes and other Nazi Party practices, German characters accompany their stiff-armed gestures with such exclamations as "This is how high the cornflowers grow!" The Germans even have invented a new character: "In Germany Now, Col. Klink’s Maid Cleans in the Nude" proclaims a headline in the Wall Street Journal (Steinmetz, A1). In the original 1960s U.S. version of the show, Col. Klink did not have a maid, and no one ever was said to be in the nude. And more is going on here than textual alterations and additions. The voices of Klink and Shultz and other Germans are rendered in regional accents that are said to be inherently comic to the German ear – possibly something like the characters Jed Clampett and Gomer Pyle sound to us. The effect of this, says a Munich newspaper commentator, is to make the German characters ‘"absolutely non-threatening’" (Cowell, 4:3).

And that is exactly what it originally was feared Hogan’s Heroes would do – trivialize the Nazis and their horrors and make them non-threatening. Although no one ever convincingly demonstrated that the original version did that, that is, ironically, why the German version succeeds. According to Cowell, "the show’s [German version] very silliness distances it from the realities of genocide" (4:3). If, as Anton Kaes suggests, the generation of Germans born during and just after the war believed that they never learned enough about the barbarity of Nazi Germany (24-25), some in the succeeding generation think they have heard just too darned much about it. Cowell quotes a spokeswoman for the network that carries Ein Kafig Voller Helden as saying that males between the ages of 14 to 29 make up a particularly enthusiastic viewing audience. In the same article, a 26 year-old student says, "’Normally when you are confronted with German history, you learn about evil and feelings of guilt…. This is the opposite. It’s sarcastic and ironic and you don’t feel confronted at all. It’s funny’" (4:3). A German teenager who has a Web page devoted to the show says that it "is very unreal. It’s not like what we learn in history…. It’s unreal. That’s one of the things that’s so appealing about it" (Hamann, 6:77). "’I like that the German army is made to look silly,’" says a 21 year-old German woman ("Germans Get Laughs…," 02A). And another 22 year-old male asks, "’Why not watch some stupid Nazis getting their butts kicked by some American dudes?’" (Steinmetz, A1). And, so, says Cowell, "It can be argued that Hogan’s Heroes provides an antidote to a veritable catalogue of anguished re-examinations of German war culpability in popular culture" (4:3).

Hogan’s Heroes, it would seem, has come a full circle – and a very ironic one. During its original U.S. run in the 1960s, it was a common touchstone for perceptions about Nazi Germany – a distorted picture as popular culture invariably presents, but a touchstone nevertheless. While once it gave U.S. viewers a glimpse into the inherent corruptness of the Nazi regime and the fearfulness of living in it, the show now seems to be helping a German audience to set aside that knowledge – and with it any associations it may legitimately or not have had with the Holocaust. If nothing else, Hogan’s Heroes demonstrates the power popular culture has to influence perceptions about historic events and reminds us also that it sometimes can have completely unintended consequences.