CBS went looking for a delightful new comedy premise for its 1965 prime-time lineup. It settled on a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp.

Yes, really.

Just twenty years after the end of World War II, while millions of veterans were still very much alive and the horrors of the Holocaust remained within painfully recent memory, someone surveyed the television landscape and concluded that what America needed was a half-hour sitcom featuring swastikas, German guards, Allied prisoners, and a laugh track.

It sounds like the sort of idea that should have ended a network executive’s career before lunch.

Instead, Hogan’s Heroes ran for six seasons, from 1965 to 1971, produced 168 episodes, and became one of the most recognizable television comedies of its era.

The premise was simple. Colonel Robert Hogan, played by Bob Crane, was the senior Allied prisoner at the fictional Stalag 13. What the Germans did not know was that Hogan and his fellow POWs had turned the camp into a secret base for espionage, sabotage, escape operations, intelligence gathering, and the occasional manipulation of German officers who really ought to have noticed all the trapdoors.

The setup was wildly implausible. That was rather the point.

But there is something about Hogan’s Heroes that makes the series considerably more interesting than its premise suggests. Several of the actors who put on German uniforms every week had deeply personal connections to the real war. Some were Jewish refugees who had fled Hitler. Some served in the American military against the Axis. Some lost family members in the Holocaust.

And one member of Hogan’s merry band of POWs had himself survived the Nazi concentration-camp system.

Once you know who was actually standing inside those uniforms, Hogan’s Heroes starts to look a little different.

A Comedy About Nazis in 1965 Was a Bold Choice

Hogan’s Heroes premiered on September 17, 1965. Its fictional setting, Stalag 13, was a German prisoner-of-war camp supposedly located near Hammelburg, Germany. To the Germans, Hogan and his multinational team looked like ordinary POWs, but their barracks concealed tunnels, radio equipment, disguises, weapons, secret entrances, and enough underground infrastructure to rival Churchill’s London bunker.

Colonel Wilhelm Klink believed himself to be the master of this little empire. In practice, Hogan controlled virtually everything that happened in it.

Klink’s record was supposedly impeccable because no prisoner had ever successfully escaped from Stalag 13. Hogan actually helped preserve that record. His own men routinely slipped out to conduct espionage and sabotage and then returned, while prisoners who needed to escape permanently could conveniently become someone else’s responsibility first. Klink’s perfect record survived largely because Hogan found an incompetent commandant much too useful to replace.

The Germans were not portrayed as formidable representatives of Hitler’s supposedly efficient war machine. They were vain, frightened, bureaucratic, gluttonous, gullible, and chronically incapable of noticing tunnels being operated approximately six feet from their offices.

That distinction matters. Hogan’s Heroes did not make the Nazis lovable because Nazism was harmless. It made them ridiculous because the Nazis were the targets of the joke.

Several members of the cast understood that distinction better than almost anyone watching.

The Nazi Officers of Hogan’s Heroes Had Something Remarkable in Common

Consider the four German characters most closely associated with the series. Colonel Wilhelm Klink was played by Werner Klemperer, Sergeant Hans Schultz by John Banner, General Albert Burkhalter by Leon Askin, and Gestapo Major Wolfgang Hochstetter by Howard Caine.

All four actors were Jewish.

Three of them—Klemperer, Banner, and Askin—had direct experience with Nazi persecution or flight from Nazi-controlled Europe. Remarkably, all four later served in the United States armed forces during World War II.

In other words, much of the German command structure at Stalag 13 was being portrayed by Jewish men, several of whom had already had considerably more personal experience with Adolf Hitler than anyone would reasonably want.

The casting department had inadvertently assembled one of history’s better revenge jokes.

Werner Klemperer: The Refugee Who Became Colonel Klink

Werner Klemperer was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1920. His father, Otto Klemperer, was one of the most celebrated conductors of the twentieth century and was Jewish. After Hitler came to power, the Klemperer family left Germany and settled in the United States.

The future Colonel Klink then did something his television character would have found deeply alarming: he joined the U.S. Army.

Klemperer was inducted in 1942. According to his Los Angeles Times obituary, he first served as a military policeman with the 33rd Infantry and later transferred to an Army Special Services unit in the Pacific, where he performed and directed plays for American troops.

So before Klemperer spent six years pretending to be an officer in Hitler’s military, he had spent the actual war wearing an American uniform.

His pre-Hogan’s Heroes career makes the irony even richer. In 1961, Klemperer portrayed Adolf Eichmann—the SS officer who played a central role in organizing the deportation of Europe’s Jews—in Operation Eichmann. That same year, he appeared in Judgment at Nuremberg, the acclaimed drama about the Nazi-era German judiciary.

Then, four years later, he was offered Colonel Klink.

Klemperer was understandably cautious about the idea of a comedy built around Nazi Germany. He agreed to play Klink with an important condition: Klink could never be allowed to come out on top. As he later put it, “If ever a segment was written where Colonel Klink is the winner, I would leave the show.”

There was little danger of that.

Klink possessed an astonishing ability to be outsmarted by virtually everyone he met. He was terrified of his superiors, terrified of the Russian Front, obsessed with protecting his record, and utterly unaware that his prison camp had roughly the same level of German control as a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party.

Klemperer played him brilliantly. He won two Emmy Awards for the role.

He also understood that Klink’s incompetence was not merely a running gag. It kept the character safely on the receiving end of the satire. The refugee from Hitler would wear the Nazi uniform, but the Nazi was never going to be the hero.

John Banner: Sergeant Schultz Fled the Nazis and Joined the U.S. Army

John Banner may have played the most beloved German character on the show, Sergeant Hans Schultz, a man whose preferred response to Allied espionage occurring directly in front of him was to announce that he had seen absolutely nothing.

Banner’s own relationship with Nazi Germany was considerably less whimsical.

He was born Johann Banner in 1910 in what was then Austria-Hungary and grew up in a Jewish family. He studied law in Vienna before sensibly deciding that pretending to be other people for money may not guarantee job security but would certainly make him fewer enemies.

Banner was performing in Switzerland in 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss. Because he was Jewish, returning home was dangerous. He eventually made his way to the United States.

Then Banner joined the fight against the country that had made him a refugee.

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Banner entered the Army Air Corps in 1942, trained in Atlantic City, and became a supply sergeant. He even appeared in a military recruiting poster before leaving the service in 1945.

Twenty years later, he put on a German uniform and became famous for refusing to notice anything the Allies were doing.

There was also tragedy behind the comedy. Banner lost close family members in the Holocaust. The Department of Veterans Affairs reports that his parents and sister were murdered by the Nazis.

That history makes Schultz an especially fascinating character. He was technically a German guard and certainly no member of the Resistance, but he was rarely presented as a committed Nazi. He mostly wanted to eat, avoid trouble, remain far away from the Russian Front, and survive each encounter with Klink without being assigned additional duties.

When Schultz discovered evidence of Hogan’s activities, his solution was generally not to assist the Reich. It was to develop immediate and profound visual impairment.

“I know nothing!” became his defining line.

Coming from a Jewish refugee who had actually served in the American military, it was an exceptionally satisfying thing to hear from a man wearing a German uniform.

Leon Askin: General Burkhalter Had Fled Nazi Persecution

General Albert Burkhalter was everything Klink feared in a superior officer: imposing, impatient, well connected, and capable of transferring him somewhere unpleasant before lunch.

The man playing him, Leon Askin, had far more reason to despise the Nazi regime than Burkhalter ever displayed on screen.

Askin was born Leo Aschkenasy into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1907. He became an actor and director and worked in political cabaret. After Hitler’s rise to power, Askin was forced out of theatrical work in Germany because he was Jewish. He was arrested and mistreated before escaping to Paris.

He later returned to Vienna, where he became artistic director of the ABC cabaret, known for its fiercely anti-Nazi productions. When Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, Askin fled again, eventually reaching the United States in 1940. The City of Vienna’s biographical account of Askin records his persecution, arrest, escape, and later emigration.

Askin subsequently served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II.

His parents did not escape Nazi persecution. Samuel and Malvine Aschkenasy were deported first to Theresienstadt and then to the Treblinka extermination camp, where they were murdered.

Years later, their son would become famous to American television audiences by dressing as a German general and periodically arriving at Stalag 13 to terrify Colonel Klink.

The Nazis had once driven Askin out of his profession and his country. Hollywood eventually paid him to make their generals look ridiculous.

History occasionally develops a sense of humor.

Howard Caine: The Gestapo Officer Who Had Served in the U.S. Navy

If General Burkhalter made Klink nervous, Major Wolfgang Hochstetter made him look as though he was considering climbing through one of Hogan’s tunnels himself.

Hochstetter was a Gestapo officer played with magnificent fury by Howard Caine, whose principal method of investigation involved storming into rooms and demanding, “WHO IS THIS MAN?” at a volume usually associated with incoming artillery.

Caine had been born Howard Elmer Cohen in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1926 to a Jewish family. Unlike Klemperer, Banner, and Askin, he was not a European refugee.

He did, however, serve in the U.S. Navy during the war.

Caine served in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1946. He trained as a radioman and served aboard the destroyer USS George K. Mackenzie, which was commissioned in July 1945, just weeks before the war ended. After leaving the Navy, he studied drama and began a long career as a character actor.

Eventually, this Jewish Navy veteran found his defining television role as a Gestapo major who could not uncover the intelligence operation being conducted under his nose by Colonel Hogan.

Again, casting can be a beautiful thing.

Robert Clary: From Nazi Concentration Camps to Corporal LeBeau

All of those stories are remarkable.

Then there is Robert Clary.

Clary played Corporal Louis LeBeau, the diminutive French POW who served as the prisoners’ chef, tunnel operative, saboteur, and occasional resident of passages apparently designed by someone who knew Robert Clary’s exact measurements.

Twenty-three years before Hogan’s Heroes premiered, Clary was a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Born Robert Widerman in 1926, he was the youngest of his father’s fourteen children. He loved entertaining and had already appeared in theater and on radio before the German occupation changed everything.

Jews in occupied France were subjected to registration, restrictions, exclusion, and eventually deportation. Clary was forced to wear the yellow Star of David. His performing career disappeared. In September 1942, German authorities came to his family’s apartment.

Clary and his parents were taken to the Drancy transit camp outside Paris. From there they were deported east in cattle cars.

The exact details of Clary’s imprisonment are sometimes compressed in popular accounts into the statement that he “survived Auschwitz.” That is broadly understandable, but his actual journey through the Nazi camp system was more complicated—and arguably more astonishing.

According to Clary’s testimony preserved by the USC Shoah Foundation, he was separated from his mother during the deportation. She continued toward Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

Clary was sent to Ottmuth, a forced-labor camp within the Auschwitz camp system. There he worked in a factory attaching rubber heels to wooden shoes.

And he sang.

Clary had been an entertainer before the war, and somehow he continued entertaining inside the camps. His singing attracted the attention of camp authorities, and he was ordered to perform. His talent earned him occasional extra food and, more importantly, helped keep him alive.

In May 1944, he was transferred to Blechhammer, another Auschwitz subcamp, where he was tattooed, put into striped prison clothing, and forced to work in a synthetic-fuel plant. He continued performing, including in shows for SS personnel.

Think about that for a moment.

The man who would later become one of America’s most recognizable television comedians was already performing for audiences while being held prisoner by the Nazis.

In January 1945, as the Soviet army approached, Clary was forced onto a death march with thousands of other prisoners to Gross-Rosen. The USC Shoah Foundation reports that roughly half the group died during the fifteen-day march.

Clary survived.

After several weeks at Gross-Rosen, he was transported again, this time to Buchenwald. By then he was desperately weak. Other prisoners helped him, found him food, moved him into somewhat less brutal quarters, and arranged for him to sing with an orchestra.

Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that American forces entered the camp on April 11 and found more than 21,000 prisoners there.

Within days, Clary was singing for American soldiers.

He eventually returned to Paris and learned the extent of what had happened to his family. His parents, four sisters, and numerous other relatives had been murdered.

Clary was nineteen years old.

How Could a Holocaust Survivor Star in Hogan’s Heroes?

There is an obvious question here.

How could Robert Clary, having survived Nazi concentration camps and lost so much of his family in the Holocaust, possibly agree to star in a comedy about Germans running a prison camp?

People asked him that question for decades.

Clary’s answer depended on a distinction that is easy to blur from the comfortable distance of eighty years: Hogan’s Heroes was set in a prisoner-of-war camp, not a concentration camp.

Those were not interchangeable things.

German treatment of prisoners of war could certainly be brutal, and many POWs suffered terribly or died in captivity. But the camps in which Western Allied military prisoners were held were fundamentally different from the concentration and extermination camp system created for racial persecution, forced labor, terror, and mass murder.

Clary was emphatic about that distinction. In discussing the series, he repeatedly stressed that the show was not making jokes about Auschwitz or the Holocaust. Hogan’s Heroes concerned military prisoners in a stalag, and the premise placed those prisoners in control of the situation.

That last part is crucial.

Hogan and his men are never helpless victims. They routinely know more than the Germans, possess better intelligence than the Germans, infiltrate German headquarters, sabotage German operations, rescue Allied agents, manipulate German officers, and occasionally convince Sergeant Schultz that he has not witnessed events that would be difficult to miss from low Earth orbit.

The Nazi characters have the uniforms, the guns, and the official authority.

Hogan has the power.

Robert Clary Didn’t Talk About the Holocaust for Decades

Another detail makes Clary’s participation in the program easier to understand. At the time Hogan’s Heroes was being filmed, he generally did not talk publicly about what had happened to him.

After returning to France, Clary threw himself into rebuilding his life. He became a nightclub performer, recorded music, moved to the United States, worked on Broadway and television, and eventually married Natalie Cantor, the daughter of entertainer Eddie Cantor.

For roughly three decades, he largely kept his Holocaust experiences in the past.

That changed around 1980, when Clary became increasingly concerned about Holocaust denial and about what would happen when survivors were no longer alive to give firsthand testimony. He began speaking to students and other groups about what he had experienced.

In 1994, he became one of the first one hundred Holocaust survivors to record testimony for the organization that became the USC Shoah Foundation. He did not stop there. He volunteered as an interviewer and helped record the testimonies of dozens of other survivors.

The cheerful little French corporal from Stalag 13 ultimately devoted a substantial part of his later life to making sure people understood what the real camps had been.

Cynthia Lynn Was a Child Refugee From Wartime Latvia

The war also touched another familiar face from Stalag 13.

Cynthia Lynn played Fräulein Helga, Colonel Klink’s secretary during the first season. She was born Zinta Valda Ziemelis in Riga, Latvia, during the 1930s.

Her childhood unfolded amid repeated occupations of Latvia. The Soviet Union occupied the country in 1940; Nazi Germany invaded in 1941; Soviet forces returned in 1944.

Lynn and her mother fled Latvia while she was still a child. Their journey ultimately took them through Germany before they reached the United States in 1950, a story Lynn later recounted in her memoir Escape to Freedom. Contemporary accounts of her life, including her 2014 obituary, noted the family’s wartime and postwar journey from Latvia to America.

So even Klink’s secretary had a childhood shaped by the European catastrophe the show was turning into weekly farce.

Was Hogan’s Heroes Making Fun of Nazis or Making Light of Nazism?

This is where the unusual backgrounds of the cast become particularly important.

There is a world of difference between making Nazism funny and making Nazis ridiculous.

Hogan’s Heroes overwhelmingly chose the second approach.

The series did not explore the Holocaust. It did not seriously depict occupation, genocide, slave labor, battlefield death, or the realities of POW captivity. It existed in a fantasy version of wartime Germany where Hogan could stroll into Klink’s office whenever the plot required it, Schultz could be bought off with strudel, and an underground tunnel system could apparently be expanded without anyone ever asking where all the dirt was going.

That unreality was what made the comedy possible.

The Nazis were stripped of the qualities their propaganda had worked so hard to cultivate. They were not fearsome Aryan supermen. They were petty bureaucrats, blowhards, fools, cowards, and buffoons.

Klink cared about his career.

Schultz cared about his stomach.

Burkhalter cared about keeping Klink terrified.

Hochstetter cared mainly about discovering WHO THIS MAN WAS.

And Hogan beat all of them.

Comedy Had Been Used Against Hitler Before

Hogan’s Heroes was not the first entertainment to conclude that one way of attacking dictators was to laugh at them.

Charlie Chaplin mocked Hitler in The Great Dictator in 1940, while the United States was still officially neutral. Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be followed in 1942 with a black comedy involving Polish actors deceiving Nazi occupiers.

The Three Stooges were ridiculing Hitler before America entered the war. Bugs Bunny eventually joined the campaign, because there are apparently few geopolitical problems Warner Bros. believed could not be improved by a rabbit dropping an anvil on somebody.

Hogan’s Heroes belonged to that tradition, but its timing was different. It arrived after the war, when the enemies who had once terrified the world could safely be reduced to stock comedy characters.

What makes the show unusual is that several of the people participating in that reduction had personally experienced the regime being mocked.

The Actors Playing the Germans Had Earned the Right to Laugh

It would be too easy—and historically irresponsible—to assume that every Jewish or refugee actor on Hogan’s Heroes regarded the program as some grand act of personal vengeance. Actors take jobs for all sorts of reasons, one of the most traditional being that the electric company remains stubbornly unwilling to accept artistic integrity in lieu of payment.

Still, their biographies matter.

Werner Klemperer understood exactly what a Nazi uniform represented. His family had left Hitler’s Germany, and he later served in the U.S. Army.

John Banner understood it. Nazi persecution had made him a refugee, his family suffered catastrophic losses in the Holocaust, and he served in the American military.

Leon Askin understood it. He had been forced from his profession, arrested and abused, driven into exile, and separated forever from his parents.

Howard Caine understood the war from a different direction—as an American Jew who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

And Robert Clary certainly understood what Nazi persecution meant. He had worn the yellow star, been deported, performed forced labor, survived a death march, endured multiple camps, and returned home to discover that much of his family was gone.

None of these men needed a television script to explain that the Third Reich had a darker side.

The Real Joke Behind Hogan’s Heroes

Seen only on the surface, Hogan’s Heroes is an absurd relic of 1960s television: a cheerful sitcom about Allied prisoners living under the Nazis, complete with secret tunnels, comic misunderstandings, incompetent guards, and a German colonel apparently incapable of learning from the previous 167 episodes.

But behind the comedy were some extraordinary real lives. The people playing those characters had already survived, escaped, fought, or outlived the regime they were portraying.

Perhaps that helps explain why Hogan’s Heroes managed to get away with a premise that still sounds astonishing today. The series was never asking its audience to believe that Nazis were harmless. It simply denied them the dignity they desperately wanted.

For six seasons, the thousand-year Reich couldn’t even keep Colonel Hogan in his barracks.

And some of the people making that joke had more reason than most to enjoy the punchline.

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