But there was a secret behind the show.
The article doesn't mention it, but Howard Caine also fought in WWII in the Pacific Theater.
In 1995 I was in Northern Germany, and watched Hogan’s Heroes with a German voice track. It was broadcast during the after-school time period.
That is astonishing. I had NO idea. That makes the show a lot more poignant.
I read the abbreviated bio of Robert Clary here on FR a couple days ago. His life story was incredible.
My 8th grade science teacher was in the U.S. Army and served time in a German prison camp during WW2. He wasn’t amused by the show. Don’t know if he was Jewish or not.
It was one of his ways to get back at the Germans.
Actually, I thought this was pretty widely known. They insisted the Nazis be portrayed in this manner as a condition of accepting the role.
Over the years, many Jewish comedians have told Holocaust jokes. They are the only ones that can or should.
John Banner, Shultz, also played a nazi in 36 hours, a kick-ass movie starring James Garner. 1965.
However I knew an old guy who just had a different view of the program, which he had every right to. Personally I thought it was a good thing to ridicule the nazis.
Anyway this is all in the news with the recent passing of Robert Clary. RIP.
Bill Crane (Hogan) in real-live was reported to be a pervert who had an obsessive craving for pornography. He was bludgeoned to death at an early age following the end of the series.
“ The article says that for many viewers, the idea of incompetent Nazis was unacceptable, because the Nazi concentration camps and POW camps were too fresh in the nation’s memory.”
50 years on idiots say that.
Hogan’s Heroes was 20 years after the war ended. It wasn’t controversial or offensive. And the audience included people, and their family members, who actually fought and defeated the Nazis.
57 years later it’s controversial and offensive to people who weren’t even born when it was on.
Werner Klemperer also played the Nazi judge prisoner Emil Hahn in “Judgment at Nuremberg”.
Ernst Janning : “Emil Hahn, the decayed, corrupt bigot, obsessed by the evil within himself.”
Emil Hahn: “Today, you sentence me! Tomorrow, the Bolsheviks sentence you!”
Emil Hahn: “How dare they show us those films, how dare they? We are not executioners, we are judges!”
Emil Hahn: “Germany was fighting for its life. Certain measures were needed to protect it from its enemies. I cannot say that I am sorry we applied those measures. We were a bulwark against Bolshevism. We were a pillar of Western culture. A bulwark and a pillar the West may yet wish to retain.”
In making fun of the Nazis, Hogan's Heroes had an honorable precedent. During World War Two, director Ernst Lubitsch, who was German born and Jewish, cast Jack Benny and Carole Lombard in a comedy, To Be or Not to Be, that made fun of the Nazis using the vehicle of a Polish theater troop in occupied Warsaw.
The film was initially scorned by some critics, and Benny's father walked out in anger at seeing his son in a Nazi uniform. He was later persuaded to watch it though and came to love the film, as have most critics since then. To Be or Not to Be is now thought of as a comedy classic.
I don’t consider these facts a joke about Hogans Hero’s. Bad title. I figure During those years of production many survivors where still alive. and it was very well known that Klemperer’s dad was a conductor.
My maternal grandfather was in the Austrian-Hungarain Army in WW1. He was a POW on the Italian front. He told me that they would sneak out of the camp at night to beg for food and sneak back in before the morning. Having grown up watching Hogan’s Heroes, I asked him since he escaped, why did he go back? “There was nowhere to go.”