Did critics of the POW sitcom ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ actually have a point?
60 years ago, ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ avoided stories of Nazi cruelty and played WWII for laughs
The cast of Hogan’s Heroes, 1965. Photo by Getty Images
By Benjamin Ivry December 19, 2024
As we approach the 60th anniversary of the TV sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, it’s a good occasion to consider whether the viewers who found it unseemly to derive laughs from a Nazi prisoner of war camp may have been right after all.
Did the series, which ran for six years, desensitize the viewing public to the destruction of European Jewry by showing bumbling, comedic Nazis? Historian Henry Feingold charged in Shofar in 2001 that Hogan’s Heroes may have “humanized German prison keepers through humor.” Cultural critic Sander L. Gilman has noted that before Gerald Green’s 1978 teleplay for the miniseries Holocaust, the American home audience had only a sketchy grasp of Hitler’s war against the Jews.
Bernard Fein and Albert Ruddy, the two Jewish creators of Hogan’s Heroes, exploited this general public ignorance by hiring Jewish actors to play Nazis, as if preemptively disarming criticism. Yet no mention was made in Hogan’s Heroes of the Jews or the Holocaust, as the Jewish studies maven Jeffrey Shandler has commented.
In this sense, Hogan’s Heroes failed to educate the general public about modern Jewish history; but then, its overt purpose was to elicit guffaws, nothing more. The film historian Sylvie Lindeperg reminds us that even the 1956 documentary Night and Fog, about Nazi concentration camps, did not mention Jews either, mourning instead Communists who had been martyred by European fascists.
Jews in the cast of Hogan’s Heroes stressed in interviews that their show was about prisoners of war, not concentration camp victims. The French Jewish actor Robert Clary, who himself had endured imprisonment in concentration camps, told journalists that there was a “world of difference” between the two forms of Nazi detention: “You never heard of a prisoner of war being gassed or hanged.”
Of course, Clary, for all the validity of his tragic personal experience, was no historian. He might have simply forgotten the film The Great Escape (1963) about the Stalag Luft III murders, war crimes perpetrated by the Gestapo after the evasion of Allied POWs from a German Air Force prison camp in 1944. Of the successful escapees, 50 were executed on Hitler’s orders.
Nor can anyone blame Clary for accepting a high-profile job offer after his early travails. In a memoir, Clary recalled that even before the war in Paris, “Being Jewish did not make me happy, because I learned when I was very young that most people did not like Jews.”
Clary’s tireless, courageous accounts of his trajectory helped to educate generations after Hogan’s Heroes. In the mid-1990s, he interviewed 75 Holocaust survivors as part of a documentary record filmed for the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation after preserving his own testimony.
Later, Clary discussed his return to postwar Paris, where he unexpectedly met one of his sisters who had survived the conflict. Recounting this family reunion, Clary paused for a moment, choked by emotion over a half-century later. This acute human feeling was nowhere to be seen in the frivolous POW sitcom.
After Hogan’s Heroes, Clary was limited mostly to soap opera roles, having missed out on being cast in an ideal part, the French servant Passepartout in the film Around the World in Eighty Days. Producer Mike Todd (born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen) decided that the Mexican comic Cantinflas would be a bigger international box office draw.
Things went similarly with the German Jewish actor Werner Klemperer, who claimed to have added the monocle and riding crop that he brandished as the buffoonish POW camp commandant. Such accessories, as the Germanist Michael Geisler argued, offered visual cues more redolent of the First World War and Huns as portrayed by the American Jewish silent screen villain Erich von Stroheim than 1940s Nazis.
An even closer prototype might have been seized upon by one of the directors of Hogan’s Heroes, the Jewish comedian Howard Morris. In 1954, Morris had seconded Sid Caesar in the landmark TV sketch “The German General,” mocking a monocled Prussian. Two years earlier, Caesar’s repeated lampoons of German militarism had included another sketch that derided a U-boat commander.
These clownish antecedents were possibly the real inspiration for Hogan’s Heroes. Nevertheless, Klemperer aspired to high culture. He had a late-career success in a 1987 Broadway revival of the musical Cabaret as the Jewish suitor of a character portrayed by Regina Resnik, an American Jewish mezzo-soprano of Ukrainian origin.
Klemperer acquited himself admirably in projects such as recording for Philips Classics the narration for Schoenberg’s oratorio Gurre-Lieder and speaking roles onstage in Mozart operas. As the son of the Jewish orchestral conductor Otto Klemperer, he naturally gravitated toward dignified performances.
Before Hogan’s Heroes, Klemperer had proved himself quite capable of playing entirely serious, neurotic, and unpleasant Nazis in the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, where he played a war criminal, and the same year as the title role in the movie Operation Eichmann. But this type of somber evocation was far from the world of Hogan’s Heroes, which the film historian Robert Shandley has observed owed much to Billy Wilder’s 1953 Stalag 17, a mixture of melodrama and cynical humor, based on a play by two former U.S. prisoners of war at a camp in Austria.
The two Stalag 17 authors sued the production company of Hogan’s Heroes, but lost as a U.S. federal judge discerned different “dramatic moods” in the two creations. Indeed, Hogan’s Heroes eliminated the lethal danger which in Stalag 17 alternated with Wilder’s broad humor.
In the giddy, surreal world of Hogan’s Heroes, two Austrian Jewish actors, John Banner and Leon Askin, played an inept camp guard and a Nazi general, respectively, whereas Howard Caine, who had a Jewish upbringing in Nashville, played a Gestapo officer. Understandably, Otto Klemperer, when he first saw the show, after praising his son’s performance, added: “But who is the author of this material?”
Even the show’s theme music was assigned to a Jew: Jerry Fielding (born Joshua Itzhak Feldman in Pittsburgh), who was irked when forced to change his family name to work on radio, as Feldman was deemed too Jewish-sounding.
Over time, Hogan’s Heroes might have helped eliminate such public prejudice, if only by relentlessly ridiculing Nazis. When U.S. neo-Nazi Richard Girnt Butler sat in the back of a pickup truck in Idaho on Hitler-worship parade days, wearing a brown Aryan Nations uniform with a swastika armband, some TV commentators claimed that he looked like an extra from the set of Hogan’s Heroes.
Although some diehard fans still praise the show, as early as 1967, Mad magazine mocked Hogan’s Heroes by proposing a spinoff, Hochman’s Heroes, set in Buchenwald and showing Jewish prisoners merrily imbibing champagne and beer and eating chicken.
If dismissed by some as offensively mendacious tomfoolery, Hogan’s Heroes may have performed a service by conveying the inherent ridiculousness of the prototypical Nazi villain, paving the way for Mel Brooks and other comedians to exploit this satiric vein of Jewish humor.
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