You’ve probably seen reruns of the hit American television show Hogan’s Heroes and not really thought much about it. After all, it isn’t a particularly deep show with any social relevancy, right? I mean, how could it be?
For those of you not familiar with Hogan’s Heroes, it’s a show about Allied prisoners of war in World War II who use their prison to coordinate top secret missions for the Allies and the anti-Nazi underground. The plots were far-fetched and the characters silly and purposefully campy, but the production values were high and it proved to be a major hit. The producers of the show successfully created a sitcom by buying into the spy craze of film and television of the late 1960s. It was good harmless fun, right?
Not everyone was happy with a sitcom based on the deadliest war in human history.
You might find this hard to believe, but the American Nazi Party protested the show for portraying the Nazis as bumbling fools. More believable were protests by Jewish groups who argued that Hogan’s Heroes trivialized World War II. Despite the protests, or possibly because of it, the producers of Hogan’s Heroes continued to do well in the ratings.
The reality is that the Nazis were actually more accurate in their criticism. Most of the major Nazi characters in the show were played by Jews, some of whom had been interred in concentration camps before the war, and all knew the risks that such a show could bring. In fact, Werner Klemperer, who played the eternally bumbling Colonel Klink, and was Jewish, once said in an interview: “I had one qualification when I took the job: if they ever wrote a segment whereby Colonel Klink would come out the hero, I would leave the show.”
Much of the controversy about the show died down after knowledge of the cast’s Nazi characters’ ethnicity became known. By the late 1970s, after Hogan’s Heroes had been off the air for several years, controversy surrounding the show surfaced again when Robert Crane, who played Colonel Hogan, was found murdered in a motel room.
We’ll get to that story later.