Robert Clary who played Corporal Lebeau passes away at 96 last of the Hogan Heroes regulars. Reading on him he actually survived the Nazi concentration camps in WW2. Werner Klemper also migrated from Germany before the war as did John Banner who played Schultz.
Sacre' Bleu Corporal Lebeau is dead!
- Thread starter NWICY
- Start date
Cyclonepride
Thought Police
One of my favorite series as a kid (watching reruns).
I've never seen the show, but I'm well aware of it. It just seems like such an odd concept. Everything to do with Nazi Germany is so serious these days, it's hard to imagine a comedy surrounding a Nazi Germany POW camp as subject matter for a sitcom. Probably the closest you can find taking the subject matter even a little litely is JoJo Rabbit and Inglorious Bastards, and even those have very serious undertones to them. Not passing judgement for anyone who likes the show. Times change. It just seems so odd.
So many comedies have a dumb protagonist that generate a lot of humor. It's been that way forever. Lucy, Gilligan, Phoebe, Kramer. The examples are endless. Hogan's Heroes upped the ante by having all Nazis be buffoons.
The show initially aired 20 years after WWII, so it had an audience of vets and children of vets that were very willing to keep kicking sand into Germany's face
The producers of the show as well as the four actors that portrayed the four main German characters were all Jewish. It's safe to say that profiting off the humiliation of their antagonist was a driving force.
Also...JoJo Rabbit is ******* fantastic.
I found it odd that just 20 years after the war we get Hogan's Heroes. Maybe it was just the comedy of the day. Making fun of Nazis seems fairly pervasive in the 60s and 70s
