Adorable Nazis: product of their time or past their prime?
By: Mikey Clarke
Tags: TV Series, Nazis, Hugh Laurie, Comedy, Stephen Fry

I adore Hogan’s Heroes.

They do say everything is a product of its time. That includes you and me and everything around us. Hogan’s Heroes is no exception. How the hell do you turn possibly the greatest furnace of pain and suffering the world has ever known into a happy-go-lucky screwball comedy?

I live in New Zealand. When I was a kid back in the ’90s, one of NZ’s national TV channels saw fit to fill its Mon-Fri 7–7:30pm slot with reruns of everyone’s favourite world-war screwball comedy. My family and I absorbed every episode. I adored it! But I’d always felt terrible for Werner Klemperer, the actor playing Colonel Klink. He was such a snivelling, toadying, spineless little creation, wasn’t he. The world formed orderly queues around the block to kick his ass and make him miserable. Child-me felt so sorry for him!

I realise that of the attributes of Hogan’s Heroes most likely to gnaw at the sensibilities of a modern viewer, the treatment of Luftwaffe officers as one-dimensional punching bags is perhaps not uppermost, but at that age, that shit honestly got to me.

Well. A few years ago, I randomly encountered an interview. Within, Klemperer set forth both the record and his feelings. A bit of googling tells me Werner Klemperer, Klink in ‘Hogan’s Heroes,’ Dies at 80 (Published 2000) is that interview, but it’s paywalled, bah. But! The page In Hogan’s Heroes should Col Hogan have protected Col Klink after Germany’s surrender since Klink wasn’t really a bad person? also quotes the bit I’m really after:

Klemperer said in an interview that he had one condition for playing the role of Klink: “If they ever wrote a segment where Klink would come out the hero, I would leave the show.”

Bwuuh? Well! Turns out both he and John Banner, the actor playing Sergeant Schultz, were German Jews. They and also quite a few other actors present (including Julian Clary (Louie LeBeau)) had been through hell in WWII. Klemperer hated the Nazis. He accepted the role of a top German officer only on the express condition that he lose every single time.

And that part of my psyche still ten years old felt a million times better.

Er … I seem to have drifted from the wider point just a tad. Right! Hogan’s Heroes contains plenty more to ruffle the feathers of the easily-er ruffle-able. I believe its biggest controversy, mentioned on Quora by a certain Jon Mixon, is the notion that such a wacky screwball comedy was disrespecting the horrific tragedies and traumas one typically encounters in a world war. I can totally see how it might come across that way. But everything is a product of its time. That includes you and me and everything we like and dislike. I say this not to imply “oh that makes the genuinely horrible shit okay, give it a rest why don’t ya,” although that’s a gnarly bonus, but to relay insight and understanding. The show’s IMDB page, Hogan’s Heroes (TV Series 1965–1971) — IMDb, contains a comment addressing this very point more eloquently than I ever could:

“The problem with Hogan’s heroes is that it has lost its context. People criticize it as a comedy set in a German prisoner of War camp, saying that trivializes the real human tragedies created by the Nazi regime. The thing is, Hogan’s Heroes is not a spoof of prison camps. It’s a spoof of World War II movies and TV shows. It came out in the wake of films like `The Longest Day’, `The Great Escape’, etc. which produced shows like `Combat’, `The Gallant Men’, 12 O’Clock High’, all of which were hyper serious because of the subject matter. Such a trend requires a leavening spoof. And `Hogan’s Heroes’ and `McHale’s Navy’ provided that comic relief. Nobody ever criticized McHale’s Navy for trivializing the Pacific War, any more than they criticized `F Troop’ for not being a documentary about the Old West or `Get Smart’ for not being written by John LaCarre. Why do we indict Hogan’s heroes for being insensitive to the deprivations of the Nazis?”

Enterprising directors were banging out war movies before the war itself had even concluded. By the mid ’60s, there was a vast glut of movies, each desperate to outdo its predecessor in being Gritty and Dark and Realistic. So the people championing Hogan’s Heroes figured, well, why not go in the other direction? Why not a silly wacky screwball comedy?

On a similar note, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie did something similar with spy dramas. The ’80s saw a similar glut of Gritty Gritty Dark Dark spy dramas clogging UK telly, so the comedic duo charged in the other direction, and created the lightest, silliest, fluffiest spy drama in the universe.

❤

Edit: Turns out one of the people put off by Hogan’s Heroes’s depiction of Nazi Germany was my very own grandfather. He was an aeronautical engineer in Scotland during the War, then moved to New Zealand in the early ’60s. He and my mum and their family at the time enjoyed Hogan’s Heroes when and as it originally aired, ’65–’71. He found it a bit distasteful, and felt it trivialised the horrors of war. If one examines the show’s history and the behaviour of its actors, turns out opinion is very much divided on this. The show’s pilot episode included a sixth Hero, a Soviet sergeant called Vladimir Minsk, played by Leonid Kinskey. After the pilot, he vanishes. Turns out Kinskey also did not like the notion of portraying Nazis or Germans as wacky screwball figures of fun. I’m not sure I agree, but I can see where both Kinskey and my grandad were coming from. Takes all sorts to make a world, right?