What a rollicking idea for a situation comedy-life among the prisoners of war in a German POW camp, complete with a laugh track to underscore the Nazi nuttiness. No one ever accused television programmers of having any sense of taste beyond their mouths, but Hogan's Heroes brought a new, appalling low to an industry that had already shown time and time again that when it came to making money, it had no shame.

Was CBS underestimating the American public? Not a chance, sorry to say: Hogan's Heroes ran for a mammoth total of 168 half-hour episodes on the network-two years longer than America was actually in the war. Heil Nielsens!

The idea for all the Gestapo giggles came from producer Ed Feldman. A play entitled Stalag 17 had been a hit on Broadway in the 1950s, and a screen version with William Holden drew both critical plaudits and box-office bucks.

The only aspects of Stalag 17  that apparently connected with Feldman were the bits of grim comedy that the POWs used to keep from going crazy. Sitcoms have been built on flimsier foundations than that, and the show was developed with the title Hogan's Raiders. At least they resisted the urge to call it Fuhrer Knows Best.

For the title role of Colonel Robert Hogan, Feldman contacted Bob Crane, popular L.A. disc jockey and next-door neighbor on The Donna Reed Show. The king of the L.A. airwaves had managed to hold both jobs for two years, and he was looking for a property that would establish him as top banana.

"A comedy about a POW camp?" said Crane, after he had signed the contract for the show. "But then Eddie Feldman explained the plot to me. . . . So I thought, why not?"

There were any number of reasons why not, but from the beginning, Feldman, Desilu, and CBS went to great lengths to emphasize that

this was going to be a tasteful situation comedy about a POW camp, which might strike the average viewer as something like a tasteful situation comedy about a merry band of child molesters.

"It's halfway between Combat and McHale's Navy-with a little bit of The Man from U.N.C~L.F. thrown in, insisted Crane.

Werner Klemperer, who played the cartoonish Colonel Klink, was no stranger to playing Nazis in film and television; his Teutonic features and thick accent made him the ultimate American stereotype of the evil German soldier. His participation in Hogan's Raiders was doubly shocking-considering that the Klemperer family themselves fled the Nazis in the early 1930s.

John Banner played Sgt. Schultz, the corpulent dummkopf who kept repeating, "I zee nusssing, Colonel Hogan . . nusssing.

Banner had left Austria to escape the Nazis, and he didn't have a problem with the plot of Hogan's Raiders, "just so people don't get prisoner-of-war camps mixed up with concentration camps. You can't make fun of a concentration camp.

With this dubious distinction in mind, and the new title Hogan's Heroes, the show made CBS's fall schedule for 1965. Among the polyglot characters behind the barbed wire were a natty, resourceful Brit, played by future Family Feud host Richard Dawson; a tiny Frenchman, Days of Our Lives star Robert Clary; and a black corporal, played by future television director Ivan Dixon. There was also a blonde secretary on the Deutschland side, whose Hildegarde braids and mammoth bust made her look like the star of a drag opera.

This outrageous stereotyping made the show seem like a stalag adaptation of Amos 'n Andy, but that didn't seem to bother Feldman or the network; after all, if they could try to wring laughs out of Nazi Germany, any other sins were small potatoes. A minor flap was stirred, though, when humorist Stan Freberg was commissioned to make a radio commercial for the new show. Its tag line: "If you liked World War II, you'll love Hogan's Heroes!" Considering Freberg's sense of humor, the line was probably his commentary on the staggering bad taste of the operation, but CBS pulled the spot after some adverse publicity.

CBS enlisted Bob Crane as Johnny-on-the-spot to defend the program. "Depicting life in a German POW camp circa 1942 isn't the most ideal setting for a situation comedy," he conceded, insisting that "ex-POWs are our greatest boosters."

Crane, whose character was described in official network publicity as the "glib and impudent ringleader of a zany band of Allied captives in a German prisoner-of-war camp," also said, "We work hard on the scripts so the lines don't sound too jokey. In other words, we try to give Hogan's

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the extra thought which makes The Dick Van Dyke Show, for instance, so beautiful." Ed Feldman readily admitted that the writing staff used William Shirer's classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich as an inspiration for source material, lest anyone think that Hogan's Heroes was less than authentic.

That sort of care, beauty, and regard for propriety was evident in one publicity stunt that CBS cooked up for Hogan's Heroes. It was a cast and press party held at the Ocotillo Lodge in Palm Springs, California. The lodge had been cosmetically transformed into a festive replica of a POW camp. Blackshirted "guards" strutted their stuff to the sound of Deutschland military marches. Best of all, an actor costumed as Adolf Hitler even made an appearance-drunk. The only thing missing was a group of manacled CBS executives sporting yellow stars and pink triangles on their pinstriped suits.

When it left the air after six years of decent ratings, Hogan's Heroes proved to be one of the most successful syndicated shows of all time. In 1972, it was running in every major U.S. city, as well as 45 different countries.

"We even tried to peddle it in West Germany!" said Werner Klemperer. "We got a 'no.'"

The most macabre twist to the Hogan's Heroes affair came on June 29, 1978. While in town for a dinner theater stint in Scottsdale, Arizona, Bob Crane was found murdered in his room. The killing was particularly brutal: two blows from a jack handle finished off the star while he lay in bed, and a cord from a nearby video camera had been tightened around his neck to ensure that the job had been thorough.

Although the police questioned family and friends, one of the earliest suspects was an American Nazi; the ritualistic nature of the murder led investigators to wonder whether an angry Nazi or group of Nazis had murdered Crane for revenge. This line of questioning, however, was quickly dismissed when an investigation of the actor's personal effects unearthed "dozens" of homemade videotapes featuring Crane in a vanety of sex scenes. The pornography

angle soon became more paramount to the case than any suspected Nazi angle, and the investigators indicted a video-equipment dealer from California. He was later released, and, to date, the case has never been solved.