Hogans Heroes Fan Club - TV Guide

Robert Clary's role as the French prisoner of war in Hogan's Heroes requires that he "intern" himself three days a week on the "Stalag 13" set. Which means that for exterior scenes - the watchtowers, the barbed-wire stockade -m he reports to the back lot at Desilu's Culver City studio. For interior shots - barracks and the like - he has to make his way cross-town to Desilu's Hollywood lot 10 miles away. The setting of this make-believe stalag is wartime Germany, sometime in 1942.

During the really true 1942, Robert Clary - a Jew, a French citizen whose name at birth was Robert Max Widerman - was a seven-days-of-the-week prisoner in the German concentration camp "Ottmuth," whose watchtowers, barbed-wire stockade, searchlights, machine guns, SS men, and barracks were located on the same "lot" in Upper Silesia.

Clary survived three years in Ottmuth, Blechhamer, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald concentration camps. His prisoner number was tattooed on the upper part of his left forearm, and it is there today: A-5714.

Concentration camps and prisoner-of war camps are not the same dish of tea. Still and all, the parallels and the contrasts in the true-life experiences of Robert Clary are unsettling to contemplate. As "LeBeau" in Hogan's Heroes Clary is a gourmet chef, among other talents, and the scripts require him to dish up delectables like crepes suzette flambees right under the noses of his German captors. In the concentration camps he had to get by on a diet of considerably less caloric content. He subsisted on one cup of watery soup each midday and one chuck of bread each night. He scavenged food scraps from refuse containers. "I used to sneak out to the SS pigsty to scrounge for rutabaga peelings."

Change of garb

At Desilu LeBeau wears a jaunty beret which he pulls off when snapping to attention in the office of "Colonel Klink," commandant of "Stalag 13." In Upper Silesia Clary's head was shaved and he was clothed in a shapeless zebra-striped prisoner's get-up with a zebra-striped head covering which he was obliged to remove whenever passing within three yards of an SS man. For footwear he was issued holtzpantinen - narrow lengths of wood with a strip of cotton across the toes. He wore the yellow Star of David on the back and front of his tunic and on his pants.

Existence in the concentration camp was a matter of gun, club and whip. Prisoners were allowed to live only until their working power was used up. As Clary recollects: "We'd come back exhausted from hard labor at the war factories, and the SS guards would line us up at attention for three hours to witness the hanging of some poor wretch who maybe stole a piece of garbage."

In a Heroes episode aired on CBS last December the situation-comedy Germans schemed to install a synthetic fuel plant at "Stalag 13" so it would be safe from Allied bombers. By disturbing coincidence, Clary's second slave-labor factory had been a synthetic gasoline plant. He remembers its name: Obersliese Hydrier Werke. The RAF bombed the plant day after day, but it was verboten for Clary or any Jew to take shelter.

One of Clary's functions as LeBeau is to keep on friendly terms with the police dogs. LeBeau talks to the dogs and they lick his face affectionately - except when Klink is around, when the dogs are supposed to pretend to be vicious.

In life, Clary has had less felicitous experiences with SS dogs who were not pretending" "When the Russian armies were approaching, we could hear the cannons roaring, and the SS ordered us to evacuate the camp. We started out with 4000 of us - a long line of hollow spectres in rags - trudging in the mud, in the rain, in the frozen cold, from early morning until late at night, spending nights in the open in temperatures below zero. In 15 days they gave us only twice a small piece of bread and a small square of margarine. Our very small ration of bread was stolen by the stronger people. We got one cup of water a day.

"The great terror on the road was to stay on your feet. If you were too weak to go on, you were beaten to death, your skull bashed in, or half your cranium shot away by the SS guards with their fingers on the trigger and their dogs on the leashes. They were German shepherds, same as Hogan's. After 15 days there were only 1200 of us still alive."

"If you liked World War II, you'll love Hogan's Heroes," promised the CBS promo which originally advertised the series. The critics had a field day, Jack Gould of the New York Times fussing about "the depiction of the Nazis as silly old buffoons in the silent-movie tradition, hopeless oafs having more in common with Desilu Studios than Hitler." And Lawrence Laurent of the Washington Post nagging that "something is missing; something has been left out….What the children are not seeing is a Nazi in any form that ever existed….The Germans, conquerors of a continent, are played as lazy doltish, cuddly, lovable and cute.

No Nice Nazis

Actually, the nearest to a cuddly German on the show is "Schultz," the dummkpof guard whom Clary describes as "a big teddy bear." And this "German" turns out to be an Austrian Jew, actor John Banner, whose real-life family was liquidated in the Nazi extermination camps.

As for "Colonel Klink," commandant of "Stalag 13," Hogan's producer Ed Feldman argues: "We don't say Klink is a wonderful guy. He's a pompous ass." Scratch this "German" - Werner Klemperer - and he does turn out to have been born in Cologne, though his own family had to get out of Nazi Germany when Hitler started persecuting the Jews. Much to Klemperer's discomfiture, one of the show's writers, Arthur Julian likes to kid him about "goose stepping all the way to the bank."

Certainly Robert Clary sees no comparison between Hogan's Heroes and what he went through. "Stalag 13 is not a concentration camp. It's a POW camp, and that's a world of difference. You never heard of a prisoner of war being gassed or hanged. Whereas we were not even human beings. When we got to Buchenwald, the SS shoved us into a shower room to spend the night. I had heard the rumors about the dummy shower heads that were gas jets. I thought, this is it. But no, it was just a place to sleep. The first eight days there, the Germans kept us without even a crumb to eat. We were hanging on to life by pure guts, sleeping on top of each other, every morning waking up to find a new corpse next to you.

"When the American armies were coming closer, the Germans started to evacuate the camp. First, all the Jews were ordered to Dachau. A Czech named Zak saved my life by hiding me away. Then the SS gave orders to kill everybody that was left, a mass massacre. Suddenly it was very quiet:
no guards, no SS, no Germans, no dogs even. At 4 o'clock in the after-noon of April 11, 1945, the GIs of the U.S. Third Army arrived at the gates of Buchenwald

Only one to survive

"Before we left that place forever, we had a jazz concert with a small combo. They introduced me as "Did" - that was my nickname - and I sang a song in English that I had learned phonetically: 'A Tisket, A Tasket.'
Then I went home to Paris. Of the 12 people in my family who had been sent to concentration camps, including my mother and father, I was the only one to come back alive.

"Today, at that apartment house where I spent the first 16 years of my life, there is a plaque over the door which says: 'In memory of the 112 inhabintants of this house, including 40 young children, deported and dead in German camps, 1942.'

"I was the only Jew in my class at school, and at the end of 1941 the Germans made me wear a yellow Star of David on my sleeve. The first day I wore it, all my classmates walked bravely with me on the street."

When Clary was 16, on the 23rd of September, 1942, at 9.30 PM., the Gestapo came and took away the whole family. They were shaved bald and were hurtled into cattle cars, headed for Auschwitz. After three days the doors were opened. The train was surrounded by 55 troops with machine guns and dogs on leashes. "They shouted, 'All men between 16 and 45, out!' I was 16. My mother's last words were, 'Do whatever they tell you to do. Don't fight it.' It wasn't until a year later that I knew my parents had been asphyxiated in the shower rooms at Auschwitz."

He sang in Paris

After Buchenwald, Clary sang for his supper in the smoky boites of the Place Pigalle. Though he spoke no English, he cut a pop record for the American Market, "Put Your Shoes On, Lucy," singing words chalked up for him phonetically. The record sold 250,000 copies. He came to this coun-try and soon became a favorite in supper clubs. The New Yorker magazine typically burbled: "Robert Clary is an ideal household pet - small, fun-loving, and willing to dance and sing until all hours." Clary will probably always be identified with a song in "New Faces of l952" - "I'm in Love with Miss Logan" about a boy with a crush on his teacher.

At 40 Clary now lives sedately near the Hillcrest Country Club in West Los Angeles with his bride, Eddie Cantor's daughter Natalie, whom he married only last year after a close 15-year friendship. Of his shattering experiences with anti-Semitism he says: "Sometimes I dream about those days and I wake up in a sweat, terrified for fear I'm about to be sent away to a concentration camp. But I don't live in the past. I didn't suffer as much as a lot of people.

And there's no echo Buchenwald at Desilu?

Hardly the same, shrugs Clary.

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