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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Truth About Colonel Klink: When America's Favorite Comedy Nazi Commandant Was Played by a Jewish
The Truth About Colonel Klink: When America's Favorite Comedy Nazi Commandant Was Played by a Jewish Refugee
http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-truth-about-colonel-klink-when-americas-favorite-comedy-nazi-commandant-was-played-by-a-jewish-refugee
Imagine achieving fame as an actor playing Nazis in America thirty years after fleeing the Nazis to America.
In our dour politically correct culture, which takes comedy too seriously, it sounds like a particularly excruciating form of hell. Werner Klemperer, born in Cologne in 1920, built his career playing a Nazi criminal Emil Hahn on trial in Judgment at Nuremberg, and the mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Operation Eichmann. Then, he was the bumbling, hyper-Teutonic, Colonel Wilhelm Klink in the TV sitcom Hogans Heroes from 1965 through 1971. Coming from a generation that could see art as challenging and comedy as subversion, Klemperer was proud of these roles. His outrageous star turn ridiculing Nazis week after week on CBS was downright liberating.
It sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit gone bad: produce a comedy about a German Prisoner of War camp just twenty years after the liberation of Auschwitz; Gomer Pyle meets Stalag 17. Then hire three German Jewish refugees as three prominent Nazis. Include among the prisoners a Buchenwald survivor who lost twelve siblings and parents in Auschwitz, and still bears the concentration camp number A5714 the Nazis branded onto his forearm.
Even in those less PC times, Jack Gould, the standard-setting New York Times critic first found Hogan's Heroes: a little sick
an insensitive and misguided extension of Hollywood televisions all too prevalent belief that anything and everything can be converted into cheap slapstick.
CentralMass
(15,265 posts)steve2470
(37,457 posts)CentralMass
(15,265 posts)brooklynite
(94,785 posts)MichMan
(11,994 posts)I think it was very telling just how people took things a lot less seriously back then. In a time when WWII wasn't really that far removed, there was a very popular prime time sit-com on network TV abut a German Prison Camp. While I was a child at the time and didn't fully understand the genocide, I though it was interesting that people who lived through the war years could accept this show without getting all bent out of shape, as they understood that it made the Nazi's out to be buffoons.
It may have not been so warmly received if you were of Jewish heritage, but it appears that actors of Jewish decent were Ok with it. If a TV execs proposed this today, there would be outrage, protests and demands that they be fired. It would never see the air
Staph
(6,253 posts)I was on a business trip to Germany, staying in a small family hotel in a village near the plant I was visiting. Only the hotel receptionist spoke English, but the rest of the hotel and restaurant staff were thrilled that I tried to communicate in German, with my trusty phrase book.
I was watching TV one evening and caught an episode on Hogan's Heroes. On German television. Dubbed in German. It actually took me a few minutes to realize that Col. Klink and General Burkhardt were speaking German, as I could tell exactly what was going on in the episode!
brooklynite
(94,785 posts)Robert Clary (Le Beau): a concentration camp survivor
John Banner (Shy Shultz)
Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter)
Egnever
(21,506 posts)Imagine achieving fame as an actor playing Nazis in America
He wasn't just playing a Nazi he was making Nazi's look like imbeciles. Can't think of a part I would want more if I were him.
brooklynite
(94,785 posts)It was illegal to speak the phrase "Heil Hitler", so the voice actors dubbing it into German substituted the phrase "The corn is THIS High!"
longship
(40,416 posts)He was the son of legendary conductor Otto Klemperer so he was brought up in a musical family. Col. Klink conducted symphony orchestras as guest conductor on occasion.
Permanut
(5,654 posts)Historic NY
(37,454 posts)Leon Askin, "General Burkhalter" was also an Austrian Jew he was imprisoned in interment camps several times and finally got out of the country. By 1940 he was in the US and he enlisted in the US Army after DEc 1941.
http://www.askin.at/e_k01.htm