The Truth About Colonel Klink: When America's Favorite Comedy Nazi Commandant Was Played by a Jewish [View all]

[steve2470]

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 Hogan’s 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 television’s all too prevalent belief that anything and everything can be converted into cheap slapstick.”