hannahstohelit t1_iwnyhrg wrote on November 17, 2022 at 1:14 AM

Thanks for posting this! He was really great on the show. Interestingly, while he was the only Jew to play a POW on the show, he was NOT the only Jew in the cast- all of the main actors who played Nazi officials (Werner Klemperer, John Banner, Leon Askin, and Howard Caine) were Jewish, and while Clary was the only Holocaust survivor, Klemperer, Banner, and Askin were refugees from the Nazis.

lucky_ducker t1_iwobov1 wrote on November 17, 2022 at 2:58 AM

... and Klemperer, Banner, Askin, and Caine only agreed to play the parts of Nazis if they were portrayed as bumbling incompetents.

hannahstohelit t1_iwoc9mh wrote on November 17, 2022 at 3:03 AM

The only one to whom that was ever attributed was a Klemperer, IIRC. He’d had plenty of previous experience playing Nazis in Hollywood (most famously in Judgment in Nuremberg) and was very alarmed when he went to the audition for Hogan’s Heroes and realized that it was meant to be a comedy. At the time he described the show as a workplace comedy that could have just as easily taken place at General Motors.

Interestingly, if you’ve seen the pilot you’ll notice that Larry Hovis, who plays Carter, is actually a one-off character and instead the main gang includes a tailor named Vladimir Minsk. He never showed up again after the pilot, and that’s because Leonid Kinskey, who played him, was also Jewish and was so disturbed by the concept of a comedy with Nazis that he walked. (Kinskey is probably most famous for playing Sascha the bartender in Casablanca and was also a refugee from the Nazis.)