Hogan's Heros

If you are old enough, you will remember Corporal Louis LeBeau on the television sitcom called Hogan's Heroes.

Most people do not realize that although actor Robert Clary played a well loved fictional character living in a German POW camp under the control of Colonel Wilhelm Klink and sergeant-of-the-guard, Hans Schultz (Stalag 13) Robert Clary was in fact a true to life survivor of the Holocaust, first taken by the Germans in 1942 and placed in Concentration camp in Upper Silesia where he was tattooed with the identification number “A5714” Robert Clary was then moved to Buchenwald concentration camp where he remained until the end of the war.

"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 rumours 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 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. ... The whole experience was a complete nightmare — the way they treated us, what we had to do to survive. We were less than animals.

Sometimes I dream about those days. I wake up in a sweat terrified for fear I'm about to be sent away to a concentration camp, but I don't hold a grudge because that's a great waste of time. Yes, there's something dark in the human soul. For the most part, human beings are not very nice. That's why when you find those who are, you cherish them"

Clary was liberated from Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. Sadly twelve other members of Robert's immediate family were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp and were all killed by the Nazis. At the end of WW2, upon his arrival to Paris, Clary learned that three of his 13 siblings had in fact survived the Nazi occupation of France

When asked about parallels between LeBeau's incarceration and his own as a holocaust survivor, Clary said, "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. When the show went on the air, people asked me if I had any qualms about doing a comedy series dealing with Nazis and concentration camps. I had to explain that it was about prisoners of war in a Stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps.

November 16th, 2022; Robert Clary, also known to so many of us as Corporal Louis LeBeau, a true survivor of the Holocaust, passed away in his home in Los Angeles at the age of 96.