When Life Gives You Lemons...Watch Hogan's Heroes

Through the years when feeling blue, I’ve been wont to hark back to—yes, drum roll, please—simpler times. From my perspective at least, many of the television programs I enjoyed as a youth serve as a very welcome pick-me-up in the here and now. In need of a lift recently, I opted to put Hogan’s Heroes in my Netflix queue. I soon after discovered that every episode—seasons one through six—was on YouTube (for the time being at least).

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been plowing through the series with glee. While Hogan’s Heroes is steeped in some controversy, it nonetheless holds up extremely well in my opinion. Werner Klemperer as the ineffectual, vainglorious Colonel Wilhelm Klink and John Banner as the endearing but bumbling Sergeant Schultz never grow old from where I sit.

Originally, I watched the show—for the most part—after it exited the prime-time stage in 1971. It went into syndication right away and played on, as I remember, local station Channel 5 every night at 7:30. In the colder climes when we were under house arrest, watching these shows over and over—be it The Munsters, The Andy Griffith Show, I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, or Batman—was therapeutic They were comforting back then when the stresses of growing up reared their ugly heads. There was just nothing quite like sitting in front of television set and watching the familiar antics of Herman, Barney, Lucy, Gilligan, and Chief O’Hara.

TV Guide included Hogan’s Heroes on its list of the worst television shows of all-time. This selection was contemporary PC at work, with the show taking a hit forty years after it went off the air for making light of a time and a place that wasn’t very funny—World War II and a German POW camp. Nazi characters appeared regularly, too, on the sitcom, and constant references to their beloved leader were made. However, Colonel Robert Hogan and his trusted subordinates always thwarted them.

Hogan’s Heroes was good satire. During the war itself the Nazis were regularly mocked in comedy fare, including in Three Stooges’ shorts. Make the most heinous folks on the world stage appear foolish and asinine—why not? It’s a healing route that says we are somehow all in this together. We’re going to laugh at the insanity. Robert Clary, who played diminutive Corporal Louie LeBeau, survived a concentration camp and has a tattoo on his arm as a lifelong reminder of the experience. John Banner escaped from his native Austria but lost many family members in the Holocaust. Werner Klemperer and Leon Askin, who played General Burkhalter, likewise fled persecution. If these men were willing to assume prominent roles on Hogan’s Heroes, surely the judge and jury of TV Guide could find it in their hearts to cut the show some slack and give it its due as a timeless classic.