Read up on the Great Escape and Colditz and you will see how lax the Luftwaffe was about security. Hogan’s Heroes was not that far off the mark.
Klink was a Junker career soldier who’d spent his life in the Wermacht and Luftwaffe under Wilhelm, Weimar, and the Nazis, a type Hitler did not trust. The feeling was mutual, as people of his class did not respect Hitler. Klink said that he was the only man from his graduating class who never made general, but most of them were dead, killed in battle or in one of Hitler’s purges. I think he knew much of what was going on, but was worried that a mistake by Hogan would upset his safe, comfortable billet and he’d join his classmates.
Schultz was also a vet of WWI and did not want to get killed–there’s a reason why armies like young soldiers. LeBeau called him a Social Democrat, odd for a factory owner because they were Marxists at the time. It might’ve been the only subtle joke in that series. Schultz also had no use for the Nazis and was unmotivated to do a good job, especially after they drafted him and turned his beloved and profitable toy factory into one making war matériel.
They were both saboteurs, working within the system to destroy it while not getting killed.
Neither of them were sabateurs - they were just Germans who had no love for the Nazis, who weren’t too bright, and chose to look the other way when convenient or when that was the safe bet.
Klink was also in it for the status and prestige, as he was terminally insecure. Schultz probably sympathized with the POWs more than with his own military, but he always had to be tricked, threatened, or heavily convinced to help. He just wanted to get through the war in one piece.
Hogans Heroes was one of my favorite syndicated shows for many, many years. It was an unusual subject for a comedy. It got kind of strange when Hogan’s group planted bombs on the train(s). Hogan would look at his watch and say “right about now” boom! The show didn’t really acknowledge the lives lost. I can’t recall similar comedies actually killing anybody. Like McHales Navy. They may have shot down a plane or something but IIRC never killed a bunch of people. Same with Sergeant Bilko or Car 54. Comedies usually avoid including any drama elements.
It was a great show. I always thought the casting and acting approach made it work. A lot of the Germans Like General Burkhalter, Hochstetter and the other german officers played their roles straight. The comedy came from watching them fail at whatever they had planned.
If there was a secret collaborator I think it was General Burkhalter. Why didn’t he ever replace Klink? Why didn’t he ever have an investigation over the sabotage in that area? He had the rank and position to secretly aid Hogan’s group.
Just occurred to me that in many episodes General Burkhalter arrives to brief Klink on some top secret operation. Like a ball bearing plant for the German war effort. Hogan’s group listened in using the coffee pot microphone.
In a way General Burkhalter was giving Hogan his marching orders. We’ll never know for sure. But I like that theory.
It also explains the “Nimrod” episode (The Missing Klink), as Burkhalter was there. He could easily be Nimrod. (as was Hochstetter. Could have been either one.)
Klink was the kaiser of rationalization. He was able to bury his knowledge of what was going so deep in his psyche that you would need deep hypnosis to uncover it. As long as it worked out in the end. His blood pressure must have been through the roof.
Banner’s wife in 36 Hours was played by Celia Lovsky (T’Pau on Star Trek), who was married to Peter Lorre, who was himself a refugee from Hitler’s Germany.
I love his character: “They told me to drive the enemy from our borders, so here I am, driving you out.”
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Or how he mercenarily takes the ring from Eva Marie Saint and very sweetly gives it to his wife. “In Germany, you must make enough money during the war to support yourself after the war.”
I think Schulz knew the PoWs were far more than regular PoWs, but he hated the Nazis as much as they did. Klink knew something but not the details, but willingly blinded himself to it.
Klink’s backstory changed: sometimes he was career military, but at least twice he referred to having been an accountant before the war.
Of course in the missing final episode, Hochstetter claims to have been an American agent all along and prepares for a heroes welcome to the U.S., until Aldo the Apache (Art Carney) asks him “Say Wolfie boy, whatcha plannin’ to do with that uniform when ya get home?” while pulling out his Bowie knife.
(I was less surprised by the fact that the actor who played Hochstetter [Howard Caine, originally Howard Cohen] was Jewish than I was that he was a champion banjo player.)
I started to include Burkhalter in the poll options but I didn’t want to overload y’all with options. I can buy that Klink was simply incompetent but the general was sly.
That Klink cameo on Batman is bizarre. The dialogue suggests that Klink is still commandant of the camp and that the war is still going on.
I love the theory that Klink and Schulz were secretly helping Hogan and the others, but the overwhelming weight of the evidence is that Klink was entirely clueless, and Schulz knew something was up but kept his lip zipped for self-preservation.
Check out the movie Auto Focus sometime, about Bob Crane’s rather sordid private life. A Jewish network executive turns down a pitch for HH, asking sarcastically, “Oh, so this will be about the funny Nazis?”: Auto Focus - Wikipedia. Clearly he hadn’t spoken to Mel Brooks.
I think both Klink and Schultz knew what was going on but kept themselves in a state of perpetual plausible deniability to cover their own asses until the end of the war. I think that while they may have been loyal Germans, they both were in no way Nazis and generally felt more familiar with the prisoners, whom they dealt with from day to day, then with the High Command and Gestapo that came through the came from time to time. As long as they did not get called out and the camp kept its perfect record they were fine letting the shenanigans happen. I doubt either of them were actually collaborating on purpose, as that would put themselves at too much risk.
Schultz was on the side of the Heroes and against the Nazi’s very much. He had his toy factory* seized by the Nazi war effort and greatly resented them. He was probably partly or fully Jewish on top of it*. He made remarks along the lines of “sometimes I have to do something for our side too” meaning the Germans but clearly indicating he knew he was working with Hogan against the Germans and especially the Nazis most of the time.
Klink was mostly clueless. He sort of knew Hogan was pulling some fast ones but thought it was small unimportant stuff in the camp itself. He thought letting Hogan “get away” with some petty stuff kept Hogan happy and thus the prisoners fairly content so they did not try to escape too often.
The part about the Toy Factory is actually canon.
** as probably almost all know that are in this thread, John Banner was Jewish and escaped the Nazi IRL. Werner Klemperer & Leon Askin were also Jewish that and successfuly fled Germany/Austria. Robert Clary was a French Jew and survived the war but lost family members.
I believe that Klemperer was not technically Jewish in that his mother was Lutheran. (His father had converted to Catholicism, and Werner was not raised in any Jewish tradition). Certainly he had no admiration for Nazism, and, as you wrote, escaped from Nazi Germany before WW2 (with his family, as a teenager).
I recall seeing some interview snippet in which he corrected an interviewer who tried to pronounce his name German-style (“Verner”). He identified strongly as an American.
