HOGAN'S HEROES question: how much did Schultz & Klink actually know about HH's activities?

[Darth_Steeler]

Yes Schultz knew. In many shows he witnessed the bunk open to the tunnels and said nothing.
He helped pull off some missions, like One to get Newkirk and carter back after they were captured. Or the one where they had to get a replacement painting of the “blue boy”. It suspected he was tired of war (after fighting in WW I) and was anti Nazi due to them taking his factory for the war effort. Now Klink did he know possibly but because he had a no escape record he did not go to the russian front. There was several times he need a train to blow up and it did after Hogan convinced him it would, then ther was the “Super” sergent he asked Hogan to get rid of, and the one time he was sent to the russian front and Hogan and the other prisoners boarded the the train to pull his bacon out the fire . Did he know? I think he did not really care as long as he stayed in Stalag 13.

[terentii]

@Sampiro

Klink’s backstory changed: sometimes he was career military, but at least twice he referred to having been an accountant before the war.

He could have “retired” from the German military after WWI (i.e., was likely made redundant) and worked as a civilian during the interwar period. He would then have been called up to serve again as the Third Reich was preparing for WWII.

[astro]

@What_Exit

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.

[/SIZE]

I came in to mention precisely this. Per Shultz’s reminiscing description of himself as a “big wheel” and the owner of an assumedly substantial factory he was evidently (pre-war) an executive and a fairly wealthy and influential man which is at odds with his role as a clueless buffoon. This is the hardest canon evidence you will find that Schultz was putting on an act.

This was also fascinating

The actors who played the four major German roles—Werner Klemperer (Klink),[62] John Banner (Schultz), Leon Askin (Burkhalter), and Howard Caine (Hochstetter)—were Jewish. Furthermore, Klemperer, Banner, Askin, and Robert Clary (LeBeau) were Jews who had fled the Nazis during World War II. Clary says in the recorded commentary on the DVD version of episode “Art for Hogan’s Sake” that he spent three years in a concentration camp, that his parents and other family members were killed there, and that he has an identity tattoo from the camp on his arm (“A-5714”). Likewise John Banner had been held in a (pre-war) concentration camp and his family was killed during the war. Leon Askin was also in a pre-war French internment camp and his parents were killed at Treblinka. Howard Caine (Hochstetter), who was also Jewish (his birth name was Cohen), was American, and Jewish actors Harold Gould and Harold J. Stone played German generals; Jon Cedar played a camp guard.

As a teenager, Werner Klemperer (Klink) (son of the conductor Otto Klemperer) fled Hitler’s Germany with his family in 1933. During the show’s production, he insisted that Hogan always win over his Nazi captors or else he would not take the part of Klink. He defended his playing a Luftwaffe Officer by claiming, “I am an actor. If I can play Richard III, I can play a Nazi.” Banner attempted to sum up the paradox of his role by saying, “Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?” Ironically, although Klemperer, Banner, Caine, Gould, and Askin play stereotypical World War II Germans, all had actually served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II — Banner[63] and Askin in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Caine in the U.S. Navy, Gould with the U.S. Army, and Klemperer in a U.S. Army Entertainment Unit.

[astro]

I ran out of time but per my last post but it’s fascinating how many of the actors in that show were directly involved in the war, some in very substantial ways. WWII seems so far away now, but when that show aired in 1965 it was only 21 years after the war. If you served in WWII in your 20’s many actors would have only been in their 40’s at that point.

[Ranger_Jeff]

@Sherrerd

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).

Technically, schmectically. He was Jewish enough to be sent to an extermination camp.

[omni-not]

@Kamino_Neko

They knew nothing! NO-THING! storms out of the barracks

I think Kamino said it best.