‘Au Revoir, Colonel’: A Tribute to Hogan’s Heroes’ ‘LeBeau’

Yesterday the death of Robert Clary, a French actor most famous as Cpl. Louis LeBeau in the comedy TV show Hogan’s Heroes, was announced. The series ran 1965 to 1971, and most of the original cast is dead now. But I wanted to pay tribute to “LeBeau”—not just as a charming character in a popular sitcom about Allied POWs hilariously outwitting Nazis, but as a person who really survived the Nazi Holocaust at Auschwitz.

Laughing at US Col. Hogan’s exploits with his team of American, French, and British POWs under the noses of the bumbling Nazis was a family event for me.  

But Nazis were no joke to Clary when he was young. Before Robert Clary was a beloved American sitcom character, he was a Jew imprisoned in the infamous Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.

Clary’s parents were killed at Auschwitz and he was then imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp. He survived partly by entertaining SS soldiers with his singing. Later he moved to the US to make records and was eventually cast in Hogan’s Heroes.

”I had to explain that [‘Hogan’s Heroes’] 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,’” Clary said. 

Clary evidently did not let his horrific experience ruin him. He was one of two Jewish cast members on Hogan’s Heroes who had escaped the Nazis—ironically, the other, John Banner (“Sergeant Schultz”), played a Nazi on the show.

Today, rediscover Hogan’s Heroes. But as you laugh at the jokes, remember that lively “LeBeau” was more than a talented comedian and actor—he was a Holocaust survivor and hero.