Robert Clary, the diminutive Paris-born actor and singer who survived 31 months in Nazi concentration camps but later had no qualms about co-starring in “Hogan’s Heroes,” the American situation comedy set in a German World War II prisioner of war camp, has died at the age of 96.
Clary, who played strudel-baking French Corporal Louis Lebeau on “Hogan’s Heroes” during its six seasons from 1965 to 1971, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, his granddaughter told The Hollywood Reporter.
Clary was16 in September 1942 when he was deported from Paris to Nazi concentration camps with 12 other members of his Jewish family. He was the only one who survived. Clary spent two and a half years in the Ottmuth, Blachhammer, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald concentration camps, enduring hunger, disease and forced labour.
He was freed when US troops liberated Buchenwald in April 1945, but then learned that his family members, including his parents, had died in the Holocaust.
Clary would later say he had no issue later appearing in a show that mocked the Nazis.
“The show was a satire set in a stalag for prisoners of war, where conditions were not pleasant but in no way comparable to a concentration camp, and it had nothing to do with Jews,” Clary told the Jerusalem Post in 2002.
Read the article by Will Dunham in The TransContinental .and WSFM.