Since many of my favorite shows are on hiatus, I have been enjoying watching classic TV shows on DVD. I am in the middle of watching the third season of Hogan's Heroes. I enjoy watching the show. One reason is that I am a big fan of WWII comedies. I collect movies like Operation Petticoat, Stalag 17, and Father Goose. I enjoy seeing Bugs Bunny, Popeye, and the Three Stooges fight the enemy. And I would like to add television shows like McHale's Navy and Operation Petticoat to my collection.

Hogan’s Heroes has suffered much more criticism than most sitcoms from that time period (i.e. Gilligan's Island or Get Smart). I would like to address this criticism with the help of Hogan's Heroes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and the article Hogan’s Heroes and the Holocaust: by Leslie Campbell Rampey, Ph.D.

Some people dismiss Hogan’s Heroes as stupid because the German characters spoke English to each other. (This was addressed in the Pilot on the Season One DVD). When Martians speak English to each other, the audience suspends their disbelief, so why not with Germans?

The bigger criticism was the depiction of the Germans as funny, incompetent or stupid, and trivializing the evil of the Nazis or the Holocaust. We can’t credibly judge a 40-year-old TV show by modern standards of good taste and political correctness. I also have never heard these critics mention the stars of the show or the characters they played.

Werner Klemperer (Colonel Wilhelm Klink) and his family fled Germany to Austria and then to the United States in order to escape the Nazi regime. He served during World War II in the U.S. Army. His TV character, Col. Klink was a Luftwaffe officer (historically they were not Nazis). Klink was never mentioned as a formal member of the Nazi Party, and was portrayed as a bumbling bureaucrat, not as a bad guy. It is important to note that historically the Luftwaffe stalags provided the best treatment of Allied prisoners of war.

Klemperer was once asked how could he play a Nazi. His answer was, "I am an actor by profession. If you can play Richard the Third, you can play a Nazi." (On the season two DVD Klemperer discussed this in an interview on The Pat Sajak Show.)

John Banner (Sergeant Hans Schultz) was in a concentration camp, then fled to the United States. His TV character, Sergeant Schultz, is a basically good-hearted man who would rather not report the prisoner’s activities, saying, "I see nothing! Nothing!" When Banner was asked how could he play a Nazi? He answered, "Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?"

Leon Askin (General Albert Burkhalter) was beaten by the Gestapo and sent to a French internment camp before escaping to the U.S. via France. When the U.S. entered WWII, Askin joined the U.S. Army. While serving, he learned that his parents had been killed at an extermination camp.