#Real war heroes series#

military during the war, because they were older - Bob Crane and the actors who portrayed his 'Heroes' had all been too young.

Interestingly, because of the composition of the show, the 'Germans' were the only ones in the main cast who served in the U.S. Navy during the war, fighting Japanese forces in the Pacific theater of operations. Howard Caine (Gestapo Major Hochstetter), who was also Jewish, was born in Tennessee. Hi s parents were killed at Treblinka, the extermination camp in occupied Poland that was the second-most deadly camp in the war, ranking behind only Auschwitz in the number of prisoners killed. Hogan's Heroes cast members have stated that Banner lost family members, conceivably due to Nazi persecution, during the war.Īskin had fled Austria in 1940 and, like Banner, served in the U.S. Air Force, even posing for a recruitment poster during his wartime service. He promptly emigrated to the U.S., and later joined the U.S. Army when World War II broke out.īanner had been held in a pre-war concentration camp, and when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, he was working as an actor in Switzerland. Klemperer and his family fled Germany for the United States in 1935, as Adolf Hitler was rising to power, and Klemperer joined the U.S. Werner Klemperer was born in Cologne, Germany, and John Banner and Leon Askin (General Burkhalter) were born in Austria all were Jewish. And for some of the cast, who'd escaped or, at least, survived Nazi persecution, it may have been a cathartic experience.

#Real war heroes series#

It's hard to imagine Hogan's Heroes getting the green light today - should it have been made in 1965? That's not for us to say - the fact remains that it was made, and was one of the most popular series on TV in its day. The Germans' treatment of prisoners in concentration camps or labor camps had been savage, and the leaders and high-ranking officers - the true believers in the Third Reich - had been despicable genocidal maniacs, bent on destroying the Jewish people but also other groups, including Slavs, Romani ('Gypsies'), gay men and lesbians, Soviets and leftists. While Hogan's Heroes has been criticized for portraying Nazis as bumblers rather than barbaric kills, there's a story behind the show that isn't as well known: Several of the actors were European Jews who'd fled Nazi persecution, and one was a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Over the course of six seasons (1965-71), Hogan regularly outsmarted Klink and Schultz, pulling the wool over their eyes while assisting other Allied forces with fictional missions. Hogan and his international band of prisoners-of-war had a cozy, though adversarial, relationship with their captors, in the form of Col. Hathcock’s was $30,000.On Hogan's Heroes, Bob Crane's Col. During Vietnam, bounties on individual soldiers weren’t uncommon, and typically ranged from $8 to $2,000. It gets badasser…: Hathcock’s 93 confirmed kills are enough to catapult him to Rambo status, but the bounty on his head would’ve made any super soldier blush. Hathcock himself couldn’t believe the shot, stating that both men must have been locked in on each other at the exact same time, and that he’d just happened to shoot first. It traveled through the eyesocket, past the brain, and out the back of the skull. His bullet struck the source of the light - which was the enemy sniper’s scope. The pair stalked each other for hours, until Hathcock saw a glint of light in the distance and instinctively fired. Amongst Vietnamese soldiers, Hathcock was known as “Lông Trắng,” translated as “White Feather.” In fact, the enemy desperately wanted that white feather as a trophy of their own, and so the Vietcong sent one of their own snipers, who’d himself killed several Marines, to hunt Hatchcock down. This Marine sharpshooter was known for two things in Vietnam: the white feather he routinely wore in his hat, and a sniper kill that seemingly could only happen in a movie. Now, Mustonen won’t rise again to battle evil, but there have been several super soldiers over the years who are pretty much one patriotic shield shy of being real-life Captain Americas. In 2005, the body of 22-year-old World War II Army Air Corps cadet Leo Mustonen was found frozen solid in the Sierra Nevada mountains he was dead, but still completely intact. But Captain America’s story isn’t fiction - not even the whole frozen-in- ice thing.

Of course, we also assumed the concept of an unbeatable red, white, and blue war machine pounding Commies, Nazis, and the like was pure fiction.