Classic Television - Prime Time

Hogan's Heroes

Original run

September 17, 1965 – March 28, 1971

Starring

Bob Crane

Werner Klemperer

John Banner

Robert Clary

Richard Dawson

Larry Hovis

Ivan Dixon

Kenneth Washington

Hogan's Heroes is an American television sitcom that ran for 168 episodes from September 17, 1965, to March 28, 1971, on the CBS network. The show was set in a German prisoner of war (POW) camp during World War II. Bob Crane starred as Colonel Robert E. Hogan, coordinating an international crew of Allied prisoners running a Special Operations group from the camp. Werner Klemperer played Colonel Wilhelm Klink, the commandant of the camp, and John Banner was the inept sergeant-of-the-guard, Hans Schultz.

The series was popular during its six-season run. In 2013, creators Bernard Fein through his estate and Albert S. Ruddy acquired the sequel and other separate rights to Hogan's Heroes from Mark Cuban and a movie based on the show has been planned.

The setting was a fictional version of Luftwaffe Stalag 13 (Camp 13 in early episodes), a POW camp for captured Allied airmen located north of the town of Hammelburg in the Bad Kissingen woods. It was on the Hammelburg Road (now known as E45), on the way to Hofburgstraße and eventually Düsseldorf. One episode places the camp 106 kilometres (66 mi) from Heidelberg in flying miles; it was 199 km (124 mi) by car. The camp had 103 prisoners during the first season, but was larger by the end of the show.[

Stalag 13 bore no resemblance to its real-life counterparts, Oflag XIII-B and Stalag XIII-C, which were prison camps for Allied ground troops. It had rather more similarities to the real-life Stalag Luft III, which was the scene of a famous mass prisoner escape involving an elaborate tunnel system. The premise was that the POWs were actually using the camp as a base of operations for Allied espionage and sabotage against Germany. The prisoners could leave and return almost at will via a secret network of tunnels and had radio contact with Allied command, which was based in London and code named "Papa Bear". Hogan's code name was "Goldilocks". They were aided by the incompetence of the camp commandant, Colonel Klink, and the complex motivations of Sergeant of the Guard Schultz.

Colonel Hogan would routinely manipulate Klink and get Schultz to look the other way while the Allied men conducted secret operations. Klink and Schultz were constantly at risk of transfer to the Russian Front, and Hogan helped keep the duo in place. Schultz was aware the prisoners were carrying out mischief, but deliberately ignored it to maintain the status quo. He would just state, "I know nothing","I hear nothing" or "I see nothing", and sometimes say all three.

Klink had a perfect record of no escapes while he commanded the camp, not including two guards who may have deserted. Hogan actually assisted in maintaining this record, and made sure any prisoners who needed to be spirited away had been transferred to someone else's authority before their escape was enacted or replacements were provided to maintain the illusion that no one had escaped.

The main five Allied prisoners (three Americans, one British, one French) bunked in "Barracks 2" (a goof here was that whenever the door was open, another building labeled "Barracks 3" could be seen, even though the barracks were supposed to be directly in front of the "Kommandantur", which was, unlike actual prison camps, situated inside the wire). The prisoners have tunnels to every barracks and building in the camp, and Hogan has difficulty, in a third-season episode, finding a spot in the camp without a tunnel under it!