by Rolaant McKenzie
December 8, 2024
Hogan’s Heroes, an American television sitcom that aired from 1965 to 1971, portrays a group of Allied soldiers in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp called Stalag 13 in Nazi Germany during World War II. The prisoners are led by senior POW officer Colonel Robert Hogan, who uses a network of tunnels underneath the camp as a base of operations to conduct sabotage and espionage activities with resistance forces and assist German defectors and escaping prisoners from other POW camps.
All these activities take place right under the nose of the clueless, inept, and vain Colonel Wilhelm Klink, the camp commandant, who is proud that no escape from Stalag 13 under his command has ever been successful. Hans Schultz, the camp’s first sergeant, is a bumbling but very affable man. He indirectly helps the prisoners in their clandestine operations by looking the other way or taking bribes from them for information.
One of the most interesting things about this television series was the stories of several of its primary cast members who were Jewish.
- Robert Clary, who played prisoner Corporal Louis LeBeau, was a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned at the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he lost most of his immediate family, until it was liberated by American troops in 1945.
- Leon Askin, who played General Albert Burkhalter and Colonel Klink’s superior officer, lost both of his parents in the Treblinka death camp. He fled his homeland of Austria to the United States in 1940 and later served during World War II as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Forces.
- John Banner, who played Sergeant Schultz, escaped from Austria and immigrated to the United States after Adolph Hitler annexed the country to Nazi Germany in 1938, where he later served in the U.S. Army Air Forces as a supply sergeant. He also lost family members to the Holocaust.
- Howard Caine, who played the Gestapo Major Wolfgang Hochstetter, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II in the Pacific Theater from 1944 to 1946.
- Werner Klemperer, who played Colonel Klink, was the son of famed orchestra conductor Otto Klemperer. Fearing for their safety in Nazi Germany, the Klemperer family immigrated to the United States in 1935. Later, he joined the U.S. Army and served during World War II in the Pacific Theater.
When Klemperer was initially told about Hogan’s Heroes by his agent and auditioned for the role of Colonel Klink, he was not informed that the show was to be a comedy. He took the role on the condition that he would never be portrayed as the hero, but that he would always be depicted as a fool who never succeeded in anything he attempted.
Some may wonder why actors who experienced the horrors of World War II, were taken from or fled their homes, and lost family members in Nazi death camps would be involved in such a show. Perhaps they understood that a merry heart, laughter, can be like medicine to the body and soul (Proverbs 17:22) and bring some healing to the traumas they experienced.
Just as Jews who annually celebrate Purim by reading the story of Esther in the Bible boo and hiss at the mention of the name of Haman, the enemy of the Jewish people who sought their annihilation, the cast of Hogan’s Heroes also could have understood that ridicule, making the evils of Nazism look absurd, was an effective way of resisting it and showing that those who embrace such ideologies are inevitably destined for defeat and destruction.
Eugen Schwab, the father of World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab, sought to establish the global power of the Third Reich by manufacturing armaments and developing nuclear weapons for the Nazis through his company, Escher Wyss AG. His failure and that of the genocidal regime he served did not dissuade his son from endeavoring to build the Fourth Reich, which he calls the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” through the WEF and its partners, where they seek to reduce people to serfdom and concentrate them into reservations, ghettos, or camps called “15-minute cities” to face all-encompassing control and eventual elimination.
As we see the efforts of global elites and organizations like the WEF to institute a worldwide dystopian antichrist kingdom of slavery, death, and destruction (Revelation 13), we may feel dismayed by their seemingly insurmountable power. But this is of no surprise or worry to God, who holds their every heartbeat and breath in His hands.
“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against His Anointed, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.’ He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then He will speak to them in His wrath, and terrify them in His fury, saying, ‘As for Me, I have set My King on Zion, My holy hill.'” (Psalm 2:1-6)
Of Messiah the King, the Anointed One, the Lord says,
“You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (Psalm 2:9)
As these satanically empowered global elites scurry around the world in their private jets, yachts, and limousines and conspire to defy God, rule the world, and destroy His creation, the Lord laughs at their vain and futile ambitions.
The cast of Hogan’s Heroes used laughter at the Third Reich as a way of looking forward with hope to the eventual defeat of similar totalitarian regimes. Much more, those who take refuge in the Lord Jesus Christ by trusting in Him for the forgiveness of sins and fellowship with God can have confident hope and joy in the laughter of God, for He will have the last word and utterly demolish the global elite’s Fourth Reich and establish us in His eternal kingdom (Psalm 2:12; Daniel 2; Revelation 19:11-16).
© 2024 Rolaant McKenzie – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Rolaant McKenzie: rolaant@gospeloutreach.net
Website: http://www.gospeloutreach.net/
