The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Hogan’s Heroes star was also death camp survivor
Robert Clary, a French-born survivor of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War who played a feisty prisoner of war in the 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, has died aged 96.
Clary died of natural causes at his home in Beverly Hills, California, niece Brenda Hancock said.
“He never let those horrors defeat him,” Ms Hancock said of Clary’s wartime experiences.
“He never let them take the joy out of his life. He tried to spread that joy to others through his singing, dancing and painting.”
When he recounted his life to students, he told them “Don’t ever hate,” Ms Hancock said.
The actor, born Robert Widerman in Paris in 1926, was the youngest of 14 children. He was 16 when he and most of his family were taken by the Nazis.
After 31 months in captivity in several concentration camps, he was liberated from the Buchenwald death camp by American troops.
Twelve of his immediate family, his parents and 10 siblings were killed. He moved to the US in 1949
Hogan’s Heroes, in which Allied soldiers in a POW camp bested their clownish German army captors with espionage schemes, played the war strictly for laughs during its 1965-71 run.
The 5ft 1in Clary sported a beret and sardonic smile as Corporal Louis Lebeau.
Clary was the last surviving original star of the sitcom, which included Bob Crane, Richard Dawson, Larry Hovis and Ivan Dixon as the prisoners.
Werner Klemperer and John Banner, who played their captors, were both European Jews who fled Nazi persecution before the war.
Clary began his career as a nightclub singer and appeared on stage in musicals including Irma La Douce and Cabaret.
After Hogan’s Heroes, his TV work included the soap operas The Young And The Restless, Days Of Our Lives, and The Bold And The Beautiful.
He considered musical theatre the highlight of his career. “I loved to go to the theatre at quarter of eight, put the stage make-up on and entertain,” he said in a 2014 interview.
He remained publicly silent about his wartime experience until 1980 when, Clary said, he was provoked to speak out by those who denied or diminished the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews.
A documentary about Clary’s childhood and years of horror at Nazi hands, Robert Clary, A5714: A Memoir Of Liberation, was released in 1985. The forearms of concentration camp prisoners were tattooed with identification numbers, with A5714 Clary’s lifelong mark.
“They write books and articles in magazines denying the Holocaust, making a mockery of the six million Jews – including a million and a half children – who died in the gas chambers and ovens,” he said in a 1985 interview.