San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Concentration camps to ‘Hogan’s Heroes’
Robert Clary, a Parisian Jew who survived concentration camps as a youth and went on to star on “Hogan’s Heroes,” the hit 1960s sitcom set in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II, died Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 96.
Brenda Hancock, a niece, confirmed the death.
The diminutive Clary was best known for his role on “Hogan’s Heroes,” broadcast on CBS from 1965 to 1971, as Cpl. Louis LeBeau, a beret-wearing French prisoner in the fictional Stalag 13. LeBeau, who whipped up Gallic culinary delights in the barracks when not blowing up bridges, was a member of a camp-based band of wisecracking Allied saboteurs led by Bob Crane’s Col. Robert E. Hogan. Clary was the show’s last living star.
“Hogan’s Heroes,” which made its debut only 20 years after the end of the war, raised questions of taste, even in the often absurdist context of 1960s sitcoms. But few viewers at the time were aware that the show, which lampooned German soldiers and SS officers as bumbling, vainglorious buffoons, starred several actors of Jewish heritage who had experienced Nazism firsthand.
But no one involved in the show had a more searing memory of Nazi atrocities than Clary, who spent nearly three years in German concentration camps during his teens and lost 10 of his 13 siblings, as well as his parents, in the Holocaust.
After he was deported to Ottmuth, a concentration camp in Upper Silesia, and eventually to Buchenwald, what helped him survive, he later said, was his skill as an entertainer; he would perform song-and-dance routines for other prisoners, and often for SS guards as well.
“That was second nature to me — singing, dancing, clowning around,” Clary recalled in “The Last Laugh,” a 2017 documentary directed by Ferne Pearlstein that explores the role of humor in regard to the ultimate taboo topic, the Holocaust. “That helped me tremendously when I was deported, because automatically, even in the first camp, I started to sing for the people who were there, the prisoners.”
“For the 10 minutes that I worked, or the 15 minutes that I sang,” he added, “they had forgotten where they were. And that was the most important thing.”
Clary was born Robert Max Widerman on March 1, 1926, in Paris. His parents, Moishe and Baila Widerman, were from Poland but moved to Paris after World War I. His father, a tailor who was 15 years older than Clary’s mother, brought six children to the marriage from a wife who had died in childbirth. The couple had an additional eight children together, including Clary, the youngest.
He spent much of his childhood living in a cramped apartment in a building on the picturesque Île St.-Louis, nestled in the Seine River near the Notre-Dame cathedral, that was owned by a rich widow who provided housing for Jewish families in need.
A showman from an early age, Clary learned to dance by watching Fred Astaire’s movies and copying his moves. By age 12, he was singing in a backup chorus with five other children on a weekly Parisian radio show.
His show business aspirations ground to a halt after the Germans stormed into Paris in 1940 and Jews were banned from parks, hotels, restaurants and theaters.
After he had been shipped to a nearby concentration camp, Blechhammer, he began to perform in weekly Sunday revues with other prisoners. “Because I entertained, sometimes I would receive an extra piece of bread and another bowl of soup,” he wrote. As if poised for stardom, he adopted the stage name Robert Clary, taking his surname from the 1942 French film “Le Destin Fabuleux de Désirée Clary.”
By January 1945, the Russian army was pouring in from the east, so the SS evacuated Blechhammer and herded 4,000 prisoners on a two-week death march through the snow toward another camp, Gross-Rosen, and ultimately the infamous Buchenwald camp near Weimar, Germany. “If you sat down to rest or were too weak to go on, you were shot by one of the guards,” Clary wrote. “Twice during those two weeks, they gave us a piece of bread.” Fewer than 2,000 prisoners made it to their destination.
Finally, on April 11, 1945, Clary and the other prisoners awoke to the sight of empty guard towers. The SS guards and officers had fled, just before Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army would roll in to liberate the camp.
After the war, Clary returned to Paris, where he carved out a career as a nightclub performer and singer. Records he made in those years attracted a following in the United States, particularly his rendition of “Put Your Shoes On, Lucy.”
In 1949, he followed his show business dreams to the United States, where he continued performing in nightclubs. In the 1950s, he appeared in Broadway musicals and occasionally in movies, including the Technicolor adventure film “Thief of Damascus” (1952).
Fame, however, proved elusive. Clary’s career was at a nadir in the mid-1960s when he heard that Edward Feldman, the producer of “Hogan’s Heroes,” was looking for an actor to play a Frenchman on his new show.
“Hogan’s Heroes” had a talented cast and clever writing, but the initial reviews were mixed. Those who hated it really hated it. “There’s something a little sick about ‘Hogan’s Heroes,’ an insensitive and misguided extension of Hollywood television’s all-tooprevalent belief than anything and everything can be converted into cheap slapstick,” television critic Jack Gould wrote in the New York Times.
Clary always shrugged off such criticism. “‘Hogan’s Heroes’ was about prisoners of war in a stalag,” he said in “The Last Laugh.” “It was not about genocide. It was not Jews going to the gas chambers.”
The year the show debuted, Clary married Natalie Cantor Metzger, the daughter of singer and comedian Eddie Cantor. They remained together until her death in 1997. Clary’s survivors include a stepson, Michael Metzger, and Metzger’s three daughters, who Hancock said regarded Clary as a grandfather.