A comedy about Nazis and WW2 only 20 years later?

It was seen as defusing a tense situation with humor--in much the same vein as Mel Brooks' 1968 comic film The Producers. Some people were indeed offended by both, but the majority seems to have gotten the intended satiric point without offense.

50 Is The New Cutoff Age.

please read some history about the show. many participants, most main germans were jewish actors and/or only signed-on if it made the nazis look like total idiots.

it's not a concentration camp but a POW camp; the original concept was pitched as taking place in a contemporary US prison -- with nothing to do with the war. and several episodes were based on true stories from the producers/writers/actors.

robert clary (lebeau) was interred, and many in his family were killed in a concentration camp (and so on...). again please educate yourself before worrying or appearing ignorant?

i fully respect the entire list of those who helped make this show happen, once you hear their story you will agree.

if not, i suggest you take "mchale's navy" off your watch list?

sorry... forgot... in ioco veritas!

The reason this series was such a huge success, and a truly hilarious series, is because it was a comedy about people's foibles, foolishness at times, and a fair amount of slapstick humor. It was set in a WWII POW camp, but none of the jokes were about the war--that is, none about the killing, serious injuries, or suffering caused by the war.

The humor came from such things as Carter's ineptness in doing various things, Newkirk tricking Schultz into not noticing when he would steal things from the guard, and Hogan conning Klink into, virtually, letting Hogan do anything he wanted to.

The Holocaust was not mentioned because that subject is too much for a comedy show, even one that was about 33% dramatic on a regular basis--the espionage scenes.

Comedies set in wartime are not rare at all. There were many comedy movies about soldiers and sailors IN WW II that were made before that war was over. Like Hogan's, the comedy moments had nothing to do with the serious issues of war, but with the funny characters and their interactions while not engaging the enemy.

You can, in this sense, compare it to MASH, set in a hospital during a war. That was a funny series also, but the humorous scenes were not connected to the horrors of war, or the seriousness of people having surgery and sometimes dying in a hospital.







Why don't we just shoot 'em down and be through with it?

Even in the 1960s there was some controversy about the show on the grounds of taste and "offensiveness" - but the success of" Hogan's Heroes" in the 1960s is an object lesson in how previous eras could be more balanced and resilient than now - when pathetic, whiny, victim mongering SJW offendrons (who usually have nothing to actually complain about of real substance, especially compared to victims of genuine horrors such as Robert Clary from HH)would probably never tolerate such a show staying on the air.

In reality of course, there was little amusing about the SS and the Nazis generally - but in previous eras even very potentially "offensive" things weren't necessarily off limits for humour. British comedy was once filled with performers doing send ups of German WW2 officers, the Gestapo, and even Adolf Hitler. The Jewish Mel Brooks made "The Producers" in 1968, a funny Nazis themed film filled with Jewish actors like Gene Wilder.

You sometimes see it written that HH was set in a "concentration camp." That's untrue, it was a POW camp - a pretty different sort of a place. Allied prisoners from the west - unlike Soviet ones in the east - were generally reasonably treated by the German armed forces in such camps, under the rules of the Geneva convention - though there were some occasions of brutality and even murder, usually where the SS was involved. The Holocaust was going on a long way away from Stalag 13, and it's doubtful someone like Col. Klink would have even known about it, though even so dense an officer could not have been totally unaware of the viciously anti Semitic regime he was serving.

I think a POW camp with comic Nazis is okay for a comedy series, but I certainly don't think an actual concentration camp/extermination camp could ever be.

Actually, it probably makes more sense that the audiences in the 1960s would be able to handle it, since most of them would have had active memories of the WW2 era and its aftermath. They would have seen the war's end and would have been consciously aware of it, since it was in their active memory. As strange as it may sound, the fact that they lived through it and saw it to the end (giving a sense of closure), it might make it easier to look back on it from a "lighter side," so to speak.

Just like how some people going through an ordeal might say "One day, we'll look back at this time and laugh."

As far as it being offensive to audiences, sometimes, I wonder just the opposite, especially when I see some of the more "serious" portrayals of the Nazis made out to be some kind of larger-than-life phantom or supervillain out of a comic book. They were a defeated enemy, and that's what the comic portrayal in Hogan's Heroes reminds us in every episode. We don't have anything to fear from them anymore. They are defeated. They are gone.

Colonel Klink ran a POW camp... not a Death Camp or a Concentration Camp.

It's been about 40 years now, but I once dated a girl whose father grew up in Germany and was in the Hitler Youth. He was pressed into the German Army as a teenaged boy, captured by the Americans, shipped to a work farm in the US and somehow was able to stay here after the war to start a new life. Being young and foolish, I'd ask him questions about the war and he'd always refuse to answer, shaking his head and saying "The war is over" before I caught on and stopped asking.

Then one day we were watching TV and a re-run of Hogan's Heroes came on. I fully expected him to change the channel but he didn't - I never heard this man laugh so much as he did at Hogan's Heroes. I asked my girlfriend "What gives?" She said he enjoyed seeing German officers being made to look foolish - German officers acted in a very autocratic way towards the enlisted men. It rubbed him the wrong way, but he dared not speak his mind but now he could finally laugh.