Hogan's HeroesMichel gave Beth and me a new DVD for Christmas and thankfully it wasn’t season 3 of Murder She Wrote. Much better, she gave us season 2 of Hogan’s Heroes. Beth had been exposed to this show a number of years ago when it was on Nick at Night. In fact, she loved it so much that when they took it off the air she wrote a letter to the network asking for them to bring it back.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it is the stupidest concept for a program ever written with the possible exception of a mother reincarnating as a car. The show is a comedy that takes place in a prisoner of war camp in Nazi Germany. But these prisoners are not typical prisoners as they have a network of tunnels running throughout and outside the camp. But they don’t use them to escape, instead using them to sabotage the Nazi war effort and help Allied pilots shot down over Germany to escape back to England.

Stupid? Absolutely! But the show is brilliant and funny. Beth hasn’t been able to stop watching it since we watched the first episode together the other night. Although some people may be offended by treating the subject of Nazis in a comedic fashion, you only have to think back to Mel Brooks and The Producers. As Brooks once said, “[I]f you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can’t win.”

But best of all is that almost every Nazi in the show is portrayed by someone who is Jewish and almost all of them either fled Nazi Germany or survived the concentration camps. Werner Klemperer, Colonel Klink, fled the Nazis in 1933 and served in the US Army during World War 2. John Banner, Sergeant Schultz, was in a concentration camp until 1938 when he was able to leave Germany. The rest of his family died in the extermination camps. Howard Caine, the Gestapo officer Major Hochstetter, was born in Tennessee and raised in New York City. Robert Clary, the Frenchman Corporal LeBeau, survived Buchenwald although many members of his family did not. But best of all was Leon Askin, General Burkhalter. Askin was a cabaret performer in Vienna and was forced to flee to France and then to the US in 1940. Askin served in the US Army during the war. His parents died in the Treblinka death camp. In 1994, he returned to Vienna where he resumed his cabaret work after being away from it for 54 years. He died two years ago, at the age of 97, having outlived the Nazi regime that wished to destroy him by 60 years.