Posted on 07/12/2006 10:08:10 AM PDT by Aussie Dasher
COLONELS Klink and Hogan and Sgt Schultz of the sitcom Hogan's Heroes have done real PoWs of the Nazis no favours, a federal minister says.
(Australian) Veterans' Affairs Minister Bruce Billson said that thanks to Hollywood, those in German and Italian prison camps in World War II were wrongly perceived by many as having had a fairly easy time.
Mr Billson, 40, said after launching this year's Weary Dunlop Medical Research appeal that he watched repeats of Hogan's Heroes as a child.
But he had a totally different view as he now considered whether European PoWs should be given a one-off $25,000 compensation payment.
Survivors of Japanese captivity, who were often subjected to barbaric cruelty and slave labour, won the payment in 2001 after a long campaign.
It was extended to 14 Korean War prisoners or spouses last year.
But the Federal Government has so far refused to include World War II European PoWs, who were mainly RAAF and RAF airmen and Diggers captured in Crete, Greece and North Africa.
"I think it's likely Hogan's Heroes has done a bit of a disservice," Mr Billson said.
"Col. Klink and Sgt Schultz haven't done much good, really."
"It has added to a false impression that the only ones who really suffered were the prisoners of the Japanese.
"Images of jolly good old chaps, the PoW camp band, men getting Red Cross parcels, creates a different impression than the reality in Europe."
Mr Billson said many Australians suffered "hardship, horror and brutality".
"Conditions varied. It depended on the location, the time, and Red Cross were involved only when it suited the captors," he said.
"This interests me and I've asked for people to come to me with more specific information."
PoWs were sent on long, hazardous marches in the frozen 1944-45 winter as the Germans fled the Russians.
Others were forced to perform gruesome tasks cleaning up bomb-ravaged cities.
Some British PoWs were held at the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp.
And four Australians were among 50 PoWs murdered by the Gestapo after they escaped from Stalag Luft III.
Their story was told in Paul Brickhill's book The Great Escape, which became a hit movie of the same name in 1963.
It is believed Mr Billson will also consider a Canadian report on European PoWs.
The RSL and Ex-PoW Association said the $25,000 payment was one of their six budget priorities this year.
Ex-PoW Association national secretary Cyril Gilbert said he liked watching Hogan's Heroes.
But Mr Gilbert said it was no joke that 862 surviving European PoWs and their 1278 widows had not been compensated. More were dying every month.
Past Veterans' Affairs ministers had used the lower death rate of men in Europe compared with that of prisoners of the Japanese as a reason to stall on compensation.
"They've been like Sgt Schultz: 'I know nothing, I know nothing'," Mr Gilbert said.
"The European PoWs have been discriminated against plainly, and that has split the veterans' community.
"In my opinion, the majority of European PoWs suffered more than those who were in Singapore for the war.
"Germans abided by the Geneva Convention only when they wanted to -- not too often."
Mr Gilbert and RSL national president Maj-Gen Bill Crews welcomed the fresh approach by Mr Billson.
"Hogan's Heroes created a very wrong impression of imprisonment under the Germans, like it was some holiday camp," Maj-Gen Crews said.
"We believe all those men suffered significantly at different times."
Mr Gilbert said it would be as foolish to judge German stalags by Hogan's Heroes as it would be to judge Japanese slave labour by the Bridge on the River Kwai.
"Screw you."
Thank you! :-) Have a nice day in a country where you can't walk down the street chewing bubble gum.
Will the families of the million German soldiers who died in Soviet death camps get compensation?
Klink, Berkhalder (sp), and Schultz were all played by Jews. And it was very difficult and heart-wrenching for them to play those parts.
I have spent alot of time researching this.
Give these brave, noble men some honor. Please stop this thread now.
And Robert Clary (Cpl. Louis LeBeau) was interred in a Nazi Concentration camp. He was the only survivor of his entire family.
I have read more than one interview from each of these men. It seems that all decided to take on these Hogan's Heroes roles as a positive thing. It gave each of them a chance to kill the boogeyman of Nazism for their own selves. And others still suffering nightmares from that era.
You have no clue, dude. One who comes to Asia and knows it, understands that the cleaner everything seems on the surface, the more decadent it is below.
I didn't like your little juvenile cheap shot at Bob Crane, and I voiced my opinion (maybe too emphatically ;-(
How about 'Le Grande Illusion'? Great movie but I don't think the people who ran the German POW camps were effete aristrocrats.
Who ist dis man and vat ist going on here on dis thread!!??
I'm sorry, but Hogan's Heroes was one of my favorites and it always will be I have the first three seasons on DVD and I am going to collect the rest as soon as they are available.
His B-17 was shot down, and he had a bad parachute landing - broke both knees. They got caught, and were part of the infamous "Sagan Death March". He spent 18 months in a POW camp. Went in weighing 180, came out weighing 120. This was toward the end of the war, and he said that the Germans barely had enough food for themselves. He had no bitterness whatsoever.
I worked for a civil engineering firm in Boston for 4 years during the late sixties and early seventies. It was a summer and college vacation job. Anyway, the two owners were a couple of Germans named Fritz Gruber and Fritz Peterson. They had been captured during the war and sent to POW camp in Massachusetts. During their time in the US, they were given the opportunity to earn engineering degrees from Boston University. They stayed on in the US after the war and became citizens. After getting additional education and experience, they started up their own company, Boston Survey Consultants. Not a bad outcome for Fritz and Fritz. They were actually nice guys and made good citizens. Not to mention that my job with their company put me through college.
It's one of my favourites, too - along with Get Smart and F-Troop.
Really is a small world.
Yes and I believe that all of his family died in concentration camps.
Damn! I guess the summer between my junior and senior year of college was just a dream. Albeit wet.
If I recall correctly John Banner [Sgt. Shultz] was on a WWI recruiting poster.
As someone who has lived most of his life in and around the city, this has always made me laugh. Remember "reporter" Lois Lane's PENTHOUSE on Central Park? Even back in the 70s, she would have been lucky to live in a fifth floor walkup near Columbia, or in Brooklyn. In my poor student days in the Bronx, I never understood how the "Friends" could live in such swank accomodations. Believe it or not, Seinfeld's rather humble place was appropriate for a journeyman standup comedian (albeit not for the multimillionaire Jerry would become).
16. When they are alone, all foreigners prefer to speak English to each other.
True when said foreigners are from different countries. I once sat in a meeting in France with two Israelis, a Spaniard, and a German. We conversed in, you guessed it, English.
I agree. I had a good friend and neighbor when I lived in Cincinnati. He was a bomber pilot who along with his crew was shot down off the coast of France. He didn't tell a lot about his time but he did tell me that he was tortured by the Nazi's at a camp in France. He also suffered life long nightmares and other stress related problems due to the way he was treated.
I agree, but you only deal with the rational ones.
Ah, Major Hochstetter. Howard Caine had the best role in the series, the small yet menacing Gestapo officer who spewed threats left and right ("Heads vill ROLL, Klink"). Angry, ineffectual, and just plain brilliant.
Caine passed away not long ago; I recall a thread here where he was discussed. Born in Nashville, he was an accomplished folk musician and won dozens of awards for fiddle and 5-string banjo. A southern, banjo-playing Jew - wearing a gestapo uniform! Not even Spock would've dared to estimate the odds of *that* happening.
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