Holocaust to 'Hogan's Heroes'

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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This past Sunday, Robert Max Widerman would have turned 100. He almost made it, being 96 when he died. This was remarkable for a man who had survived Nazi concentration camps. A startling coincidence is that as the actor Robert Clary, he achieved fame playing a prisoner in a World War II Nazi camp.

Widerman was born on March 1, 1926, in Paris, the youngest of 14 children, seven of whom died in the Holocaust. His parents, Baila and Moishe Widerman, were Polish Jewish immigrants. At age 12, he began a career singing professionally on a French radio station and he also studied art. In 1942, because he was Jewish, he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Ottmuth, in what is now Otmet, Poland. Widerman was tattooed with the identification A5714 on his left forearm. He was later sent to the notorious Buchenwald labor camp.

There Clary sang to an audience of SS soldiers every other Sunday, accompanied by an accordionist. He later recalled, “Singing, entertaining, and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived. I was very immature and young and not really fully realizing what situation I was involved with.”

He continued: “We were not even human beings. When we got to Buchenwald, the SS shoved us into a shower room to spend the night. I had heard the rumors about the dummy shower heads that were gas jets. I thought, ‘This is it.’ But no, it was just a place to sleep. The first eight days there, the Germans kept us without a crumb to eat. We were hanging on to life by pure guts, sleeping on top of each other, every morning waking up to find a new corpse next to you. Sometimes I dream about those days. I wake up in a sweat terrified for fear I’m about to be sent away to a concentration camp. There’s something dark in the human soul. For the most part, human beings are not very nice. That’s why when you find those who are, you cherish them.”

Widerman was liberated from Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. Twelve other members of his immediate family had been sent to the Auschwitz death camp, and none of them survived. When he returned to Paris after the war, he reunited with six of his 13 siblings as well as half-siblings and several nieces and nephews who had avoided being taken away and survived the Nazi occupation of France.

He returned to the entertainment business and began singing songs that became popular not only in France but in the United States as well. After renaming himself, Robert Clary made his first recordings in 1948. The following year he traveled to the U.S., and one of his first appearances was a French-language comedy skit on “The Ed Wynn Show.” He later met Merv Griffin and the singer Eddie Cantor. (He would marry Cantor’s daughter Natalie in 1965 after being close friends for years.) Cantor got Clary a spot on “The Colgate Comedy Hour,” and the TV jobs came along steadily as did stage work. He made a movie too, Thief of Damascus, with Paul Henreid and Lon Chaney Jr.

In 1965, the diminutive Clary – he was only 5’1” tall -- was offered the role of Corporal Louis LeBeau on a new television sitcom called “Hogan’s Heroes.” The series was set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II, and Clary played a French POW who was a member of an Allied sabotage unit operating from inside the camp.

Asked about parallels between LeBeau’s incarceration and his own, Clary said, “Stalag 13 is not a concentration camp. It’s a POW camp, and that’s a world of difference. You never heard of a prisoner of war being gassed or hanged. When the show went on the air, people asked me if I had any qualms about doing a comedy series dealing with Nazis and concentration camps. I had to explain that it was about prisoners of war in a stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps.”

Robert Clary was the last surviving original cast member of “Hogan’s Heroes.” Kenneth Washington, who joined the cast in the show’s final season as Sergeant Richard Baker, was the only surviving cast member when Clary died.

After the show was cancelled in 1971, Clary maintained close ties to fellow cast members Werner Klemperer, John Banner, and Leon Askin, whose lives were also affected by the Holocaust. Clary appeared in a handful of feature films with World War II themes and others such as The Hindenburg, playing Joseph Spah, a real-life passenger on the airship’s final voyage.

When not acting, he spent years touring Canada and the United States, speaking about the Holocaust. He was a painter, painting from photographs he took on his travels. Clary was among dozens of Holocaust survivors whose portraits and stories were included in the 1997 book The Triumphant Spirit. In the book, Clary wrote, “I beg the next generation not to do what people have done for centuries — hate others because of their skin, shape of their eyes, or religious preference.”

In 2001, his memoir From the Holocaust to “Hogan’s Heroes”: The Autobiography of Robert Clary was published.

His wife had died four years earlier. The former Robert Max Widerman died at his Los Angeles home on November 16, 2022.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one with Bob Drury, The First to Go West, has just been published in paperback. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.