Hogan’s Heroes and Postwar America

In 1965 a radio ad promised its audience "that if you liked World War II, you'll love Hogan's Heroes."  That somewhat misbegotten, and soon cancelled ad, all by itself tells us something about laughter, war, history, and memory.  And, oddly enough, it tells us about the united, wholesale agreement of Americans in 1965 that Nazism was bad, and so it was safe to laugh at it.  This podcast tells the story of the making of that show, and of the actors' lives before and after its production run.  But it also tells the story of how we can see and understand postwar America better when we understand those stories. Three members of the cast were Jewish refugees from the Nazis and all three of them joined the U.S. Army during the war. A fourth survived Buchenwald by singing to the camp guards.  Yet another would be a civil rights advocate in the 1960s and would direct one of the most radical films about black revolutionaries ever made--so radical that its distribution was halted and all copies save one were destroyed by the U.S. government.  The show's lead would immerse himself in the opportunities presented by the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and would ultimately be brutally murdered because of it. We dive into all these stories and more. Hogan's Heroes, a beloved albeit silly slapstick comedy, has a surprising amount to tell us.  And we do so through interviews of filmmakers, TV critics, comics, and historians of the 1960s and 1970s, of the holocaust, of the German Army in World War II, and more.    And, now, in 2026, "Hogan's Heroes" can remind us that we once all agreed who the bad guys were. They were Nazis.  And for a long time, it felt safe to laugh at them.