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Vale: Robert Clary

French actor Robert Clary, best known for Hogan’s Heroes, has died.

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French actor Robert Clary, best known for Hogan’s Heroes, has died, aged 96.

He died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles.

Clary, who was mentored by famed entertainer Eddie Cantor, began singing and performing at the age of 12. One day when he was 16, he and his family were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz where his parents were murdered in the gas chambers.

At Buchenwald, a young Clary sang with an accordionist to an audience of SS soldiers. “Singing, entertaining and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived,” he once said.

Clary was incarcerated for 31 months and tattooed with the identification “A-5714” on his left forearm. He was the only one of his captured family to make it out alive, choosing not to talk about his experience for almost four decades.

Yet he went on to star as pint-sized Corporal LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes for six seasons from 1965 to 1971, dreaming about girls, befriending the guard dogs and distracting his captors with his expert culinary skills.

“For 36 years I kept these experiences during the war locked up inside myself,” he once said. “But those who are attempting to deny the Holocaust, my suffering and the suffering of millions of others have forced me to speak out.”

Clary said he had no reservations about doing a comedy series dealing with Nazis and concentration camps.

“I had to explain that [Hogan’s Heroes] 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,” he wrote in his inspirational 2001 memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes.

Clary’s other credits included Ten Tall Men, Thief of Damascus,  A New Kind of Love, The Hindenburg, Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless and The Bold and The Beautiful.

He was the last surviving member of the Hogan’s Heroes principal cast.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

4 Responses

  1. I remember him best from Days of our Lives. His scenes with Bill and Susan Seaforth Hayes are remembered for their joy and real friendship. R.I.P Robe’rt.

  2. The people behind the characters who played Sergeant Schultz, General Burkhalter, Colonel Klink as well as Louis Le Beau escaped from and/or experienced the evil tyrrany of the Nazis. The actor Howard Caine whi is of the same heritage as the abovementioned actors was born in the US.

    “Hogan’s Heroes” lives on in my DVD set of the series where I play the episodes to my heart’s content.

    Thank you,
    Anthony, Belfield, in the land of the Wangal and Darug Peoples of the Eora Nation.

  3. For a man who was taken away with his family to a concentration camp and the only one to come out alive he lived a good life ,we should never forget that The Holocaust was real ,those who deny it are more ignorant than the flat earthers , RIP Robert Clary.

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