Robert Clary

The Nazis gave him and his family ten minutes to get their belongings before being loaded into a cattle car and transported to a concentration camp where children were killed by gas.

It’s a far cry from bumbling German military officers in Hogan’s Heroes, but it’s part of the real life of the man who played French Resistance fighter Louis LeBeau on the series, Robert Clary.

The TV comedy had nothing to do with concentration camps, or their atrocities, but it always had the same message every week: Nazis are real losers.

In the last decades of his life, Clary had another message he took to college campuses and anywhere people would listen—that the Holocaust was no myth, no exaggeration. The people who said otherwise weren’t there. He was.

The story of how Clary came to the United States after being liberated from Buchenwald in 1945 was reported by “I.K.” in the San Angelo Standard-Times, Nov. 20, 1955. By then, Clary had some modest fame from his work in the “New Faces” revue in New York, where the breakout star was Eartha Kitt.

Robert Clary Finds U S Likes French
Talent-scouting is one of the perennial hobbies of thousands of people who like to acquire their own favorites before the publicity mills get to work, and there is increasing evidence that Robert Clary (it’s pronounced “Rohbair") is enjoying one of the most spontaneous word-of-mouth buildups nationwide that any new performer has had in years. A native Parisian (he was born in the Ile-St.-Louis district), Clary was hoping for a start in the amusement business when war broke and he wound up in a prison camp.
Postwar France was hardly a happy hunting ground for new talent in the singing line (old talent was having plenty of trouble, too), but Clary found some inconsequential work including singing with a band at the Olympia Hall in his native city.
Here he was fortunate to be heard by the American violinist and orchestra leader Harry Bluestone, who became the first of the talent scouts to sing the praises of Clary. In fact, he sang them so well to the young man himself that the latter agreed to record two songs in English, which he now manages handily (with a pleasant flavoring all his own), but at that time didn’t know at all.
These opened the way for West Coast nightclub engagements (Bluestone is well oriented in Hollywood circles), followed by exposure to the sophisticates who patronise such New York nighteries as the Village Vanguard, the Blue Angel and La Vie en Rose.
In turn came an opportunity in the show called “New Faces” and, most recently,” the chance to distribute his art nationally via an Epic disk titled appropriately Meet Robert Clary.” In it he performs a mingling of French ("Fleur Bleue,” “Un Rien Me Fait Chanter" and “La Route Enchantee”) and American (“Have You Met Miss Jones?,” “Hoops" and “Out of This World")–songs with an ingratiating blend of Gallic charm and a Negroid-influenced vocal manner which is hard to resist.
A shortish, compact French type, Clary now affects a crew cut which gives him a decidedly jaunty air and the adolescent appeal without which no popular balladeer can succeed these days.
If having all the ingredients is the secret of success, Clary is practically there already. He also draws Steig-Iike pictures, whose reproduction adds to the merriment of his album.

Success on television followed Clary in the 1960s. After Hogan’s Heroes, he had regular roles on soap operas.

But then he decided he had to speak out. Here is a portion of a story from the St. Louis Jewish Light, April 24, 1985.

CLARY SHARES EXPERIENCES
By CAROL B. LUNDGREN
Executive Editor
Robert Clary folds back his sleeve, revealing the crude concentration camp tattoo A-5714, and spews forth a staccato of images about his harrowing Holocaust experiences.
Sobbing children gaining only false security by desperately clinging to their mother's hand; rancid bits of food stolen from pigs who had rejected them; wretched rags wrapped around feet to protect them from the stinging cold—Clary does not merely talk to his audience; he takes them on a wrenching journey with him.
He unabashedly admits that it is not vanity which prompts him to tuck his glasses into his pocket when he delivers a speech. Rather, he fears that if he sees his listeners cry, he will cry with them. Clary, 59, is most well-known as Louis LeBeau, the French prisoner of war in Hogan's Heroes. Now it is debatable whether he is seen more often as the hilarious chef in Hogan television reruns or as a Holocaust survivor on the lecture circuit.
St Louis was a stop last week on Clary's itinerary—a criss-cross of cities probably only he and his agent can decipher. As the Wolf-Najman Memorial Lecturer, he addressed an audience of 825 at this year's Yom Hashoa Commemoration, held at Temple Shaare Emeth and sponsored by the St. Louis Center for Holocaust Studies of the Jewish-Community Relations Council.
Clary, who turns over his fees to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, places a strict stipulation upon his speaking engagements. He must be booked to speak to high school students in addition to adult groups.
While here, he was whisked from place to place. Four-hundred students from Parkway, Pattonville, Mehlville, University City and John Burroughs high schools packed the Loretto-Hilton to hear him; he spoke to the upper grades at the Central Agency for Jewish Education's Jewish Community High School He also managed to offer his time to the media; a full slate of newspaper, television and radio interviews crowded his agenda.
Just being an actor or a lecturer alone implies a hectic, energy-sapping life style. But Clary has coupled them in an overly complicated schedule of his own choosing. And if the name Robert Clary draws a bigger crowd than usual to events focusing on the Holocaust, then all the better to hear about an era which must never be forgotten.
Clary admits that he was fatigued before his lecture here; he had delivered two in Baltimore earlier the same day. But if he was tired, it was imperceptible to his audience, who watched as tears filmed the eyes of the diminutive Frenchman as he was living a role rather than playing it.
Clary is well-prepared for the inevitable question how could a survivor act in a humorous series about German soldiers during World War II. He sees no anomaly in the situation, strictly differentiating between his part as a POW from that of a death camp inmate and between the Luftwaffe and the SS. "No one in their right mind could do a situation comedy about concentration camps," avers Clary, who was in every episode but one of the classic show, filmed from 1965-71.
In an interview with the Jewish Light and in his passionate speech, Clary said that until four years ago, he did not discuss his 31-month death camp ordeal. It was not fear of pain for himself or others—that he elected silence. Although he was afflicted with nightmares, "it was not eating me alive," he attests. Instead, he wanted to take his suffering, fold it up into a tight bundle, set it aside and "get on with living again."
What then turned him into such a vocal advocate of Holocaust documentation and education? A resurgence of anti-Semitism and a spate of books and tracts denying Hitler's attempt to systematically exterminate the Jews, he replies. Clary saw, and continues to see, cemeteries being desecrated; restaurants and movie houses being bombed; professors hiding behind the guise of scholarship making a mockery of what he endured firsthand.
It is ironic then that the final "slap on the face" which catapulted Clary into the forefront of the Holocaust lecture scene was not an anti-Jewish incident, but a documentary film, Kitty Returns to Auschwitz, in which a survivor takes her son back to the scene of her incarceration.
It was then that Clary realized that "30 or 40 years from now there won't be any survivors" to refute those who deny the Holocaust and to remind the world that anti-Semitism, if left to fester, can burst open into another Holocaust.

Clary appeared in his own biographical film, made on a low budget at Kent State University in 1988.

His death today at age 96 gives yet another opportunity of life for his story, which must never die.