“I know nothing!” Sergeant Schultz said it so often that it became one of the most quoted lines in television history. Hogan’s Heroes premiered on CBS on September 17, 1965, and ran for six seasons and 168 episodes, until its final broadcast on April 4, 1971, during which Colonel Hogan and his fellow prisoners ran a sabotage operation right under the nose of Stalag 13’s bumbling commandant.
What many viewers never knew was how close to home that war was for this cast. Several of the actors who played German officers were Jewish men who had fled the Nazis, and the actor who played the cheerful French corporal had survived Buchenwald. The Hogan’s Heroes cast has been gone for a while now, and the last regular member died in 2025. Here is what became of the men and women of Stalag 13, roughly in the order we lost them.
Is John Banner still alive?
John Banner played Sergeant Hans Schultz, the lovable guard who would rather see nothing than report anything, and his own life story is far braver than Schultz ever was. He was born Johann Banner on January 28, 1910, in Stanislau, Austria-Hungary, to Jewish parents. In 1938 he was performing with an acting troupe in Switzerland when Hitler annexed Austria, and he never went home. Instead he emigrated to the United States and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942, serving as a supply sergeant and even posing for a recruiting poster.
Given all that, Banner was protective of his character. “Schultz is not a Nazi,” he told TV Guide in 1967. After the show ended, he starred as the gangster Uncle Latzi in the short-lived sitcom The Chicago Teddy Bears, and his final role came in a 1972 episode of The Partridge Family before he retired to France with his wife.
Banner died on January 28, 1973, in Vienna, where he had been visiting friends. It was his 63rd birthday. Most accounts give the cause as an abdominal hemorrhage, and he was the first of the regular cast to pass away.
Is Bob Crane still alive?
Before he ever wore Colonel Robert Hogan’s leather jacket, Bob Crane was a radio star. Born July 13, 1928, in Waterbury, Connecticut, he was hired by CBS in 1956 for the morning show at KNX in Los Angeles, and he soon had the top-rated program in the market. Acting came next, including a regular role as Dr. Dave Kelsey on The Donna Reed Show.
Hogan’s Heroes made him a household name, and Crane earned Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series in 1966 and 1967. The years after were bumpier. He appeared in Disney’s Superdad in 1973, but his NBC sitcom The Bob Crane Show was canceled after a short run in 1975, and he took to touring the country in the dinner theater comedy Beginner’s Luck.
On June 29, 1978, Crane was found beaten to death in his apartment in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was 49. Police focused on his acquaintance John Henry Carpenter, but no charges were filed at the time, and it was only after the case was reopened years later that Carpenter was charged in 1992. A jury acquitted him in 1994, and he died in 1998 maintaining his innocence. As NBC Los Angeles has reported, the killing has never been solved.
Is Werner Klemperer still alive?
Werner Klemperer knew exactly what the Nazis were, because his family had run from them. He was born March 22, 1920, in Cologne, Germany, the son of the famous conductor Otto Klemperer, and the family left for the United States in the 1930s after the Nazis came to power. During World War II, Werner served in the U.S. Army, mostly in a Special Services unit that entertained troops in the Pacific.
So when he was offered the part of Colonel Wilhelm Klink, he accepted on one condition: Klink had to be a fool who never succeeded. The monocled commandant brought him five straight Emmy nominations from 1966 to 1970, and he won the award in 1968 and 1969.
Klemperer kept working long after Stalag 13 closed its gates. He appeared at the Metropolitan Opera from 1979 to 1982, narrated concerts with orchestras across the country, and earned a Tony nomination for the 1987 Broadway revival of Cabaret. In 1993, he played Klink one more time as Homer’s guardian angel in the Simpsons episode “The Last Temptation of Homer.” Klemperer died of cancer at his Manhattan home on December 6, 2000, at age 80, as CBS News reported at the time.
Is Larry Hovis still alive?
Larry Hovis played Sergeant Andrew Carter, the sweet-natured explosives expert who could build a bomb out of almost anything. Born February 20, 1936, in Wapato, Washington, he got his big break in 1964 when Andy Griffith’s manager discovered him and cast him as Private Larry Gotschalk on Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
After Hogan’s Heroes, he joined Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and by the late 1970s he had moved behind the camera, producing Liar’s Club and sitting on its panel. His company, Bernstein-Hovis Productions, later made the original Lingo and Yahtzee.
In 1990, Hovis began teaching acting at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, now Texas State. He died of esophageal cancer on September 9, 2003, at a hospice in Austin, at the age of 67, and Texas State University announced his death and held a memorial service in his honor on its campus.
Is Leon Askin still alive?
General Albert Burkhalter was the stout officer forever threatening to send Klink to the Russian front, and Leon Askin played him in 67 episodes. Behind the bluster was a man who had lost nearly everything to the real Nazis. He was born Leo Aschkenasy on September 18, 1907, in Vienna, into a Jewish family, and he fled Austria in 1940 after persecution by the SA and SS. He was held in an internment camp in France before reaching the United States, and his parents, Malvine and Samuel, were murdered at Treblinka in 1942. During the war, Askin served as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Forces.
Remarkably, he went home again. In 1994 he moved back to Vienna and returned to cabaret, opera and festival work, and the city awarded him its Gold Medal of Honor. Askin died in Vienna on June 3, 2005, at age 97, as the New York Sun reported.
Are Sigrid Valdis & Cynthia Lynn still alive?
Colonel Klink had two secretaries over the years, and Cynthia Lynn played the first, Fräulein Helga, during the debut season. She was born Zinta Valda Ziemelis on April 2, 1937, in Riga, Latvia. After leaving the show, she guest-starred on Mission: Impossible, The Odd Couple, and The Six Million Dollar Man, and she came back to Stalag 13 for one episode in 1968 and another in 1971. In 2000, she published an autobiography called Escape to Freedom. Lynn died on March 10, 2014, in Los Angeles at age 76, Hollywood Life reported, and TMZ said the cause was multiple organ failure after she developed hepatitis.
Sigrid Valdis took over as Hilda in 1966 and stayed for 43 episodes, and her story became tangled up with the star’s. Born Patricia Annette Olson on September 21, 1935, in Bakersfield, California, she married Bob Crane on the Hogan’s Heroes set on October 16, 1970, with Richard Dawson as best man. Their son, Scotty, was born in 1971, and the couple separated in 1977. Valdis died of lung cancer on October 14, 2007, at her daughter’s home in Anaheim, California. She was 72, according to Variety.
Is Ivan Dixon still alive?
Ivan Dixon played Staff Sergeant James “Kinch” Kinchloe, the radio man and Hogan’s second in command, and he arrived with serious credits. Born April 6, 1931, in Harlem, he had been in the 1959 Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun and the acclaimed 1964 film Nothing But a Man. He was also the only longtime regular who did not stay for the whole run, leaving after the fifth season in 1970.
Directing became his second act, and it lasted for decades. His feature films included Trouble Man in 1972 and The Spook Who Sat by the Door in 1973, and on television he directed close to 40 series, among them The Waltons, The Rockford Files and Magnum, P.I. Off the set, he was active in civil rights and served as president of Negro Actors for Action.
Dixon died March 16, 2008, in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the age of 76. According to Variety, he died after suffering a hemorrhage, and his family said he also had complications from kidney failure.
Is Richard Dawson still alive?
Corporal Peter Newkirk was the cast’s wisecracking Englishman, and Richard Dawson was the real thing. He was born Colin Lionel Emm on November 20, 1932, in Gosport, England, and at 14 he ran away from home to join the British Merchant Navy. He went on to appear in all 168 episodes of Hogan’s Heroes.
Dawson’s biggest success came after the war camp closed. He joined Laugh-In in 1970 and became a fixture on the Match Game panel from 1973 to 1978, and then he took over Family Feud, hosting it from 1976 to 1985 and again from 1994 to 1995. That run earned him a Daytime Emmy as best game show host in 1978. You can read more about how Dawson went from Newkirk to game show royalty. Moviegoers also remember him as the sinister host Damon Killian opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Running Man in 1987.
Dawson died on June 2, 2012, at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles from complications of esophageal cancer. He was 79. His son Gary confirmed the news, NBC News reported, and he left behind his wife, Gretchen, their daughter Shannon and two sons from his first marriage.
Is Robert Clary still alive?
Robert Clary played Corporal Louis LeBeau, the French chef who cooked for the prisoners and sometimes for Klink himself, and his real life was far darker than anything on the show. He was born Robert Max Widerman on March 1, 1926, in Paris, the youngest of 14 children of Polish Jewish immigrants, and he was singing in cabarets by age 12.
In 1942, when he was 16, the Nazis deported him and much of his family. His parents were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, while Clary was sent to Ottmuth and then to Buchenwald, where he was tattooed with the number A5714 that he kept for the rest of his life. Every other Sunday at Buchenwald he sang for the guards alongside an accordion player, and he credited that singing with helping him survive until American troops liberated the camp on April 11, 1945.
Some people wondered how a camp survivor could do a comedy set in a German prison camp. Clary told the Associated Press that a POW camp was “completely different,” and that compared with concentration camps and gas chambers, “it was like a holiday.” For decades he kept silent about his own past, until Holocaust deniers moved him to speak in 1980. “They write books and articles in magazines denying the Holocaust, making a mockery of the 6 million Jews,” he told the AP in 1985. In 2001 he published his memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes.
Clary also spent years in daytime television, with long runs on Days of Our Lives and later roles on The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful. He died of natural causes at his Los Angeles home on November 16, 2022, at age 96. His niece, Brenda Hancock, said his message to students was always the same: “Don’t ever hate.” Read our tribute to Robert Clary here.
Is Kenneth Washington still alive?
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When Ivan Dixon left, Kenneth Washington stepped in for the sixth and final season as Sergeant Richard Baker, who took over Kinch’s duties. Washington was born in Ethel, Mississippi, and grew up in San Francisco, and before Stalag 13 he had a recurring role as Officer Miller on Adam-12, with stops on Star Trek and I Dream of Jeannie along the way.
After the show, he appeared in the 1973 film Westworld and guest-starred on series such as The Rockford Files, and his final on-screen credit was A Different World in 1989. Then he started a second career in the classroom. According to People, he earned a degree from Loyola Marymount University and went on to teach speech, oral interpretation, and a course on Black actors in film at LMU and Southwest College.
With Robert Clary’s death in 2022, Washington became the last surviving regular cast member of Hogan’s Heroes. He died on July 18, 2025, at his home in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 88. People later obtained his death certificate, which listed cardiopulmonary arrest and prostate cancer as the causes, and his remains were cremated and scattered at sea. His cousin Derek Olivia shared the news on Facebook in words that closed the last chapter of Stalag 13: “Yesterday we had to say goodbye to my big cousin Kenneth Washington.”
