I watched a lot of classic TV shows when I was a kid, always in reruns, as I wasn't alive for the first-run episodes. My favorites were the westerns, but I also loved stuff like Dennis the Menace and My Three Sons and Laugh-In, etc. I wasn't into Hogan's Heroes because, at the time, I believed history was boring.
Due to the recent political climate I thought it would behoove me to watch the whole series, and I got what I wanted, but I also got something very unexpected.
In this very space I've compared Trump to Schultz, in the "I KNOW NOTHING!" sense. It's a bad comparison, as Trump has more in common with the Dunning-Kruger-ish Klink, but even that doesn't hold up. I'll get to that soon, but what really impressed me was Hogan's MO.
In case you're unfamiliar, Col. Hogan is a POW in a Luftwaffe prisoner camp. He's the ranking officer, so he's in charge of his fellow occupants, among them Kinch, the comms officer; Newkirk, a horny Brit; LaBeau, an equally horny Frenchman; and Carter, an idiot who is somehow an explosives expert. They're not there simply because they got caught. Allied intelligence put them there as a sabotage squad, and they chose Stalag 13 because the commandant, Col. Klink, and his second in command Sgt. Schultz, are exceptionally stupid. So they have no idea about the comm tower Hogan has in their own flagpole, the network of tunnels under the camp and even the submarine Hogan has at his beck and call.
Klink and Schultz (and a few other regulars) are so inept that Hogan is able to easily pull off his missions. The first season is the best. The others are good, but the cons they pulled then required all the Nazis to be stupid. That first season? Even smart people would fall for the shit Hogan and his friends pulled.
Hogan's Heroes is about Allied prisoners tricking Nazis for a laff riot, but only on the surface. It's really about how to manipulate people into doing your bidding. I suspect the show's creators worked for the CIA--or maybe they continued in that capacity while filming!--they are that good at depicting manipulation.
There's a buzzword that I despise, but I'm going to use it because no other will suffice. Hogan specializes in "psyops."
A psyop is the use of propaganda to influence a person or group of persons into doing things they ordinarily wouldn't do. Short for "psychological operations," it's how the military approaches things in regions where American "interests" just so happen to belong to other nations. These days the phrase is almost exclusively used by YouTube con artists trying to teach you how to influence people.
Which is fairly simple when you understand human nature, and Hogan does, very much so. He knows to appeal to ego without sucking up. Never ask questions but make observations that offer opportunities to explain or correct. Give pieces of evidence but don't connect them, leaving your target to connect the dots and therefore feel clever for doing so. Etc.
The thing that stops most people from doing this is a lack of confidence, ie. the word "con" is short for in "con artist." It's shocking what you can make people believe if you sound like you know what you're talking about. If you're good at this, people won't even check your work.
Luckily Hogan's cup of confidence floweth over . . . and spilleth all over the floor.* He's so confident he routinely tells Klink what he's up to *for real* and Klink always dismisses it as a joke. Hogan is digging tunnels under the stalag? Very funny. But confidence alone won't do it. The key to getting someone to do something they wouldn't normally do is to find a way to fit that thing into their worldview and feed them enough disinformation to make it feel like the righteous thing to do. It helps to also mold that worldview if you can help it, and in that first season, this last bit is where Hogan excels.
This show was on for six years, so it did get old after a while, but one of the reasons it lasted so long was because Klink and Schultz, despite being Nazis and exceptionally stupid, are kind of likeable. Or, at least, you can't hate these fools. It's clear they didn't know about the Final Solution, for example. Klink got his rank because of family connections, and his position keeps him safe from the horrors of the Russian front, where the deadliest fighting of WWII occurred. Somehow his cowardice redeems him, which would be next to impossible on any other show. The same goes for Schultz. He enjoys the simple things in life. Actually fighting in a war? That's unthinkable to him. All he wants to do is eat and relax. It's difficult to understand how he got so far as a sergeant. He doesn't know anyone in High Command, nor does he have important relatives.
Hogan's Heroes naturally didn't know they were getting canceled, so we never get to see the end of his operations. Over the course of the years, guests he helped escape to England always wanted to know why he never escaped himself. Hogan always said that when it came time to leave, he would walk out the front gate in full view of everyone. I really wanted to see that moment of victory. Ah well.
As with The Rat Patrol, I did find myself wondering what happened to everyone after the war. I'm not going to get too much into that. I like to think Newkirk and LaBeau remained best friends and spent much of their civilian life in pubs and maybe some brothels, too. Carter probably went home and became a cop. I imagine Kinch became an engineer. Schultz went home to his wife and had a passel of children exactly like him.
Klink probably got captured and put on trial for war crimes. Not that he actually did any of them, but I suspect General Burkhalter framed Klink for *his* crimes. And so he hanged at Nuremburg with Julius Streicher and friends.
As for Hogan? Who knows? Maybe I'll write about him, too, someday.
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*I forgot who I stole that joke from. I suspect it was Mel Brooks, as I am currently reading his memoir, but I don't recall for sure.
