Image: Werner Klemperer as Colonel Klink in the 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes.
Werner Klemperer was born on 22 March 1920 in Cologne, Germany. His father, Otto Klemperer, was a prominent conductor and composer while his mother was soprano Johanna Geisler. His father was a Jew who had converted to Catholicism and his mother a Lutheran while Werner was raised Catholic. During his childhood Werner was immersed in the arts- he played piano, violin and trumpet as well as training as an operatic baritone. Yet dark clouds for the family were on the horizon.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 and it became apparent to those who were Jewish that Germany would no longer be safe for them. The Klemperer family, after the disappearance of a physician they knew, whose only crime it was to be born a Jew, fled Germany in 1935. After a brief stay in Vienna, Austria, the family emigrated to the United States, finally settling in Los Angeles.
Once he had settled into life in the United States, Klemperer began acting in high school and had enrolled in acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse. After Pearl Harbor Klemperer signed up for the US Army and was stationed in Hawaii as a military policeman. By 1943 he had been assigned to the Special Services unit as an entertainer, along with actor and writer Carl Reiner, in Major Maurice Evan’s Central Pacific unit. Evans was a Shakespearean actor who would later become known for his work as Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes and as Samantha Stephens’ father Maurice in Bewitched.
Evans would create a play called G.I. Hamlet, a special reinterpretation of the play within a two-hour format which would make it more appealing to the average American soldier. Evans would later take this play on a national tour after the war to rave reviews. Klemperer would play the part of Polonius, chief counselor of the King and father of Ophelia in G.I. Hamlet. Klemperer, Evans and Reiner would entertain troops in Hawaii, Guam, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima for two years.
After the war, Klemperer moved to New York City and worked as a stage and radio actor. By the mid-1950’s he began acting in films and in 1965 he began a 6 year stint in his most famous role as Colonel Klink, the blundering commandant of Luft Stalag 13. When offered the part he had been unaware that the show was to be a comedy, but when he was informed he thought that they had lost their minds, but he accepted the role. Klemperer later stated that “I had one qualification when I took the job; if they ever wrote a segment whereby Colonel Klink would come out the hero, I would leave the show.”
During his post-Hogan’s Heroes life Werner Klemperer had accepted an invitation to serve as Grand Marshal if a parade in Oregon, yet a state legislator, who was unable to separate life and art, loudly objected to this and stated that in no way should they honor an actor who had played Colonel Klink. Werner Klemperer stepped down as Grand Marshal.
“I found that so ridiculous,” he stated in later years. “I wrote an open letter to the paper in that particular area and I said that I would certainly bow out of this parade, but that it was saddening to me that I, a three-year World War II veteran, had to do that.”
Werner Klemperer died December 6, 2000 in New York. His body was cremated and his ashes spread over the ocean.
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