Hogan's Heroes came out when I was in third grade and it quickly became the favorite show of all the guys my age.
We never missed an episode and relived it Monday at school during lunch and recess (It was aired Friday nights, then Saturday nights after a year or two).
It still holds up as one of the better TV series of the 60s. It's gotta be top 10, easy.

I always believed Hogan's Heroes to be a parody of the film, "Stalag 17," and the trifecta was rounded out by the Mad Magazine parody, "Hokum's Heroes," in which everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Eisenhower came up through the tunnel (strange, the things we remember).
At the time my peers and I were reading a lot about World War II, we knew veterans of the war and that was our favorite game to play in the woods - War.

We had no idea of the horrors of the prison camps and were just hearing about the Holocaust, couldn't comprehend it and never thought of the show in terms of tasteless depiction making light of something that should not have been made light of.
Bu-ut, we also had F Troop and McHale's Navy and also just viewed those shows as just funny entertainment.

I think it was after the first season that Hogan's Heroes was filmed in color. It was a period of transition; at first the TV shows in color were indicated with a "(c)" in the TV Guide, but when most shows were in color, the form was to indicate black and white shows with a "(bw)."

I read somewhere that when the show was aired in Germany, depicting someone giving the stiff-armed Nazi salute and shouting, "Heil Hitler" was illegal, so the voice over was changed to have the characters shout, "Look! A bird!"

Over the years it has been so sad to see all the original cast members die, one by one, beginning with Bob Crane (Colonel Hogan) who was our favorite.
It seemed appropriate that Crane had affairs in real life with the women who played Helga and Hilda, Klink's secretaries.

I love it, that there is no attempt to be realistic (:

I always felt it was a way to make humor, out of a terrible time period. I admire that! It's a good thing to :D laugh when we can!
I'm not an expert, and the show tries to keep it all light, so I don't want to do the heavy. But i did find it interesting, although I didn't think of it until it came up recently, but some of those guys lived through stuff in WW2.

Ie 'LeBeau' a Jew during 'the Holocaust' time period. For him to be in a show like this, able and wanting to make people laugh, is admirable.
Seems generally known that
Colonel Klink
General Burkkhalter (sp?)
and Sargeant Schultz were
Jews, of either German or Austrian origin.
Other Jews were in the show, and I think it was great to 'protest' WW2 enemies in that particular style.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hogan's Heroes is an American television sitcom set in a
Nazi German prisoner-of-war (POW) camp during World War II.
It ran for 168 episodes (six seasons)