Robert Clary, who performed Corporal LeBeau on the long-running World Battle II comedy Hogan’s Heroes, has died. He was 96.

The information was confirmed by Deadline’s sister publication The Hollywood Reporter, which cited his granddaughter Kim Wright.

Clary was seen by generations on the CBS present, which was set in a German prisoner of conflict camp throughout World Battle II. His Corporal LeBeau was a French POW and a member of an Allied sabotage unit working contained in the camp. Not solely did Hogan’s Heroes have a long term from 1965-1971, nevertheless it performed endlessly thereafter in syndication.

Clary was one of many final two surviving members of the present’s principal solid, the opposite being Kenneth Washington, who performed Sergeant Richard Baker within the present’s last season.

He was additionally a survivor of the Holocaust. Born in Paris in 1926 because the youngest of 14 youngsters in a Jewish household, he was despatched to the Nazi focus camp at Ottmuth in Poland in 1942. Clary had sung on the radio earlier than his imprisonment and, after he was transferred to Germany’s infamous Buchenwald camp, he sang to an viewers of SS troopers each different Sunday.

“Singing, entertaining, and being in form of good well being at my age, that’s why I survived,” he later recalled. “I used to be very immature and younger and probably not totally realizing what state of affairs I used to be concerned with … I don’t know if I’d have survived if I actually knew that.”

A dozen members of Clary’s household have been despatched to Auschwitz and died in the course of the conflict, together with his mother and father. He was liberated from Buchenwald on April, 1945 and subsequently realized that three of his siblings had remained in occupied France and survived.

Requested years later in a Tv Academy Basis interview if he introduced any of these experiences with him to Hogan’s Heroes Clary answered, “No, as a result of it was fully totally different. If I needed to carry [to my] character what it was like it might have been determined.”

He was additionally cautious to differentiate between the present’s setting and his personal experiences as a Jew interned at Nazi focus camps. “Stalag 13 shouldn’t be a focus camp. It’s a POW camp, and that’s a world of distinction. You by no means heard of a prisoner of conflict being gassed or hanged.”

After the conflict, Clary returned to singing, and had some success in each France and america. He moved stateside in 1949 the place he befriended singer Edie Cantor, later marrying Cantor’s daughter Natalie Cantor Metzger.

He started showing on exhibits akin to The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Martha Raye Present and on Broadway.

After Hogan’s Heroes, Clary appeared on numerous soaps, together with Days of Our Lives, The Younger and the Stressed and The Daring and the Lovely.

Clary appeared within the 1975 movie The Hindenburg, which traced a fictional plot to explode the German airship. He performed Joseph Späh, a real-life passenger on the airship’s last voyage.

Clary spent his later years touring Canada and america and talking in regards to the Holocaust.

Watch Robert Clary’s Tv Academy Basis interview under.