The Only Major Actors Still Alive From Hogan's Heroes

In 1953, Billy Wilder scored a critical and commercial success with his film adaptation of Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski's stage play "Stalag 17" (one of his 14 best films according to /Film). Set in a World War II POW camp behind Nazi enemy lines, the movie is a rambunctious account of how imprisoned soldiers misbehave and attempt to make their captors' lives miserable. They're also ever on the verge of hatching a new escape plan, though they wind up having a rat in their ranks who complicates their efforts.

Given that World War II was a desperately bloody affair on both the European and Pacific fronts as the Allies fought to save civilization from the clutches of genocidal vermin, you might not think it appropriate for artists to find humor anywhere within the conflict. But the ability to laugh when things are at their darkest is vital to surviving such dreadful times. After all, if we lose everything that makes life worth living, what are we fighting for in the first place?

So, yes, a skillful filmmaker like Billy Wilder can get away with a spectacularly entertaining comedy about prison camps. On a degree of greater difficulty, Ernst Lubitsch and Jack Benny can wring huge laughs from a character nicknamed "Concentration Camp Ehrhardt" in "To Be or Not to Be." But is a sitcom really the best venue to make WWII hay?

20 years after the end of the conflict, American television viewers decided the time was right for weekly POW camp yuks when they made "Hogan's Heroes" one of the top-rated sitcoms on television. The CBS sitcom starred Bob Crane as U.S. Colonel Robert E. Hogan, a rather cavalier chap who orchestrates all manner of mayhem and sabotage around the premises of Stalag XIII. He's aided by fellow captured soldiers like LeBeau (Robert Clary), Kinchloe (Ivan Dixon), and Newkirk (future "Family Feud" host Richard Dawson), and very rarely stymied by the incompetent Nazi duo of Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer) and Sergeant Schultz (John Banner). The series was canceled in 1971, so you won't be surprised to learn that all of these actors are dead (though you may be shocked to learn how Crane died in 1978, which is depicted in Paul Schrader's underrated "Auto Focus").

But there is one remaining member of Stalag XIII still with us, and I'm afraid it isn't Larry Hovis.

Kenneth Washington's career got off to an early start when, at the age of 10, he appeared in Norman Taurog's "The Birds and the Bees" (a ho-hum remake of Preston Sturges' screwball comedy classic "The Lady Eve"). After an 11-year absence from movies, he made his television debut on an episode of the CBS drama "Daktari." With this, Washington was off and running, landing an eight-episode run on "Adam-12" as Officer Miller, and booking guest spots on noteworthy shows like "Star Trek" (as redshirt John B. Watkins in the episode "That Which Survives"), "That Girl" and "Petticoat Junction."

When Ivan Dixon left "Hogan's Heroes" after the fifth season, Washington stepped in as radio operator Sergeant Richard Baker. This, alas, proved to be the final season of the sitcom. Thereafter, Washington returned to guesting on shows like "Marcus Welby, M.D.," "Police Story" and "The Rockford Files." He also made a brief appearance in Michael Crichton's "Westworld" (not the HBO series). Save for a pop-in on "A Different World" in 1989, Washington has evidently been retired from acting.