Remembering Robert Clary:, Louis LeBeau in Hogan's Heroes

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Robert Clary, 1926-2022.

Robert Clary (center), with Bob Crane and Richard Dawson in Hogan's Heroes.

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Blog Created: 2-13-2025

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Robert Clary (born Robert Max Widerman; March 1, 1926 – November 16, 2022) was a French actor who was mainly active in the United States. He is best known for his role as Corporal Louis LeBeau on the television sitcom Hogan's Heroes (1965–1971). He also had recurring roles on the soap operas Days of Our Lives (1972–1987), and The Bold and the Beautiful (1990–1992).

Early life and Holocaust survival ~

Born in 1926 in Paris, France, Clary was the youngest of 14 children, 7 of whom died in the Holocaust. His parents, Baila and Moishe Widerman, were Polish Jewish immigrants. At age 12, he began a career singing professionally on a French radio station and also studied art in Paris. In 1942, because he was Jewish, he was deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Ottmuth, in Upper Silesia (now Otmęt, Poland). He was tattooed with the identification "A5714" on his left forearm. He was later sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.

The Holocaust. German concentration camp.

At Buchenwald, Clary sang to an audience of SS soldiers every other Sunday, accompanied by an accordionist. He said, "Singing, entertaining, and being in kind of good health at my age, that's why I survived. I was very immature and young and not really fully realizing what situation I was involved with ... I don't know if I would have survived if I really knew that."

Writing about his experience, Clary said:

"We were not even human beings. When we got to Buchenwald, the SS shoved us into a shower room to spend the night. I had heard the rumours about the dummy shower heads that were gas jets. I thought, 'This is it.' But no, it was just a place to sleep. The first eight days there, the Germans kept us without a crumb to eat. We were hanging on to life by pure guts, sleeping on top of each other, every morning waking up to find a new corpse next to you. ... The whole experience was a complete nightmare — the way they treated us, what we had to do to survive. We were less than animals. Sometimes I dream about those days. I wake up in a sweat terrified for fear I'm about to be sent away to a concentration camp, but I don't hold a grudge because that's a great waste of time. Yes, there's something dark in the human soul. For the most part, human beings are not very nice. That's why when you find those who are, you cherish them."

Clary was liberated from Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. Twelve other members of his immediate family had been sent to Auschwitz concentration camp; Clary was the only survivor. When he returned to Paris after World War II, he reunited with six of his thirteen siblings and half-siblings and several nieces and nephews who had avoided being taken away and survived the Nazi occupation of France.

Career ~

Clary returned to the entertainment business and began singing songs that became popular not only in France, but in the United States as well. Clary made his first recordings in 1948; they were brought to the United States on wire and were issued on disk by Capitol Records. He went to the U.S. in October 1949. One of Clary's first American appearances was a French-language comedy skit on The Ed Wynn Show in 1950. Clary later met Merv Griffin and Eddie Cantor. This eventually led to Clary meeting Cantor's daughter, Natalie Cantor Metzger, whom he married in 1965, after being "the closest of friends" for 15 years. Cantor later got Clary a spot on The Colgate Comedy Hour. In the mid-1950s, Clary appeared on NBC's early sitcom The Martha Raye Show and on CBS's drama anthology series Appointment with Adventure.

Clary's comedic skills were quickly recognized by Broadway, where he appeared in several popular musicals, including Leonard Sillman's revue New Faces of 1952, which was produced as a film in 1954.

In 1952, he appeared in the film Thief of Damascus which also starred Paul Henreid and Lon Chaney Jr. In 1958, he guest-starred on The Gisele MacKenzie Show (NBC). He guest-starred on The Munsters Today (1989) as Louis Schecter, Lily's acting coach, in the episode "Green Eyed Munsters".

Paul Henreid and Lon Chaney Jr.

In 1959, he was cast in the title role of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in a British production of an Edward Chodorov play, Monsieur Lautrec. The play ran for two weeks at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry. Although The Stage panned the play, it praised Clary for portraying Lautrec "with a delicacy and yet moving intenseness."

LeBeau on Hogan's Heroes ~

In 1965, the diminutive 155 cm (5 ft 1 in) Clary was offered the role of Corporal Louis LeBeau on a new television sitcom called Hogan's Heroes, and he accepted the role when the pilot sold. The series was set in a German prisoner of war (POW) camp during World War II, and Clary played a French POW who was a member of an Allied sabotage unit operating from inside the camp.

Clary as Corporal Louis LeBeau on Hogan's Heroes.

Asked about parallels between LeBeau's incarceration and his own, Clary said, "Stalag 13 is not a concentration camp. It's a POW camp, and that's a world of difference. You never heard of a prisoner of war being gassed or hanged. When the show went on the air, people asked me if I had any qualms about doing a comedy series dealing with Nazis and concentration camps. I had to explain that it was about prisoners of war in a Stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps."

Main street in Stalag IV-B. German POW camp.

Clary was the last surviving original cast member of Hogan's Heroes. Kenneth Washington, who joined the cast in the show's final season as Sergeant Richard Baker, was the only surviving cast member when Clary died.

Later life and career ~

After Hogan's Heroes was cancelled in 1971, Clary maintained close ties to fellow Hogan's Heroes cast members Werner Klemperer, John Banner, and Leon Askin, whose lives were also affected by the Holocaust. Following the show's cancellation, he appeared in a handful of feature films with World War II themes, including the made-for-television film Remembrance of Love, about the Holocaust. Clary also appeared on the soap operas Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless, and The Bold and the Beautiful.

Clary appeared in the 1975 film The Hindenburg, which portrayed a fictional plot to blow up the German airship after it arrived at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station. He played Joseph Späh, a real-life passenger on the airship's final voyage.

Clary spent years touring Canada and the United States, speaking about the Holocaust. He was a painter, painting from photographs he took on his travels.

Clary was among dozens of Holocaust survivors whose portraits and stories were included in 1997 book “The Triumphant Spirit,” by photographer Nick Del Calzo. In the book, Clary said, “I beg the next generation not to do what people have done for centuries — hate others because of their skin, shape of their eyes, or religious preference.”

Clary published a memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes: The Autobiography of Robert Clary, in 2001.

Personal life ~

Clary married Natalie Cantor, the daughter of Eddie Cantor, in 1965. She died in 1997. The couple had no children.

Clary died at his Los Angeles home on November 16, 2022, at age 96. Clary's niece, Brenda Hancock, confirmed his death to the public, but did not provide a cause.

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From:

Hogan’s Heroes Actor Robert Clary, 96, Survived the Holocaust and Committed Himself to Remembrance ~

In September 1994, Hogan’s Heroes actor Robert Clary stepped up to be among the first 100 Holocaust survivors to be interviewed by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the organization established by Steven Spielberg soon after he finished filming Schindler’s List.

Then, just weeks after recording his own testimony, Clary volunteered to be an interviewer. Over the following 18 months, he interviewed 75 Holocaust survivors, helping the Institute seed a collection that would grow to include more than 50,000 testimonies by the turn of the century.

Clary, whose career included theater, radio, film and television credits, died Nov. 16 at age 96.

“Robert Clary gave a tremendous amount of time and energy to this unprecedented mission of collecting Holocaust testimonies, because he was so committed to honoring and preserving the voices of survivors,” said Robert Williams, Finci-Viterbi Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation. “He was truly a master interviewer, guiding survivors through their memories with empathy and sensitivity.”

For the first three decades of his post-war life, Clary had little interest in sharing his story, including at the time he played Corporal LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes—a 1965-1971 CBS comedy set in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. In fact, from the moment he returned to Paris in May 1945 after three years in Nazi concentration and labor camps, Clary refused to speak of his experiences, even with his surviving siblings.

“I was 19 years old. No self-pity. I turned that page so fast, it's unbelievable. I had one goal in my life. I wanted to go back into show business…And I just never wanted to talk about it,” he said in his 1994 testimony.

Then, in 1980, he watched a PBS documentary about a survivor who had gone back to visit Auschwitz with her son.

“And what she said in that documentary, that really woke me up,” Clary said. “She said, ‘You know, 30, 40 years from now, we're all going to be dead. And anybody can write anything they want about it.’... And I realized that she's right. After 36 years of not saying anything about it, I have to teach people about man's inhumanity to man.”

Clary began speaking at high schools and to community groups, and he volunteered with the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. He attended the first World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem in 1981. And he became involved with Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the precursor to USC Shoah Foundation.

In his 1994 testimony, Clary recalls a happy childhood that gave him both the tools to survive the war and the passion to make it in Hollywood.

He was born Robert Widerman on March 1, 1926 in Paris. He was the youngest of his father’s 14 children – six from a first wife, who died in childbirth, and eight from Robert’s mother. His father was a tailor from Warsaw who had moved the family to Paris in 1923.

The Widermans lived on Île Saint-Louis in an apartment building a philanthropist subsidized for Jewish families.

Clary describes a thriving social life in the building, where he enjoyed huge holiday celebrations with friends and family, played in a youth band, and benefited from mentors hired to lead activities and help the children with homework. At the age of 12, he began performing with a local theater and was featured on a radio show.

His parents kept him mostly sheltered from rising antisemitism, even after World War II erupted in September 1939.

France fell to the Nazis in June 1940, when Robert was 14. The family had their passports stamped with a “J” and were forced to sew yellow stars with the word “Juif” (Jew) onto their clothing.

With Nazis in power, Robert was thrown off the radio show and out of the theater troupe. But unlike many other Jewish children, he was able to continue his education because he was enrolled in a small private art school, not a public school. He recalls wondering if his friends would abandon him when he started to wear the yellow star.

Robert Clary in his elder years.

“And the complete opposite. … The first day I wore the yellow star, they walked with me from the school to my home so that, you know, in case somebody does something, they're going to protect me. And I will always remember that,” he said.

In 1941, he witnessed Nazi soldiers rounding up and arresting Jews who were not French citizens, including some of his Polish-born family members. In September 1942, Nazi soldiers arrived at Robert’s apartment building on Île Saint-Louis.

Before being taken with his parents and other Jews to a local police station, Robert tied up his belongings – his comic books, his movie magazines, his art – in a blanket. The group stayed there overnight and were then deported to the Drancy transit camp, from which they were put on cattle cars.

At a stop along the way, men of working age were ordered off the train. Though Robert was 16, he looked 12. (As an adult, he reached the full height of 5-foot-1). Still, he managed to stick with the men, though it meant leaving his mother.

He later learned the train continued to Auschwitz, where his mother was killed in a gas chamber.

“A lot of people say, how come you didn't escape? How come you don't rebel?” Robert reflected in his testimony. “It's a dumb question to ask, really. If we knew that we were all going to go to the gas chambers...then of course we would rebel. It doesn't matter if we're going to die [in a rebellion], because we're going to die anyway. But if we don't know that, life is precious in a way…You want to live as much as you can.”

Robert was imprisoned in Ottmuth, a concentration camp that was a satellite of Auschwitz. He was sent to work in a factory, putting rubber heal taps on wooden shoes. To keep up his morale, he sang while he worked, and before long was summoned to perform song-and-dance routines for camp commanders. In his 19 months at Ottmuth, his voice and charisma saved him from deportation, earned him extra bread and soup, and brought joy and relief to the other inmates.

In May of 1944, Robert was transported to Blechhammer, another satellite labor camp of Auschwitz.

He was shaved, tattooed, given a striped uniform, and sent to work in a factory making synthetic fuel from coal. He also performed in two shows for the SS every Sunday, sometimes playing comedic women’s roles, sometimes slipping in a subversive Yiddish song.

"You entertain, but you're going to starve and you're going to die,” he said of the absurdity of his situation. “They can kill you in a second.”

In January 1945 the area came under bombardment from Allied forces, and Robert was among 4,000 people marched to the Gross-Rosen labor camp. Half the group was killed during the 15-day death march, and many more died under inhumane guards once they arrived at Gross-Rosen.

After three weeks he was again evacuated, this time to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. There, two French prisoners and a Czech camp secretary took an interest in Robert, who was by then frail. They got him moved from the Jewish barrack to the slightly less oppressive barrack for political prisoners. One of them ran an orchestra, and he recruited Robert to sing.

“They nurtured me back to life. They gave me food. They had sugar—that's the first time I saw sugar since 9 September 1942,” Robert said.

Allied planes flew overhead on April 11, 1945, and, with Nazi guards already on the run, Robert lay down on the roll-call field with other inmates to form their bodies into “SOS.”

A week later, he sang at a concert for American GIs.

By May 4, 1945, he had arrived at Hotel Lutetia in Paris, where his sister Cecile was waiting for him.

“We were crying like I’ve never cried before,” he remembered.

She told him that his parents and four sisters, along with several nieces, nephews, and other family members, had been murdered. Other siblings were finding their way back home.

Robert immediately turned toward the business of living his life.

He began performing at Paris nightclubs, where he was spotted by an American film and television producer who brought him to the U.S. In Los Angeles, he was taken under the wing of actor Eddie Cantor, and subsequently landed parts in theater, film and television. In 1964, Robert married Natalie, Cantor’s daughter, and in 1965 was cast in Hogan’s Heroes.

He began telling his story in 1980, leaving thousands of students with a message of empathy and activism.

"If you want this world to be alive, to be a fertile world, you have to stop feeling superior to another human being just because that human being has a different color skin, or different shape of eyes, or a different religion than yours. Do not feel superior to this person,” he said he told school children. “Give them as much chance that you want to have.”

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Robert (Widerman) Clary at his Bar Mitzvah in Paris in March 1939, “That's me … very cocky, waiting for my ring and watch and fountain pen.”

Robert Widerman, far right, with the bandmates from his apartment building on Île Saint-Louis in 1941. His friend, Henri Adoner, on the left, was deported and killed in Auschwitz. The other boys were hidden and survived.

Robert and his sister Madeline in Paris in 1942, both wearing yellow stars on their clothing. “I was a very good jitterbug dancer.”

Robert Clary at a talk about the Holocaust in a Los Angeles high school in 1981.

Eddie Cantor, stage and film star. He was Robert Clary's father-in-law.

Robert's wife, Natalie Cantor Clary. Daughter of Eddie Cantor.

Clary's in-laws, Eddie Cantor, his wife and daughters.

Martha Raye. Clary did guest spots on her early 1950s TV show.

German concentration camp, Auschwitz. It was here that Robert Clary's mother and other family members were sent to the gas chambers.

German concentration camp, Auschwitz. Main entrance with railroad tracks where cattle cars containing thousands of Jews were brought in and then murdered.