Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Understandable Confusion

The guys at Power Line provide a link to a Tablet article entitled "Hogan's Heroes Lied," by Hillel Kuttler. It starts out with a cranky old World War II vet yelling at the TV,
This is not the way it was. I can’t believe they’re making a comedy about concentration camps.
Of course he was correct, concentration camps didn't look anything like Stalag Luft 13. That is largely because it was not a concentration camp but rather a prisoner of war camp for shot-down aircrew, run by the Luftwaffe.

POW camps were no picnic but they were not the concentration (death) camps to which the Third Reich shipped Jews, Gypsies, Communists, and others the regime wished to separate from society. These unfortunates they either murdered immediately or worked to death while starving. That was typically not the fate of captured Allied troops.

Anybody who thought Hogan's Heroes was history, or pretended to be, was clearly deluded. It was obviously comedy, and as such fun.