Hogan's Heroes
1965-1971 Television Sitcom
Hogan's Heroes is an American television sitcom created by Bernard Fein and Albert S. Ruddy which is set in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Nazi Germany during World War II. It centers on a group of Allied prisoners who use the POW camp as an operations base for sabotage and espionage activities directed against Nazi Germany. It ran for 168 episodes (six seasons) from September 17, 1965, to April 4, 1971, on the CBS network, and has been broadcast in reruns ever since.
Bob Crane starred as Colonel Robert E. Hogan, coordinating an international crew of Allied prisoners covertly running a special operations group from the camp. Werner Klemperer played Colonel Wilhelm Klink, the obtuse and oblivious commandant of the camp, and John Banner played the gullible and affable sergeant-of-the-guard Hans Schultz.
Overview
Hogan's Heroes centers on U.S. Army Air Forces Colonel Robert Hogan and his staff of experts who are prisoners of war during World War II. The plot occurs during the permanent winter season in the fictionalized Stalag 13 just outside the real city of Hammelburg in Nazi Germany, though details in the show are inconsistent with the real-life Stalag XIII and city's location in Franconia.
According to a title overlay, the pilot episode takes place in 1942. According to subsequent storylines when the group was formed under Hogan's command, he (and they) received the following orders: "You will assist escaping prisoners, cooperate with all friendly forces, and use every means to harass and injure the enemy." Hogan recites those orders verbatim from memory in the Season 3 episode "The Collector General".
Pursuant to those orders, the group secretly uses the camp to conduct Allied espionage and sabotage and to help escaped Allied POWs from other prison camps via a secret network of tunnels that operate under the nose of the inept commandant Klink.
The prisoners cooperate with resistance groups (collectively called "the Underground"), defectors, spies, counterspies, and disloyal German officers to accomplish this. The prisoners sometimes bribe or blackmail otherwise loyal German officers so as to effectively manipulate their actions.
The public source identifies “Hogan's Heroes” as 1965-1971 Television Sitcom. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hogan's, Heroes and 1965-1971.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q431917. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1965, 1971 and 1942.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hogan's Heroes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.