Robert Clary has died: The Holocaust survivor and actor, best known as Corporal LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes, was 96

Robert Clary, who played Corporal LeBeau in the long-running WWII comedy Hogan’s heroes, deceased. He turned 96.

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

Clary was a cross-generational cast member on the CBS show, set in a German POW camp during World War II. His Corporal LeBeau was a French prisoner of war and a member of an Allied sabotage unit operating at the camp. Not only Hogan’s heroes had a long run from 1965-1971, but after that it played endlessly in syndication.

Clary was one of the last two remaining members of the show’s main cast, the other being Kenneth Washington, who played Sergeant Richard Baker in the show’s final season.

He was also a Holocaust survivor. He was born in Paris in 1926 as the youngest of 14 children in a Jewish family and was taken to the Nazi concentration camp in Ottmuth in Poland in 1942. Clary sang on the radio before his imprisonment and after being transferred to Germany’s infamous Buchenwald camp, he sang every second Sunday to an audience of SS soldiers.

“Singing, entertaining and being in good health at my age is why I survived,” he later recalled. “I was very immature and young and didn’t fully appreciate the situation I was in … I don’t know if I would have survived if I had really known.”

A dozen members of Clary’s family were sent to Auschwitz and died during the war, including his parents. He was liberated from Buchenwald in April 1945 and subsequently learned that three of his siblings had remained in occupied France and survived.

Years later, in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation, he asked if he had had any of those experiences Hogan’s heroes Clary replied, “No, because it was completely different. Whether I wanted to bring [to my] character as it was, as it would have been Despair.”

He also carefully distinguished the show’s setting from his own experiences as a Jew interned in Nazi concentration camps. “Stalag 13 is not a concentration camp. It’s a POW camp and it makes a world of difference. You have never heard of a prisoner of war being gassed or hanged.”

After the war, Clary returned to singing and had some success in both France and the United States. He moved to the United States in 1949, where he befriended singer Edie Cantor and later married Cantor’s daughter, Natalie Cantor Metzger.

He started appearing in shows like The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Martha Raye Show and on Broadway.

About Hogan’s heroesClary has appeared in a number of soap operas including days of our lives, The young and the restless and The bald and the beautiful.

Clary appeared in the 1975 film The Hindenburg, who pursued a fictitious plan to blow up the German airship. He played Joseph Späh, a real passenger on the airship’s final voyage.

Clary spent his later years traveling across Canada and the United States speaking about the Holocaust.