‘Hogan’s Heroes’ Star Robert Clary Dies At 96

French-born actor Robert Clary, who is remembered for his six-season stint as Corporal Louis LeBeau on the CBS sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 96.

Launched in 1965, 20 years after the end of World War II, Hogan's Heroes was set in a German POW camp, where a group of Allied prisoners were attempting to liberate the camp and defeat the Nazis from within. Clary was Jewish in real life and was deported to a Nazi concentration camp, but survived by singing and dancing in shows. He sang with an accordionist every other Sunday to an audience of SS soldiers.

“Singing, entertaining and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived,” Clary once said in an interview.

Clary was the last surviving member of the original principal cast of Hogan’s Heroes.

Born Robert Max Widerman in Paris on March 1, 1926, Clary was the youngest of 14 children in a strict Orthodox Jewish family, 10 of whom would die along with his parents in the Holocaust.

“We were not even human beings. When we got to Buchenwald, the SS shoved us into a shower room to spend the night,” recalled Clary. “ I had heard the rumors 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.

“I had to explain that Hogan’s Heroes 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,” he wrote in his 2001 memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes.

As a singer, Clary made his first recordings in 1948. They were brought to the United States on wire and were issued on disk by Capitol Records.

One of Clary's first on camera appearances was in a French-language comedy skit on The Ed Wynn Show in 1950. He also appeared in more television guest spots, and in such films as Ten Tall Men (1951) and Thief of Damascus (1952), where he met singer Eddie Cantor. Cantor took him to New York to perform and he came to the attention of producer Leonard Sillman, who cast Clary in the Broadway musical revue New Faces of 1952.

After Hogan’s Heroes, Clary appeared as a guest star in sitcoms like Arnie and Love Thy Neighbor. In 1972, he began a 15-season recurring stint as Robert LeClair in the NBC daytime drama Days of Our Lives.

He also appeared in daytime soaps The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful.

Clary was also a painter, recreating photographs he took on his travels, and he sang in several jazz albums.

He was married for 32 years to the late Natalie Cantor, the second daughter of Eddie Cantor. She died in 1997.