The interviewer leans forward, the studio lights catching the silver rim of a small, circular object in his hand.

“Werner, I think you recognize this,” he says with a grin.

Werner Klemperer leans back in his chair, a sophisticated smile spreading across his face as he looks at the small piece of glass nestled in the velvet box.

“Ah, my old nemesis,” he laughs, his voice as resonant and cultured as it was decades ago on the set.

“You know, people always ask me if I used glue or some sort of spirit gum to keep that thing in my eye.”

He shakes his head, remembering the grueling days under the hot studio lights of Stage 50.

“No glue. Just pure, unadulterated facial tension. I think I still have a permanent twitch in my right cheek from five years of playing Colonel Klink.”

The conversation shifts to the early days of the show.

Werner explains that when he was first approached for Hogan’s Heroes, he had one non-negotiable condition.

He insisted that the character of Klink had to be a fool.

He wanted the commandant to never succeed, because to him—a man who had fled Germany in 1935—that was the only way the comedy could be justified.

The monocle was Werner’s own idea, a badge of Prussian arrogance that served as the perfect punchline whenever Klink became flustered.

“But there was one afternoon,” Werner continues, leaning closer to the microphone.

“We were filming a scene in Klink’s office. It was a very dialogue-heavy moment with Bob Crane.”

“Hogan was supposed to be spinning some elaborate lie about a secret weapon, and I had to be particularly stern.”

“I was supposed to lean over the desk, right into Bob’s face, and bark a line about the absolute efficiency of the Luftwaffe.”

“I had the monocle jammed in tight. I was ready to be terrifying.”

“The cameras were rolling, the lighting was perfect, and I felt I was giving a truly menacing performance.”

“I took a deep breath, slammed my hands onto the mahogany desk, and leaned forward with all my might.”

“And that’s when it happened.”

The monocle didn’t just fall; it launched itself.

It popped out of my eye socket with the force of a champagne cork, did a graceful half-flip in the air, and landed with a perfect, liquid “plink” right into my full cup of hot coffee.

For a second, the entire set went absolutely silent.

You have to understand the atmosphere of a television set back then.

We were on a very tight schedule, we were behind for the day, and the director was starting to sweat.

This was supposed to be the “big” take.

I stood there, still leaning over the desk, my right eye squinting at nothing, staring down at the tiny ripple in my coffee cup.

Bob Crane, God bless him, didn’t miss a single beat.

He looked down at the cup, then looked back at my empty eye socket, and without breaking character for a second, he leaned in closer.

“Colonel,” Bob said, his voice perfectly calm and full of that classic Hogan swagger, “I think your eye just went for a swim.”

That was the end of any professional decorum.

I tried to hold it together. I really did.

I tried to maintain that stiff, military posture, but then I caught a glimpse of John Banner—our dear Schultz—standing in the background by the door.

John was already a man of considerable girth, and when he started to laugh, his whole body would shake like a bowl of jelly.

He was trying so hard to be quiet that he was turning a deep, alarming shade of purple.

He let out this tiny, muffled “Hee-hee-hee” sound, and the floodgates just opened.

I collapsed back into my chair, laughing so hard I thought I was going to choke on my own breath.

The director, Bruce Bilson, yelled “Cut!” but he wasn’t angry.

He walked onto the set, holding his clipboard over his face to hide his own grin, just shaking his head in disbelief.

He looked at me and said, “Werner, I can’t use that. We don’t have the budget for a diving team to get your eyeball back.”

We had to stop filming for nearly twenty minutes because the crew couldn’t stop.

But it wasn’t just the laughter that held us up; it was the logistics of the prop.

That monocle was a specialized piece of glass, and once it hit the coffee, it was covered in cream and sugar.

One of the prop masters had to come out with a pair of silver tweezers to fish it out of the bottom of the mug.

Then, they realized the coffee was so hot it had slightly fogged the interior of the lens.

Every time they gave it back to me and I tried to put it back in, it would fog up immediately from the heat of my skin.

So there I was, the “commandant” of Stalag 13, sitting at my desk while two grown men with hair dryers were blowing hot air onto a tiny circle of glass.

Bob Crane was sitting across from me the whole time, sipping his own coffee and roasting me.

“You know, Werner,” he said, “if you just admitted the coffee was better than the script, we could all go home.”

The cameramen were leaning against their rigs, wiping tears from their eyes.

There was something so fundamentally human and ridiculous about the moment.

Here we were, dressed in these costumes that represented a very dark time in human history, and we were all reduced to giggling children because of a piece of glass in a beverage.

It broke the tension of the long week.

After that day, whenever I had a scene where I had to get particularly angry, the crew would start making “gurgling” noises the moment I opened my mouth.

John Banner would lean over and whisper “Plink!” right before the cameras started rolling.

It became a legendary piece of lore among the staff at Desilu.

I think they actually kept the footage in a vault somewhere, though back then, they didn’t really put bloopers on television.

It’s funny how the things that go wrong are the things you remember most fondly when you look back.

We spent years trying to make everything look perfect and professional, but the “perfect” moments aren’t the ones that stick in the heart.

I think about the coffee. I think about Bob’s quick wit. I think about John’s purple face.

Playing Klink was a strange journey for me, given my family’s history and what we endured.

But in those moments of shared, uncontrollable laughter, the weight of the uniforms and the set felt a little lighter.

We weren’t just actors in a sitcom; we were a family that knew how to find the joy in a mistake.

I eventually got very good at catching the monocle in my hand before it hit the floor.

But I never did learn how to keep it out of the coffee.

It’s a reminder that even in the most rigid roles, life finds a way to make you look like a human being again.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever dropped at exactly the wrong time?