I remember sitting in a studio in Los Angeles during the late nineties, doing one of those retrospective interviews that actors of a certain vintage eventually find themselves doing. The host was a lovely man, very knowledgeable about sixties television, but he was asking the usual questions about the ratings and the controversy of a comedy set in a POW camp.

I was leaning back, probably thinking about what I wanted for lunch, when a woman in the third row of the audience stood up during the Q&A segment. She didn’t ask about the politics of the show or the scripts. She just looked at me and said, “Richard, we all loved the physical comedy, but I have to know—did Werner Klemperer ever actually have trouble with that monocle?”

I couldn’t help it. I just leaned into the microphone and started to chuckle. The memory hit me like a physical wave. You see, people forget that Werner was the son of Otto Klemperer, one of the greatest conductors who ever lived. Werner himself was a concert violinist. He was a man of immense dignity and classical training.

And then there was Bob Crane and me. We were the resident hooligans of Stage 4.

We spent about ten hours a day trying to find ways to make the “serious” actors break. Werner was the ultimate prize because he was so disciplined. He had this way of snapping that monocle into his eye that was so precise, so German, and so perfectly Klink. It was part of his armor.

One Tuesday morning, we were filming a scene in Klink’s office. It was a standard setup: John Banner, as Schultz, had to deliver some bad news, and Klink was supposed to be preoccupied with a map. Bob Crane walked over to me while the crew was tweaking the lighting and showed me a tiny velvet box.

He had gone to a specialty shop in Hollywood and found a jeweler’s loupe—a high-powered magnifying lens—that had been ground down to the exact diameter of Werner’s prop monocle. From a distance, it looked identical. Up close, it was essentially a telescope for one eye.

Bob whispered to me, “I’m swapping it. When he goes to look at Schultz, he’s going to see the molecular structure of John’s skin.”

We watched from the wings as Werner returned from his dressing room, adjusted his uniform, and sat at the desk. He didn’t even glance at the monocle sitting on his blotter. He just waited for the director to call “Action.”

Werner reached down, his fingers moving with practiced muscle memory.

He snapped it into his eye and looked directly at John Banner.

The first thing that happened wasn’t a laugh. It was a physical jolt. Werner’s head snapped back as if he’d been hit by a silent gust of wind. You have to understand that when you put a jeweler’s lens an inch from your pupil and then look at a man who is standing three feet away, your entire reality shifts.

To Werner, John Banner didn’t just look close. John Banner looked like a cosmic entity filling the entire universe.

Werner’s right eye, behind the lens, suddenly looked like a giant, pulsing marble to the rest of us. It was terrifying and hysterical at the same time. He tried to deliver his first line—something about the Gestapo or a missing shipment of bratwurst—but the words just died in his throat.

He started blinking rapidly. Because of the magnification, it looked like a strobe light was going off in his eye socket. He began to lean forward, then backward, trying to find a focal point that didn’t make him feel like he was falling into a black hole.

John Banner, being the sweetest man on earth and a true professional, just stood there in his greatcoat, waiting for his cue. He could see Werner’s eye throbbing, but he didn’t want to ruin the take. He just leaned in a little closer and whispered, “Colonel? Is everything quite alright?”

That was the breaking point. Werner tried to look down at the map on his desk to ground himself, but the map looked like a vast, topographical 3D model of the Alps. He let out this tiny, high-pitched “Gah!” and literally fell out of his swivel chair.

The set went dead silent for a heartbeat. The director, Gene Reynolds, was staring at the monitor with his jaw hanging open, wondering if his lead actor was having a neurological event.

Bob Crane and I were already on the floor. We weren’t even laughing out loud yet; we were in that state of silent, painful oxygen deprivation where you’re just vibrating.

Werner scrambled back up, his face turning a shade of purple that matched the trim on some of the officers’ uniforms. He ripped the lens out and stared at it like it was a venomous insect. He looked at the lens, then he looked at us, and then he looked at John Banner.

“John,” Werner said, his voice trembling with a mix of shock and dawning realization. “I have just seen the future, and it is entirely composed of your mustache.”

The crew exploded. I mean, the sound guy actually dropped his boom mic. The cameramen were leaning against their pedestals, shaking so hard the footage would have been unusable anyway.

John Banner picked up the lens from the desk, held it up to his own eye, and turned it toward the audience of extras. He let out that classic, booming Schultz belly laugh and shouted, “I see… EVERYTHING! I see what Hogan is doing in the tunnel! I see what the caterer is having for dinner tonight!”

It took us nearly two hours to get back to work. Every time Werner tried to put his real monocle back in, he would hesitate, squinting at it like he was checking for a trap. He became obsessed with inspecting his props. For the next three seasons, you’d see Werner Klemperer before a take, holding his monocle up to the light like a diamond merchant, making sure it was just a piece of glass and not a scientific instrument.

It became a running gag. If Werner was ever being a bit too “serious” or if the day was dragging, Bob would just whisper, “Should I get the jeweler’s kit?” and Werner would immediately break into a smile.

That was the magic of that group. We were doing a show about a dark subject, and we were doing it in a time of great transition in the industry. But between those takes, we were just a bunch of guys trying to make a classically trained violinist see the world in high definition.

I told that story to the woman in the audience, and by the end, she was laughing as hard as I was. It’s funny how a little piece of glass can define a decade of your life. We weren’t just making a TV show; we were building a brotherhood, one prank at a time.

I still miss those guys every single day. Especially Werner, who had the grace to laugh at himself when the world—literally—became a bit too big to handle.

Do you have a favorite memory of Colonel Klink or the Hogan’s Heroes gang?