It was late in the autumn of 1996, and Werner Klemperer was sitting on a small, velvet-covered stage in North Hollywood. He looked exactly as you would expect—refined, articulate, and possessing that sharp, intellectual sparkle in his eyes that made Colonel Klink so much more than a two-dimensional caricature. He was there for a retrospective, a quiet evening of “Inside the Actors Studio” style questioning, when a young man in the third row stood up. The fan wasn’t holding a script or a DVD; he was clutching a vintage 1960s Hogan’s Heroes lunchbox, the kind with the rusted metal corners and the thermos still rattling inside.
The fan asked a simple question: “Mr. Klemperer, in all those years of playing the most incompetent officer in the Luftwaffe, was there ever a moment where the uniform just… failed you?” Werner leaned back, a small, knowing smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He adjusted his glasses—real ones this time, not the prop monocle—and let out a soft, melodic chuckle. He told the audience that the question brought him back to a Tuesday morning in 1967, on a set that was unusually quiet and smelling faintly of stale coffee and floor wax.
They were filming a scene in Klink’s office. It was one of those high-tension moments where the script required Klink to be at his most menacing. John Banner, the wonderful man who played Schultz, was standing at stiff attention. The director wanted a tight close-up of Klink’s face as he leaned in, mere inches from Schultz’s nose, to deliver a scathing line about the Russian Front. It was the kind of take that required absolute precision. The lighting was perfect, the crew was exhausted and ready for lunch, and the tension in the room was palpable as Werner prepared to scream.
He took a deep breath, leaned forward until he could see the sweat on John’s brow, and tightened his facial muscles to keep that famous monocle clamped firmly in his eye socket.
The monocle didn’t just fall; it performed a feat of physics that should have been impossible. As Werner lunged forward to deliver the killing blow of the dialogue, the tension in his cheek muscle acted like a spring-loaded catapult. The glass disc shot out of his eye socket with the velocity of a small pebble, arched through the air, and landed with a distinct “clink” directly inside the collar of John Banner’s heavy wool tunic.
For a second, the set was frozen. Werner was staring at John with one eye wide and the other squinting, his face frozen in a mask of theatrical rage. John Banner, a man who took his craft very seriously despite the comedy, tried his absolute best to stay in character. He stood there, chest puffed out, eyes forward, but you could see his entire body beginning to vibrate. The monocle had traveled down his shirt and was now, apparently, resting somewhere near his belt line, and the cold glass against his skin was more than he could handle.
The silence lasted maybe three seconds. Then, John let out a sound that Werner described as a “strangled teakettle.” It wasn’t a laugh yet; it was the sound of a man trying to swallow a laugh while also dealing with a piece of eyewear in his trousers. Then, John’s face turned a shade of crimson that rivaled the set’s Nazi banners. He looked at Werner, lost all pretense of being a fearful guard, and just started to howl.
Once John Banner started laughing, there was no stopping the tide. His laugh was a full-body experience—a deep, seismic rumble that made his entire frame shake. Werner, seeing his partner in crime lose it, finally let go of his own professional exterior. He collapsed against the edge of Klink’s desk, clutching his sides. The director, who had been praying for a one-take wonder so they could break for lunch, let out a long, theatrical groan and slumped into his canvas chair, covering his eyes with his hands.
But the crew was where the real chaos erupted. The boom mic operator was laughing so hard the microphone was bobbing up and down in the shot like a fishing lure. The script supervisor was doubled over her clipboard. Even the extras playing the stoic German guards at the door had broken formation and were leaning against the plywood walls for support.
Werner told the audience that the funniest part wasn’t the initial accident, but the five minutes that followed. John Banner, in his thick accent, kept trying to apologize while simultaneously trying to fish the monocle out of his uniform. He kept saying, “Werner, I am so sorry, but I think the Colonel has just performed a very intimate search of my person!”
Every time they tried to reset the scene, they would look at each other and the cycle would begin again. Werner would try to look stern, but then he would see John’s eyes darting down toward his collar, and they would both dissolve into fits of giggles like schoolboys. It took twelve takes to get through those three lines of dialogue. By the end, they weren’t even acting anymore; they were exhausted from the sheer exertion of trying not to find each other hilarious.
The director finally gave up on the close-up and filmed the scene from a distance, probably fearing that any more proximity would lead to another projectile monocle incident. Werner looked out at the fan with the lunchbox and noted that people often forgot that underneath the costumes, they were just two Jewish men who had escaped a very dark history, finding a way to laugh in the middle of a recreation of it.
That was the magic of the set, he explained. No matter how much they rehearsed or how serious the scene was supposed to be, the humanity of the cast always found a way to “clink” its way to the surface. It wasn’t just a blooper; it was a reminder that even in a fictional prisoner-of-war camp, joy was the one thing the guards couldn’t keep under lock and key.
It just goes to show that sometimes, the best way to break a character is to let the costume do the talking.
Who is your favorite character from the classic Stalag 13 crew?
