Depending upon whom one asks, Hogan's Heroes was either a cutting edge situation comedy or a testament to how desensitized to human suffering American television viewers had become in the 1960s. The basic plot of the popular television show centered around American Col. Robert Hogan, played by Bob Crane, and a band of other prisoners of war, who had established a secret complex within and below the grounds of Stalag 13, a Nazi concentration camp. From there they engaged in sabotage and rescue operations against the Third Reich. Every bed was a passageway, every coffee pot a radio. For six seasons on CBS, Hogan and his group used a stash of supplies, that would have made the Third Army envious, to confound Hitler's hapless forces in and around Dusseldorf.

Hogan's Heroes was loosely based on the play Stalag 17, triggering a lawsuit by the...