John Banner

John Banner, born Johann Banner on January 28, 1910, in Stanislau, Austria-Hungary (now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine), was an Austrian-born American actor who worked across Broadway, film, and television. He is best remembered for portraying Sergeant Hans Schultz in the CBS situation comedy Hogan's Heroes, which ran from 1965 to 1971. Banner died on January 28, 1973, his 63rd birthday, from a burst abdominal aortic aneurysm while visiting friends in Vienna.

Born to Jewish parents, Banner pursued a law degree at the University of Vienna before choosing a career in acting. In 1938, while performing with a theater troupe in Switzerland, Hitler annexed Austria to Nazi Germany, and Banner emigrated to the United States. He learned English rapidly, though early in his American career he was still acquiring fluency and had to memorize his stage lines phonetically. He married Elizabeth Raudnitz in Los Angeles on October 11, 1940. During World War II, Banner enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces, completed basic training in Atlantic City, and served as a supply sergeant until 1945, at one point posing for a military recruiting poster. His family members who had remained in Vienna perished in Nazi concentration camps, a loss also noted by fellow Hogan's Heroes cast member Robert Clary, himself a Holocaust survivor.

Banner's Broadway career spanned 1939 to 1947 and comprised three productions. He appeared in the musical revue From Vienna, which ran for approximately two months in 1939, and in the comic play Pastoral, in which he held a leading role during its brief run in November of that same year. His final Broadway appearance came in The Big Two, another comic play that ran briefly in January 1947.

His film career encompassed more than 40 feature films. His first credited screen role was a German captain in Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), opposite Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers. He subsequently played a Gestapo agent in 20th Century Fox's Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas (1943). Though the typecasting of such roles did not please him, they were the parts he was offered. He later appeared as the German town mayor in The Young Lions (1958), as Rudolf Höss in Operation Eichmann (1961), and as Gregor Strasser in Hitler (1962). In 1953, he had a supporting role in the Kirk Douglas film The Juggler, and the year before Hogan's Heroes premiered, he played a World War II German home guard soldier in 36 Hours (1964), starring James Garner.

Banner accumulated more than 70 television appearances between 1950 and 1970, with credits including The Lone Ranger, Sky King, Adventures of Superman, Father Knows Best, Perry Mason, The Untouchables, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and The Partridge Family, among many others. In 1954, he held a recurring role as Bovarro in the children's science-fiction series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Two years later, he appeared in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "Safe Conduct" alongside Werner Klemperer, who would later play Colonel Klink opposite Banner in Hogan's Heroes.

Hogan's Heroes debuted on CBS in 1965, with Banner playing Sergeant Schultz, a bumbling German guard at a World War II prisoner-of-war camp whose primary motivation was avoiding trouble with his superiors. The prisoners frequently bribed Schultz with food and candy, and he routinely feigned ignorance of their clandestine activities, delivering the catchphrase "I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!" — which over the course of the series was shortened to "I know nothing. Nothing!" Banner appeared in every episode of the six-year run. In a 1967 interview with TV Guide, he described Schultz as "the representative of some kind of goodness in any generation" and emphasized that the character was not a Nazi. Banner married his second wife, Christine Gemenne, on June 19, 1965, the same year the series launched. In 1968, during the show's run, he co-starred with Hogan's Heroes colleagues Werner Klemperer, Leon Askin, and Bob Crane in the Cold War comedy film The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, starring Elke Sommer.

After Hogan's Heroes was cancelled in 1971, Banner starred as Uncle Latzi in the short-lived television comedy The Chicago Teddy Bears. His final acting appearance was in a March 17, 1972, episode of The Partridge Family, after which he retired to France with his Paris-born wife.