-
Difficulty:
-
-
Terrain:
-
Size: 
(micro)
Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions
in our disclaimer.
Colonel Klink
Kommandant Oberst (Colonel) Wilhelm Klink (Werner Klemperer) is an old-line Luftwaffe officer of aristocratic (Junker) Prussian descent, and a social climber. He was born in Leipzig in the 1890s, though he refers to Dusseldorf, where he attended the Gymnasium (high school) (graduating 43rd in his class), as his home town. After failing the entrance exams to study law or medicine, he received an appointment from Kaiser Wilhelm II to a military academy, through the influence of his uncle, the Bürgermeister's barber, and graduated 95th in his class – the only one who has not risen to the rank of general. However, when questioned by Colonel Hogan, Colonel Klink admits that many of his higher-ranking classmates have been killed in action or shot by Hitler.
He has fencing armor in his dining room and wears a monocle. One episode has a brief shot of his office showing that Klink has a pompous coat of arms on his wall. In another episode when he thinks he is going to be rich, he claims his 500-year-old name will finally have some money as well. A veteran aviator of the First World War, Klink happily lives out the end of his military career in the relative comfort and safety of a prison camp commandant's billet - although in one episode he wished he was piloting a Heinkel bomber again. He has been stuck at the rank of colonel for 20 years with an efficiency rating a few points above "miserable".
In one episode, Klink tried to flatter Schultz, a businessman in civilian life, hoping to be hired as a bookkeeper with Schultz's toy company after the end of the war. Klink is portrayed as a vain, bumbling, self-serving bureaucrat, rather than as an evil Nazi. Indeed, officers of the German military (as opposed to the Nazi party's SS forces) were prohibited from joining any political party, including the Nazis. With his innate skills as a hustler, Hogan is able to manipulate Klink (which Klink doesn't even notice, though occasionally he wonders who is really in command of Stalag 13) through a combination of appealing to his vanity through a lot of flattery, and playing with Klink's fears of being sent to the frigid and bloody Eastern Front war with the Soviet Union, or of being hauled off by the Gestapo.
In one episode, Klink is told by General Burkhalter that to climb higher socially, he would need to marry into an important family. Burkhalter next tells him that his widowed sister and niece will be arriving at Stalag 13 soon. Klink initially thinks that Burkhalter's lovely niece is the one to whom Burkhalter is referring, but Klink finds out that it is actually Burkhalter's homely and gruff sister, Frau Linkmeyer, whom Burkhalter is trying marry off - and this becomes Klink's worst nightmare. Klink narrowly escapes from this fate with the help of Colonel Hogan. In a later episode, it is revealed that the two other Stalag commandants under Burkhalter's command also narrowly escaped marriage to Frau Linkmeyer . In the episode "The Missing Klink", Klink is nearly shot by both the Underground {because he isn't high enough rank to trade for an Underground leader prisoner} and the Gestapo (because they think he is allied super-spy "Nimrod" (née Stefan Rosenberg, allias Stephen Rigby, alias Stéphane Dubillier).
Colonel Klink had received the Citation of Merit-Second Class (fictitious) from General Stauffen during World War I. The general had visited Stalag 13 to get a briefcase from Hogan filled with explosives and a thirty-minute timer in a plot to murder Adolf Hitler, all under the unsuspecting eyes of Klink. This is typical of the scenarios in which Hogan would entangle Colonel Klink, where Klink's ego is used against him. A running gag in Hogan's Heroes is that Klink gets doused in the face with water at times for comedic effect. Another running gag is that Klink is an inept violinist, too, and is only able to play The U.S. Army Air Forces Song (in real life, Werner Klemperer was a skilled violinist, and son of the famous orchestra conductor Otto Klemperer).
Geocaching is a fun hobby in which many find enjoyment. Hope you have as much enjoyment in finding caches as we do in hiding and finding others. Part of that enjoyment is reading the logs you write on your posts. Thank you for your logs.
If cache needs maintenance or you have any questions about cache, feel free to contact us, if able we will answer promptly.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
ebpx orgjrra gjb fznyy cvarf