Nazi-Hunting in Movies and TV Thrillers, Over the Decades

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Movies and television have re-fought World War II almost continuously for more than 70 years. I’m not talking about stories set during the war, or even stories about the Cold War, but the stories that have mined the aftermath of the war for thrillers.

An example is “Hunters,” the Prime Video streaming series that follows a group of Nazi hunters in 1970s New York as they track Nazi leaders, scientists and concentration camp officials who are hiding in the United States and, in the series’ second season, internationally.

But we’ve seen the echoes of World War II in thrillers for decades. Ground zero for a lot of these dramas was the 1960s and 1970s, but the stories began almost immediately after the war with thrillers like “The Stranger,” director Orson Welles’ 1946 noir film starring Edward G. Robinson as an agent of a United Nations war crimes commission who tracks Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler (played by Welles) to a small town in Connecticut. 

The film established many of the tensions and tropes repeated in the decades to follow, with the hunter establishing the identity of the Nazi and stalking him until the fugitive can be brought to justice. The added tension here is that the Nazi is newly married to the daughter (played by Loretta Young) of a Supreme Court justice.

“The Stranger” is famous for including actual footage of the Holocaust, as Robinson’s character tries to educate Young by showing her film of what her husband was responsible for. It’s said that many Americans didn’t believe in the existence of the death camps at this time.

I’m not sure when I first saw “The Stranger,” but it reinforced to me the idea that the post-war era was ripe with tragic memories of the Holocaust and the toll of the war – and the potential for thrillers.

It’s not like the idea was surprising to me. As a child of the 1960s, I grew up consuming not only TV shows that portrayed the war, like “Combat” and “Rat Patrol,” but entertainment that extrapolated the battles of the war into later decades. My earliest childhood comic book reading memory was the fourth issue of “The Avengers,” from 1964, in which war hero Steve Rogers – better known as Captain America – is thawed out of ice to join modern-day superheroes. It’s a story that’s well known in recent years, as Marvel movies brought Cap and all these characters to the big screen. (Cap’s rebirth and memories of the war are not the only echoes of the war in comics and comic book movies, of course.)

As someone whose father served in the Army in the war, stationed in the Pacific, I found those reverberations of the conflict to be powerful stuff. And those thrillers still populate our TV and movie screens.

‘Hunters’ is faith and vengeance

Because of its length – 18 episodes in two seasons – and its depth, “Hunters” is probably the piece of entertainment to most fully explore the idea of Nazis living in the modern world, if we’re to count the 1970s as modern.

(Spoilers ahead.)

The gritty series stars Logan Lerman as Jonah, a young man living in New York City with his grandmother, Ruth (Jeannie Berlin) in the summer of 1977. When Ruth is killed by an intruder, Logan comes to believe she wasn’t the victim of a random break-in and robbery.

Enter Al Pacino as Meyer Offerman, a Jewish NYC millionaire who, we quickly learn, leads a secret team called the Hunters. The group, comprised of death camp survivors like Murray and Mindy (Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane) as well as hardened former British intelligence agent Sister Harriett (Kate Mulvaney) and Lonny Flash (Josh Radnor), a washed-up actor. Along with a diverse team of avengers, the Hunters track Nazis in hiding and bring them to justice – usually by executing them.

On the other side of the battle is the Colonel, played by Lena Olin, leader of the NYC-based Nazis and a woman who is much more than she seems.

There’s a strong element of the Jewish faith in “Hunters” that gives it a very welcome layer of drama and heart over what might otherwise have been just a revenge drama/”Mission: Impossible” knockoff. We get to know the characters and their beliefs and the story is much richer for it. 

It’s interesting in that the series uses as a major plot point Operation Paperclip, a U.S. program that brought Nazi scientists to this country after the war for their scientific expertise. Among them was Wernher von Braun, who brought innovations to the U.S. space program during the race to the moon. Von Braun is a character here, although he isn’t as prominent as he was in “For All Mankind,” the Apple TV+ series about an alternate history of the space race.

Operation Paperclip, for those who might not know, also figured prominently in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” the 2014 Marvel superhero movie. In it, Toby Jones plays Zola, a Nazi scientist brought to America by Operation Paperclip.

“Hunters” is the latest and most exhaustive treatment of the post-World War II thriller, but it follows in the footsteps of many movies and TV series.

From trash to classics

It’s appropriate that “Hunters” is set in the 1970s because that decade saw what was perhaps the height of Hollywood’s interest in turning overlooked and on-the-lam Nazis into mass market entertainment. The period is highlighted by two major studio releases.

To be certain, the topic of Nazis in modern day had been turned into popular entertainment before. Who can forget “They Saved Hitler’s Brain,” a low-budget film from 1968 that … well, the general idea is pretty much conveyed in the title. It is widely regarded as a bad film. If you’re tempted to watch it, I highly recommend finding online the four-minute compilation of all of the scenes of Hitler’s head in an aquarium. (Surely someone has theorized that the epic animated series “Futurama,” with its proliferation of living heads in jars, was inspired by this movie.)

TV series from the 1960s onward used Nazis for plot points, usually for dramatic purposes but also for comedy: The less said about “Hogan’s Heroes” the better, since it doesn’t fit the post-war theme of this article, but how about “Big Nazi on Campus,” an episode of the goofy 1980s comedy series “Sledge Hammer!”

“The Twilight Zone” did a better job with the episode “Deaths Head Revisited.” So did “Wonder Woman,” for that matter – with a plot that would have fit with “Hunters” – in the episode “Anschluss ’77,” about Nazis in South America. In a 1995 episode, “The X-Files” also tackled Operation Paperclip.

The twin monuments of modern-day Nazi stories came only two years apart in the 1970s and were based on notable novels, which is probably why they’re fondly remembered to this day. And one of the two is a classic.

“Marathon Man” came first, in 1976, and is widely regarded as the better of the films. It was based on the novel by William Goldman and pitted Dustin Hoffman as a NYC doctoral student against Lawrence Olivier as Szell, a Nazi in hiding. The infamous “Is it safe?” scene, as Szell drills into the teeth of Hoffman’s character, is probably what most people think of when they remember the movie.

But “Marathon Man,” directed by John Schlesinger, is a taut thriller with a great cast that also includes Roy Scheider, William Devane and Marthe Keller. 

The other big “Nazis in the 1970s” movie was “The Boys from Brazil,” released in 1978 and based on Ira Levin’s novel about Josef Mengele, played by Gregory Peck, living in South America and looking to trigger teenage Hitler clones he’s placed around the world. Olivier, who played such a menacing figure as the Nazi scientist in “Marathon Man,” here plays an aging Nazi hunter who, after coming to believe the plot is really underway, confronts Mengele.

“The Boys from Brazil” could certainly be considered an inspiration for “Hunters,” with its aging antagonists and young Nazi hunters including, early on, Steve Guttenberg in a rare serious role. The movie, directed by Franklin Schaffner, also has a wonderful cast, including James Mason, Denholm Elliott and Rosemary Harris, familiar to later moviegoers as Peter Parker’s Aunt May in the initial set of “Spider-Man” movies.

Heroes and superheroes

There’s something so unlikely, but so chilling, in the idea of Nazis living among us and so pleasing about those who hunt them, as we saw played out in real life with Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust who was discovered living in Argentina and captured by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, in 1960. That real-life drama, which has been fictionalized officially and unofficially, ended with Eichmann’s execution in 1962.

There are shades of the Eichmann pursuit and execution in a number of unlikely spots, but one of the most entertaining was in the “X-Men” movies. In the original 2000 film, we see that the Magneto character was a child in Nazi concentration camps. The experience shaped his way of looking at the world for the rest of his life and proved his suspicions that those in power will sometimes do all they can to target and exterminate an oppressed group.

Magneto’s quest is more fully dramatized in the 2011 prequel “X-Men: First Class,” which not only depicts Nazi experimentation like we saw in “The Boys from Brazil” but Magneto’s eventual activity, in the 1960s, as a Nazi hunter. More than a few people suggested they would have happily watched an entire movie of Michael Fassbender’s Magneto hunting and killing Nazis.

Much more irregular in their treatment of Hitler and Nazi hunters are “Top Secret,” a 1984 comedy by the creators of “Airplane,” and director Quentin Tarrantino’s 2009 war film, “Inglourious Basterds,” which warped history and introduced major changes in the fate of Hitler.

For a movie that is so melodramatic, “The Boys from Brazil” has one of the most chilling lines of dialogue in films of its subject matter, as war criminal Mengele is confronted by Lieberman. It was chilling in the 1970s and is perhaps even more chilling today, in a time some Americans are embracing fascism. 

Mengele tells his hunter he saw films about the war on TV, late at night in his motel room.

“Films of Hitler,” Mengele said. “They’re showing films about the war, the movement. People are fascinated. The time is ripe. … The right Hitler for the right future, tailor made for the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s …” 

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