Amazon Show Hunters Recommendation. I’ve spent most of my time here on THiNC. avoiding TV shows. I probably politely decline a television show a week. (How do so many TV shows get made?) I don’t have anything specific against a serial show – except for maybe the normal repetitive serial nature of television. You know – create the setup – and then repeat the schtick over and over again. Write your way through the bad guy, who passes the torch, just in time, to start the hunt and climb all over again. Just not a huge fan of the tease. Now, if you are able to write a great start to finish, with a plot heading in a concise and definitive direction, then maybe I’ll join in. (Oh, I don’t know, maybe like Taboo, The OA, Killing Eve, or better than that, Dark, then you just found me some prime THiNC. material!)
But today, here I am, bringing you a series all the same. This one is brought to you by Lairs – a real world friend. (I have FRIENDS? No, I actually don’t. But he is kind enough not to tell me to go away. So file that under ‘For What It’s Worth.’) Now, what we have here is a brilliant question – and a show that is wrapped around that same question. And you know what, sometimes the moral question is reason enough all by itself. The show is Amazon’s Hunters. It’s actually a show that has a very Quinton Tarantino-esque feel to it. But imbued within every fiber of the show’s being is a philosophical, metaphysical, existential, theological question that may just physically hurt to even consider.
Get it? In episode two it is declared that at Nuremberg, the US executed 12 perpetrators, out of 8 million. The moral question here on the table for us to consider is…what does it take to grant moral atonement for an entire country that murdered over 6 million Jews? Never mind the handicapped, the gypsies, the million children that the Nazis murdered. Worse, what if I were to tell you that influential German officers that were involved in this torture and eradication were alive today, living punishment free on our soil? What then? Does society have an obligation to act? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m literally asking that question. A simple yes or no will do.
The Israeli Mossad have answered this specific question. During World War II, Adolf Eichmann was a SS-Obersturmbannführer, and helped organize the Holocaust. He was responsible with managing the logistics involved in deporting millions to ghettos, internment centers, and extermination camps. Well, after the Mossad got a tip that Eichmann had taken refuge in Argentina, they snuck into the country, and captured him. Now, Argentina would have never in a million years allowed Israel to pull a stunt like this off – so they were forced to literally sneak him out of the country under the cover of darkness. (Read the mind blowing book of this account, “Hunting Eichmann” which details this story. It an amazing read. And if you’d like a shorter version of the story, you can find it here.)
So the question remains. What do you do if you discover a Nazi lives next door to you. Not just any Nazi, but a Nazi who happened to murder thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands…hell, let’s just say he physically pulled the trigger on millions…I don’t care. Do you just let it go? Do you call the cops? What would they do? Do you call Israel? How would that even be done? Do you poison his well? Suffocate him in his sleep? Give him grace, and forgive him? Is that your place?
Have you heard the story of Eva For? Eva is a Jewish woman who was forced to submit to cruel, horrific pseudo-scientific medical experiments. She was one of more than a hundred sets of twins, who had been tortured by a man named Dr. Mengele. You can even read the unrealistic horrors of her story in the fantastic book “Echoes of Auschwitz” published in 2000. It was Mengele’s genetics laboratory that studied the idea that twins could hold the answer to producing the “perfect” Aryan master race. (The movie Rabbit anyone?) “Three times a week we’d be placed naked in a room, for six to eight hours, to be measured and studied. They took blood from one arm and gave us injections in the other. After one such injection I became very ill and was taken to the hospital. If I had died, Mengele would have given Miriam a lethal injection in order to do a double autopsy. When I didn’t die, he carried on experimenting with us and as a result Miriam’s kidneys stopped growing. They remained the size of a child’s all her life.”
I’m sorry, but that is literally the stuff of nightmares right there. Unbelievable really – more unbelievable is the fact that Miriam chose to forgive Germany, in toto. Just like that…she forgave the sum total of the entire offending country. (Eva’s doctor, Mengele, actually escaped to South America as well, and eventually died while swimming in the ocean in Sāo Paulo. I’ve long maintained that Mengele’s death was not an accident…but that is another topic entirely.) Well, many fellow Jews thought Eva a traitor, and told her so. Is forgiveness the correct path? Does it betray the enormity of the debt? What do you do when the scope and scale of something larger than one’s mind is even able to conceive of?
Well, the new Amazon show is happy to go there…to not only open up that existential can o’ worms, but to dive, swim, and marinate in said worm pool. The show creates fictional Nazis, and then uses its fictional Jewish hit squad as a sort of psychic palette cleanser. I’ve only watched a couple of episodes so far, and the rinse repeat of the show gets a bit tiring. But I have not gotten tired of the persistent questions the show posits. WHAT WOULD YOU DO? WHAT SHOULD WE DO?
How would a responsible society respond? How did they respond? I can tell you exactly how the United States responded. There is a 600-page report that the Justice Department struggled to keep secret for years. The report titled, “The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” provides evidence about two dozen of the most infamous Nazi cases the U.S. Government attempted to deal with. I literally just discovered the report yesterday, but the white paper is so incredible I read it front to back in the span of an evening. It’s an utterly mind blowing read – so mind blowing, that last night, I finally got my answer about Mengele. Remember the question I posed two paragraphs ago about Eva and her Angel of Death? You know, yesterday when I was clueless and naive? Well, a not insignificant portion of the report discusses exactly how Mengele died, and whether or not it was actually an elaborate ruse to avoid being caught. The U.S. Government brought in handwriting experts, went to South American and exhumed his body, all in the effort to provide the proof necessary that he was actually dead.
But the most embarrassing details the report uncovers is the fact that the United States created a safe haven for Nazis for years. The CIA worked directly with Nazi emigrants as important intelligence sources. Not only that, but the report proves that the government worked to cover up our work with numerous Nazi murderers. The report even goes so far as to call the CIA’s work with Nazis, collaboration. The government knowingly allowed entry to the United States these “persecutors” regardless of their knowing about their egregious pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” the report stated.
So what would you do? Would you collaborate, as the U.S. government did in some instances. Or would you uncover them from their hiding places? Or better yet, would you kill them where they slept? Well, the show Hunters has an answer for you. The larger question might just be, should this question be this entertaining? If you watch, I’d love to know what you think of my Amazon Show Hunters Recommendation.
Edited by: CY
