I'm a complete nut for documentaries, but only when they cover unique subjects. Offer up a documentary on the Revolutionary War, and I'll pass. Show me one documenting the war from the eyes of the British, and I'm all in. Nazi Hunters obviously falls into the latter category and snagged my attention from the start.
The general premise for the entire eight-part series is quickly set up in the first episode. In the 1960s, the world government decided that the time for prosecution of Nazi war criminals had passed, deciding to shut down the hunt for war criminals even though several were unaccounted for. Although much of the Western World was willing to let the past stay in the past, for many, the atrocities committed by the Nazis was still very fresh. Worse, many of the regime's worst offenders were still on the loose, many having escaped through the ODESSA network into South America.
Each episode of Nazi Hunters profiles a different war criminal and the efforts of men like Simon Weisenthal and the Israeli Mossad to track them down. The Nazis featured include:
- Herbert Cukurs
- Adolf Eichmann
- Klaus Barbie
- Erich Priebke
- Joseph Mengele
- Kurt Lischka
- Paul Touvier
- Gustav Wagner/ Franz Strangl
Before delving into the details surrounding their capture, each episode spends time setting up their role in the Reich and their crimes. The list of atrocities accredited to the above men is grim. Strangl, nicknamed "The White Death," was commadant of both Soibior and Treblinka extermination camps. Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons," was an infamous torturer, often times using electroshock and dogs as instruments of sexual abuse. Cukars, a notorious Kommando, executed hundreds of men, women and children (some in front of their mothers) in the Riga ghetto. Perhaps the worst on the list, Mengele, was nicknamed the "Angel of Death," for his grisly human experiments at Auschwitz.
Each story is as unique as the person it focuses on. For instance, Cukurs was tracked down by the Mossad and targeted in a scheme that you would expect to hear in a movie. After befriending Cukurs under the alias "Anton Kunzle," Israeli Mossad agents were able to lure Cukurs to Uruguay under pretenses of helping to expand his struggling business, offering panoramic flights around Sao Paulo, Brazil. Once in Uruguay, Kunzle led Cukurs to a house in a remote suburb in Montevideo, where he was executed by four Mossad agents and left stuffed in a trunk in the house. Once back in Europe, the agents alerted authorities in both South America and Germany to the whereabouts of Cukurs's body, only to have it initially dismissed as a prank.
Other stories involve a TV news crew discovering Priebke living in a small town by finding his name in the phone book. Or Barbie, who was hunted down by a middle-class German housewife who vowed to track down the war criminal, who for a time served as a CIA operative. The stories are unbelievable and only get wilder.
It's probably worth pointing out that Nazi Hunters doesn't pull many punches when it comes to detailing each Nazi's crime or their eventual fate. There are numerous images of people being shot and buried in mass graves, Holocaust images and even a shot of Cukurs's body in the trunk after it was discovered. The shots are brief, but some images are graphic.
My only major complaint with the entire series, which is admittedly based more on my personal beliefs, is the episode involving Adolf Eichmann. Although he is usually considered the architect of the "Final Solution," I've always been a believer in the idea that Eichmann's trial was always more of a cathartic release. He was low-level cog in a much bigger machine whose primary duty was to make sure the train was running. The episode takes the opposite approach, painting him to be Mephistopheles.
Though I wasn't expecting the episode to delve into what is a rather controversial subject, some acknowledgement would have been interesting. But, like I said, it's a personal nitpick and probably not worth the digital ink spilled over it. Beyond that one issue, I was absolutely fascinated by Nazi Hunters and recommend it for anyone interested in the subject, or in offbeat documentaries.
