[In the summer of 1945, Nazi scientists began arriving in the United States, recruited to work in the US government and eventually its space program as part of Operation Paperclip. But they weren’t the first nor the only American Nazis by any means, and this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of others, leading up to this weekend post on an interesting and fraught recent cultural representation of Paperclip.]
[NB.
Serious SPOILERS for the first season of Amazon
Prime’s Hunters in this post’s
final paragraph; I haven’t seen season two.]
On a more
historical and a more fictional side to a recent TV show’s depiction of Nazis
in America.
Like all
the histories about which I’ve written in this week’s series, the US
government’s Project
Paperclip program needs a great deal more of a place in our
collective memories. The program’s very name reflects the idea that the Nazi
pasts of the scientists brought to the United States in the months after the
war’s end would be excised from their files, these personal and collective
histories elided so that the US could advance its Cold War and (eventually) Space Race
goals and deny the Soviet Union the same opportunities. We can debate
whether bringing the scientists over and employing them was the right or wrong
decision (I’d side with “wrong,” but I understand the other arguments), but to
my mind the purposeful erasure of their Nazi histories was unequivocally wrong,
and frankly an implicit recognition that there was a shameful side to this
program that was always intended to be withheld from the American people. So
any means by which we can better remember Paperclip and those fraught decisions
and questions is a very good thing indeed.
One such
means, and I’ll freely admit the one through which I initially learned about
Project Paperclip (I had already written in
this space about von Braun, but I don’t think I had known about that
overall/official frame for the operation until watching the show earlier this
year), is Amazon Prime’s controversial
alternate history show Hunters. I
understand and largely agree with that hyperlinked article’s critiques of the
show’s depiction of the Holocaust, but would say that when it comes to the
histories of Paperclip and Nazis in America, Hunters get a couple of seemingly contradictory, equally accurate things
impressively right. On the one hand, the show depicts the ways in which the
majority of the ex-Nazis disappeared into everyday American life, many of them in Huntsville,
Alabama (site of the U.S. Space
& Rocket Center). And at the same time, the show recognizes
that some ex-Nazis (like von Braun) ended up instead in far more prominent
public positions—while the show’s choice to make the first ex-Nazi we meet the US
Secretary of State is as exaggerated as everything else about Hunters, I’d argue that exaggeration
(and perhaps especially the fact that his Nazi past has been kept secret) is
not all that far from the truth of von Braun’s influence on the US government
for decades.
The last
ex-Nazi we meet in Season 1 of Hunters
is also a prominent figure who has been hiding his Nazi past—but in this case,
I would argue that in service of a “twist” the show does a significant
injustice to its historical subjects. [Again, SPOILERS from here on out.] Throughout
the show’s arc, Al
Pacino’s Meyer Offerman serves as a mentor and father-figure to Logan
Lerman’s Jonah Heidelbaum, bringing Jonah into the team of Nazi hunters who are
tracking down these hidden figures and delivering vigilante justice to them. But
in the final
episode’s final minutes, Jonah learns that Meyer is himself an
ex-Nazi, none other than “The Wolf” who terrorized Jonah’s grandparents during
their time in a concentration camp. The revelation allows Jonah the chance to
make his own final decision about vigilante justice and murder (something he’s
been struggling with throughout the show), but it doesn’t quite work within the
show’s plot—and much more importantly, to my mind it doesn’t work at all within
the show’s historical and cultural themes. After all, this twist literally collapses
the distinctions between Nazis and Jews, Holocaust perpetrators and
victims/survivors—and that’s an injustice not only to the Holocaust itself, but
also to better remembering the histories of those Nazis who found their way to
the United States in the decades after committing those horrors.
Next
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment