[On September
20, 1945, the first group of Nazi scientists repatriated to the US under
Operation Paperclip arrived at a
landing point in Boston Harbor. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful
of histories and stories of American Nazis, leading up to this special post on
that fraught anniversary.]
[NB. Serious
SPOILERS for Amazon
Prime’s Hunters in this post’s
final paragraph!]
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 learned most directly 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?
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