With the alt-right’s nighttime, torchlit march on Charlottesville, where chants of “Jews will not replace us!” could be heard, and the disruption of European soccer matches by neo-Nazis thriving across the continent, Nazis — the original brownshirts, not the modern-day wannabes — have reentered the public imagination. And with that, so, too, has the idea of vigilante justice.
In the broader culture, the Third Reich never actually left us. The evil of Nazism and depictions of its steadfast servants have always been en vogue, at least in popular culture. Whether Hogan’s Heroes in the 1960s, the television miniseries Holocaust in the 1970s, the feature films Sophie’s Choice and Schindler’s List in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively, the smash Broadway musical The Producers, which set a new Nazi-mocking tone for the millennium, or countless other artistic and documentary representations, the image of jackboots and high-handed salutes has continued to fascinate artists and audiences alike.
Now, the resurgence of a particular genre of this Nazi fixation is upon us, one that is guided by the muse of revenge. Good revenge has always gotten a bad rap.
Netflix is showcasing a new documentary, The Devil Next Door, a five-part series about John Demjanjuk, a Cleveland autoworker accused in the 1970s of being the sadistic Treblinka guard “Ivan the Terrible.” The Justice Department denaturalized and extradited him to Israel, where he was tried and found guilty, only to be sent back when new evidence was introduced that cast doubt that he was, in fact, Ivan the Terrible. Regardless, he was still a guard in a death camp. On that allegation, he was eventually extradited to Germany, where he was found guilty (he died while awaiting appeal).
There’s more. Bestselling novelist Joseph Kanon’s latest thriller is The Accomplice, which revolves around an aging Nazi doctor suddenly recognized by one of his former victims. The Holocaust survivor’s nephew, a CIA agent, takes it upon himself to settle the score. A recently published work of nonfiction, Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America, by Debbie Cenziper, describes how the United States got into the business of apprehending and deporting some of Hitler’s most notorious henchmen, who managed to reinvent themselves as unblemished American citizens.
Soon, Al Pacino will be coming to Amazon Prime with a new series, Hunters, about a gang of improbable Nazi-hunters taking justice into its own hands and ridding Brooklyn of hundreds who had infiltrated the borough with designs on a Fourth Reich.
What these offerings all have in common, and what makes them so compelling and maddening, is the innocent pleasure of Nazis receiving their due, regardless of the passage of time or the fact that such frontier justice is being undertaken by vengeful hands with wide open eyes rather than the steadier arms and dispassionate heart of a blindfolded Lady Justice.
In the end, either way, the audience or reader is rewarded with a dead Nazi.
It may sound like blind vengeance, but the deliberate act is performed as a moral imperative. The Hunters trailer shows Pacino mixing sing-song Yiddish with Talmudic logic as he surveys the photos of his targets and says: “This isn’t murder; this is mitzvah.”
And he’s right. Death is the virtuous endgame of hunting for Nazis. It’s the reason the outcome is so emotionally satisfying. Just deserts is the appropriate term because isn’t that exactly what escaped Nazis justly deserve?
In art, tracking Nazis down and bringing them to justice makes the happy ending of a Hollywood movie even better. The recent Operation Finale (2018), which dramatized Israel’s kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, had that effect. After an excruciating trial, he was hanged — the only person the Jewish state has ever punished with a death sentence. More often in such movies, courtrooms are forsaken for suspenseful point-blank assassinations.
The basic plotline is a familiar one. Nazis are on the lam, hiding in plain sight, sometimes under bizarre aliases. Eichmann was, in actuality, raising rabbits! In some, they are respected industrialists, dentists, or doctors, such as in The Odessa File (1975), Marathon Man (1976), and The Boys from Brazil (1978), respectively.
Some challenge the crass metaphor of Jews inching toward the gas chambers like “sheep to the slaughter.” They are portrayed, instead, actually killing Nazis while the Holocaust is in full flame. This was the conceit in Escape from Sobibor (1987), Uprising (2001), Defiance (2008), and Inglourious Basterds (2009). The Rich Cohen book The Avengers (2000) and the off-Broadway play The Retributionists (2009) covered similar ground.
Screenwriters knew that audiences would take just as much pleasure in seeing Indiana Jones, admittedly hunting for ancient artifacts, kill Nazis as his patented Indy derring-do.
Recent superhero movie Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) required very little movie magic for audiences to detest the bad guy — who happened to be a Nazi.
Nazis make for terrific movie villains. Disposing of them never raises an objection. The Almighty might have said, “Vengeance is mine.” But when it comes to Nazis, revenge is both a spectator and open-participation sport.
Given the enormity of the Holocaust, its revulsion wasn’t easily dissipated. Whatever manner of justice that had taken place — the Nuremberg Trials, restitution payments, or the token return of stolen assets — reconciliation on the order of a clean slate was not likely. Germans had hoped that this national stain would eventually fade from pop culture prominence. But that was not to be, even though Islamic terrorism soon became its own dramatic trope.
Nazis were never let off the hook. Filmmakers, novelists, and dramatists would never run out of ways in which to make them pay.
Yet no one cops to the virtues of vengeance. To rationalize revenge is to become a social outcast. But there’s no reason to be bashful about our motives or to reject the moral logic of revenge. Stories about revenge are actually about justice. There is no true justice unless victims feel avenged. Worldwide studies on neuroscience confirm that the human brain is hardwired for fairness. Seeing someone get away with murder activates the same sectors of the brain, whether that brain belongs to the victim or a bystander.
Vengeance and justice are one and the same, regardless of the platitudes of polite society.
Justice does not have to take place in a courtroom. This is the basic framework of a revenge movie.
One of the reasons to explain the general public’s lack of confidence in the legal system is because with plea bargains rampant and judicial manpower overstretched, the guilty often either go free or are severely underpunished. But not in a revenge movie. And that’s what makes them so compulsive. All revenge films operate under one shared premise: The legal system is given the first opportunity to make things right, and it fails. Sometimes, the legal system itself, corrupted and self-motivated (think: Sweeney Todd), is the source of the injustice. More often, lawlessness simply goes unredressed.
Once that happens, the avenger is deputized into action. He or she is nearly always a reluctant hero, unsuited to the task (The 2018 film Peppermint comes to mind). Sometimes, the duty is too demanding or the wrongdoers too numerous; a vigilante must answer the call (think: Showtime’s Dexter). But regardless of who takes on the assignment of evening the score, a solitary avenger is suddenly motivated by a moral absolute. And audiences, no longer passively eating popcorn, demand retribution.
Leaving the task undone is simply not an option because it would be morally unbearable to do so.
That is the reason why audiences are willing to overlook that the avenger has assumed the role of judge, jury, and executioner. In fact, they are cheering him or her on.
If vengeance is so wrong, as many say, why then are revenge movies so immensely popular — box-office extravaganzas, critically acclaimed, Oscar worthy? Were ticketholders and movie critics duped, patsies of deceptive marketing? Surely, they figured out quickly that The Searchers (1956), Unforgiven (1992), Braveheart (1995), Eye for an Eye (1996), Gladiator (2000), The Patriot (2000), In the Bedroom (2001), The Brave One (2007), Law Abiding Citizen (2009), True Grit (2010), and The Revenant (2015) were revenge films. Yet, no one jumped from their seats, complained that the film was socially pornographic, and demanded a refund. On the contrary, everyone manages to stay put until the wrongdoer repays the debt, to both society and the victim.
And that repayment is often made with his or her own life.
Vengeance is not some animalistic, thoughtless regression into lawlessness. It is not the province of impulsive barbarians. The avenger knows exactly what he or she is doing and why it must be done. There is a plan; serious thought is undertaken. The revenge-seeker knows precisely how much must be redeemed. “Getting back what is owed,” “payback,” “score-settling,” “getting even,” “eye-for-an-eye,” “measure for measure” — this is the vocabulary of accountants, not savages.
In the case of Nazis, most people do not quibble between justice and revenge. The Israelis could have simply assassinated Eichmann in Buenos Aires and few would have faulted them. President Barack Obama had no plans to capture Osama bin Laden and have him brought back to stand trial. The Navy SEALs entered the compound in Pakistan under a presumption that bin Laden would not be taken alive. Soon after the assassination, the president, himself a former law professor, addressed the nation and announced that “justice” had been done. I recall no American lamenting how unfair it was to the man who inspired the attacks on 9/11. In fact, I remember that there was rejoicing in the streets.
Was it then justice or revenge? Actually, it was both. Crimes against humanity have a way of dispensing with the ceremonies of conventional justice. A more finite manner of closure is undertaken, with less hairsplitting and regret.
Sometimes vengeance is misunderstood in an altogether different way. Netflix’s The Devil Next Door is a good reminder of it, largely because it is a true story.
By the time Demjanjuk was finally punished for his participation at Treblinka, decades had passed since he was first discovered. (He didn’t need to be Ivan the Terrible to be deported. He was terrible enough.) In the documentary’s final moments, he is seen in a German courtroom, at the age of 91, lying on a gurney, nearly unconscious, awaiting his fate. He died 10 months later with his conviction still on appeal. (Edgar Ray Killen, the mastermind in the murders of civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney during the Freedom Summer of 1964, met a similar fate in Mississippi. It wasn’t until 2005, at the age of 80, when he was finally convicted. He died in prison 12 years later.)
But The Devil Next Door shows that during his 1986 extradition, when he was a much spryer 66-year-old, Demjanjuk’s neighbors defended him. After all, he had been a model U.S. citizen, a doting grandfather, and suffered from medical problems. All true, although he was seen, under surveillance, in much better shape than how feebly he presented himself in court.
One of the unavoidable anomalies of aging is that even a mass murderer, in the forgiving light of time, appears harmless and benign. The horror of that person’s crime is entombed within a body that shuffles, wheezes, and verges on collapse. Once brawny and menacing, now, by all appearances, cuddly and cute.
The moral imperative of Nazi hunting — whether performed by Pacino or the U.S. Justice Department; whether it results in assassination or deportation — is that there is no statute of limitations on mass murder. Justice must be done, no matter by what name it is called, even after many failed tries. In the aftermath of an atrocity, the moral universe is blind to redemption. Some crimes cannot be altered by the mere pull of a heartstring.
And those were the very crimes that the Nazis committed.
Thane Rosenbaum is a distinguished university professor at Touro College and the author of Payback: The Case for Revenge. His forthcoming book, Saving Free Speech … from Itself, will be published in March 2020.
