Nazi Hunters

This series of thirteen one-hour films tells the tale of that extraordinary group of people, the Nazi Hunters. They chased some of the most hated and reviled people on earth. Sometimes they did it for the highest of motives. Sometimes in ways that, when revealed, would horrify their own supporters. They were chasing those whose crimes were so horrendous that they demanded retribution. And there were many prepared to hunt the perpetrators until justice was done - from Churchill to the SAS to the Strategists who planned the D Day landings to Mossad. These stories of pursuit and the struggle to balance the scales of justice are full of drama and tragedy.

Part 1: Hunting the Nazi Rocket Scientists

These stories of pursuit and the struggle to balance the scales of justice are full of drama and tragedy. Brilliant German scientists worked for the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s, creating the V2 ballistic missile. When the war ended, the US was desperate to get its hands on these scientists before the Russians did. They wanted their expertise as the need for military superiority overrode any concerns of bringing these criminals to justice. Their wartime work hid a dark secret. Hundreds of slave labourers died building the V2. There was a chase across Germany in 1945 to get them before the Russians did. But these rocket scientists had blood on their hands.

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Part 2: The Hunt for Martin Bormann

Martin Bormann was vital to Hitler. Bormann made Hitler, and the Third Reich, rich through thinly veiled extortion schemes such as The Hitler Endowment Fund of German Industry. He also came up with the idea of charging royalties on Hitler's image on postage stamps - and so made his Fuhrer personally wealthy. He became so close to Hitler and the running of the war that Hitler once screamed "To win this war, I need Bormann!". More sinister was Bormann's involvement in ensuring the progress of the final solution . Himmler had to report back to Bormann on the extermination of the Jews. Bormann, Hitler's doctor Stumpfegger and Artur Axmann (the Head of the Hitler Youth) all left the bunker in Berlin together after Hitler's suicide on 30th April 1945. After Axmann left them at the Lehrter Station Bormann and Stumpfegger disappeared. This led to one of the longest Nazi hunts in history.

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Part 3: Justice SAS Style

Former Gestapo officers in Eastern France, Hans-Dietrich Ernst and Heinrich Neuchtschwanger. Also targeted, the evil Dr Rohde, who executed four female spies by lethal injection. Ernst and Neuchtschwanger murdered some 31 SAS soldiers caught during a secret mission, Operation Loyton. The SAS War Crimes Investigation Team, commanded by Major Eric Alistair 'Bill' Barkworth. SAS secretly hunted down these Gestapo officers. It is said that the SAS always prefer to 'hunt their fox in secret' - and this is what they did here. Alongside him was SOE operative, Vera Atkins There were 31 missing SAS men, victims of the botched Operation Loyton. But there were no clues. No bodies. They had just disappeared. It smelled bad.

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Part 4: Peiper the Murderer of Malmedy

Joachim Peiper and his vicious bunch of SS thugs marched US 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion into a field near Malmedy in January 1945 and shot them. There were a series of other massacres of US soldiers which were attributed to Peiper. The hunters were members of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. They were horrified by the brutality of the action. It was also the biggest massacre of US soldiers in the Second World War and caused uproar among the US public.

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Part 5: Death Camp Kommondant

Franz Stangl was the Nazi commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps in Poland. He was responsible for the extermination of around 900,000 men, women and children. At the end of the war, he escaped to Italy where he joined a "rat-line" organised by Vatican officials. From there, he disappeared. Simon Wiesenthal was a survivor of the Holocaust. Born in the Ukraine in 1908, he was rounded up with his family in 1939 and imprisoned in a labour camp where he serviced the German railroad. In May 1945, he was liberated by Allied soldiers from Mauthausen camp. His six-foot-frame weighed barely 99 pounds. Restored to health, he vowed to track down some of the Nazi monsters who had put him and so many other Jews through hell.

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Part 6: The Good Nazi

Speer's crimes included using and organising slave labour in death camps and prolonging the war by his fanatical work to develop the Nazi war machine. He was hunted by two groups. The UN War Crimes Commission, but first he was wanted by the US Strategic Bombing Survey. This strange group of people included the economist JK Galbraith and the veteran arms negotiator Paul Nitze. These were hardly hardened prosecutors and they had authorisation from the highest level to keep Speer out of the hands of the Criminal Investigators from the UN. They tracked Speer down and spirited him away to a country house after the war, where he was extensively questioned, giving the Americans detailed information about the effectiveness of US bombing. This was critical intelligence and would eventually shape much of US strategy during the Cold War. When this story leaked out it caused huge controversy as the hint has always been that the Americans agreed to go easy on Speer at his trial in exchange for his co-operation.

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Part 7: The Angel of Death

Joseph Mengele who experimented on adults and children in the Auschwitz death camps. He was a prime target and was, for many years, the world's most wanted criminal. The Hunters were Simon Wiesenthal, the UN War Crimes Commission and even Mossad. But none of them succeeded. Wiesenthal lacked the resources. The official investigators made blunders, twice letting Mengele slip through their hands. Mossad preferred to concentrate on Eichmann. After the war, the victorious powers had literally millions of POWs to screen. Among them were 22 people called Josef Mengele. So even though the hunt was one for the "Angel of death" of Auschwitz, he simply got lost in an American POW camp. Once out, Mengele was simply able to slip out of view thanks to the Nazi escape organisation, Odessa. But one man would not give up on him. Simon Wiesenthal had been imprisoned in concentration camps twice during the war, but managed to get out of the first through a degree of collaboration. He was re-captured after a year and survived because his new guards needed prisoners in order to escape being sent to fight on the Eastern Front.

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Part 8: The Jewish Avengers

The story of the Jewish Avengers after the Second World War has been rarely told. For the first time, a group of men and women, now in their 80s, tell the extraordinary story of how some Jews decided after the war had ended to seek brutal and shocking “eye for an eye” revenge on the Germans. They believed that those who’d delivered the holocaust had simply not paid a high enough price.

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Part 9: Killing Reinhardt Heydrich

They called him “The Hangman”. Reinhardt Heydrich, became one of the most hated men in all of occupied Europe. He was the real mastermind behind the “Final Solution” and created the blueprint for the Holocaust. Heydrich’s ambition knew no bounds, he even wanted to replace Adolf Hitler. He ruled occupied Czechoslovakia with a rod of iron and thought himself untouchable. But in London, a top-secret hit squad had different ideas. They began to target Heydrich for execution…

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Part 10: Hunting Adolf Eichman

Adolf Eichmann - The logistical brains behind Hitler’s Final Solution. He organised the transportation and incarceration of 6 million Jews to the death camps. The Holocaust even made him rich. Eichmann stole the Jews’ last possessions and sold them for profit. At the end of the war, when others were being arrested, Adolf Eichmann vanished. He had escaped to Argentina where he thought he was safe, but on his tail was Israel’s ruthless intelligence agency…Mossad.

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Part 11: The Monster and the Butcher

1987 was a dramatic year for Nazi Hunters. Klaus Barbie in France and John Demjanjuk in Israel were about to face justice, 45 years after their alleged war crimes. Why had it taken so long?

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Part 12: Who Killed Heinrich Himmler

Two weeks after the end of World War II Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Gestapo – Germany’s dreaded secret police, killed himself while being interrogated by the British. On the face of it his death looked like straightforward suicide.As the mastermind behind the Final Solution, the systematic murder of six million Jews, no-one mourned Himmler’s passing. However it was not long before rumours about the way in which Himmler died began to spread, lasting for years to come.

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Part 13: Goering the Star Exhibit

Commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering was Hitler’s anointed successor and had been at the Fuhrer’s side for over twenty long years. Goering also first suggested the idea of a “Final Solution” - the extermination of the Jews. At the end of World War 2, Goering was the only top Nazi left alive. As the Allies closed in, one after the other, top Nazis had chosen suicide. Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, all gone. Hermann Goering was the last man standing and the Allies were desperate to put him in the dock. He was soon apprehended and any idea of a happy ending rapidly vanished. At the trial of the century in Nuremberg, he became the “Star exhibit”, his guilt, “unique in its enormity”… However the outcome would be as mysterious as it was controversial and would take everyone by surprise.

Richard Landes: Lethal journalism (and the Arab Israeli conflict)

The Addiction of the Western News Media to Lethal Narratives about Israel and its disastrous consequences for everyone, including Palestinians. Speech given on 3/2/13 in Boston, MA by Prof. Richard Landes.

Nashville Islamic leaders preaching hate against Jews and Christians

Islamic extremism at Northeastern University

Video Exposes Northeastern University's Muslim Chaplain Abdullah Faaruuq as an Islamist extremist. University Terminates Relationship with Imam Faaruuq.

Hijacking Holocaust remembrance at Northeastern University

Documenting Northeastern University faculty members abusing Holocaust Remembrance events for political purposes. Northeastern professors and their invited guest lecturers are seen comparing Israelis to Nazis and denying Jewish peoplehood -- on tape recordings and in internal emails.

Anti-Semitic education at Northeastern University in Boston

Northeastern University's professors promote anti-Jewish, anti-Israel agendas under academic banner. Tenured professors indoctrinate students, encourage meetings with anti-Semites.

The Story of the Jews - Episode 4 - Over the Rainbow

This epic five-part series presented by historian Simon Schama explores the story of the Jewish experience from ancient times to the present day.

Simon Schama plunges us into the lost world of the shtetl, the Jewish towns and villages sewn across the hinterlands of Eastern Europe which became the seedbed of a uniquely Jewish culture.

Shtetl culture would make its mark on the modern world, from the revolutionary politics of the Soviet Union to the mass culture of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood. It was also the birthplaces of Hasidism, the most visible, iconic and, arguably, most misunderstood expression of Jewish faith and fervour.

This episode takes us from the forests of Lithuania, where Simon's own family logged wood and fought wolves, to the boulevards of Odessa, where shtetl kids argued the merits of revolutionary socialism over Zionism. From the Ukrainian city of Uman, where today thousands of the Hasidim chant and sing over the tomb of the wonder-working Rabbi Nachman, to the streets of Manhattan's lower east side, where the sons of shtetl immigrants wrote the American songbook. We return, with grim inevitability, to Eastern Europe in 1940 where the genocidal mechanisms of the 'final solution' were beginning to grind the shtetl world into dust and ash.

See other parts of this series:
The Story of the Jews - Episode 1 - In the Beginning
The Story of the Jews - Episode 2 - Among Believers
The Story of the Jews - Episode 3 - A Leap of Faith
The Story of the Jews - Episode 5 - Return

The Story of the Jews - Episode 3 - A Leap of Faith

This epic five-part series presented by historian Simon Schama explores the story of the Jewish experience from ancient times to the present day.

Simon Schama explores the bright, hopeful moment when Enlightenment thinkers and revolutionary armies brought ghetto walls crashing down - allowing Jews to weave their wisdom, creativity and energies into the very fabric of modern life in Europe.

One of the most of fruitful branches of this Jewish renaissance was in music and the stellar careers of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn established the enduring tradition for Jewish musical prodigies. However, the remarkably successful integration of Jewish talent into the mainstream of European culture and commerce stirred up the ghosts of ancient prejudice, decked out in the new clothes of romantic nationalism and the pseudo-science of anti-semitism. The road to the hell of the Holocaust was paved by the diatribes of Richard Wagner, while the trial of Alfred Dreyfus led Theodor Herzl to conclude that without a homeland of their own, Jews would never be free of the millennia-old persecution.

See other parts of this series:
The Story of the Jews - Episode 1 - In the Beginning
The Story of the Jews - Episode 2 - Among Believers
The Story of the Jews - Episode 4 - Over the Rainbow
The Story of the Jews - Episode 5 - Return

The Liberation of Auschwitz

This chilling, vitally important documentary was produced to mark the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The film contains unedited, previously unavailable film footage of Auschwitz shot by the Soviet military forces between January 27 and February 28, 1945 and includes an interview with Alexander Voronsov, the cameraman who shot the footage. The horrifying images include: survivors; camp visit by Soviet investigation commission; criminal experiments; forced laborers; evacuation of ill and weak prisoners with the aid of Russian and Polish volunteers; aerial photos of the IG Farben Works in Monowitz; and pictures of local people cleaning up the camp under Soviet supervision.

The original German version can be viewed here:

The Story of the Jews - Episode 2 - Among Believers

This epic five-part series presented by historian Simon Schama explores the story of the Jewish experience from ancient times to the present day.

Simon Schama's epic series continues with the story of medieval Jews struggling to preserve their identity--and sometimes their lives--under the rule of Christianity and Islam.

Whether labelled 'Christ-killers' by the Christians or 'dhimmi' (non-Muslim citizens of an Islamic community) by the Muslims, diaspora Jews built new lives and invented new ways of being Jewish in exile in the face of discrimination, blood-libels and persecution interspersed with periods of tolerance, protection and peaceful co-existence.

Drawing on some of the extraordinary documents they left behind, this episode offers a vivid portrait of Jewish bankers, merchants, doctors, poets and artists flourishing in Lincoln, Cordoba, Venice and Cairo and tells the tragic story of their mass expulsion from Spain in 1492.

See other parts of this series:
The Story of the Jews - Episode 1 - In the Beginning
The Story of the Jews - Episode 3 - A Leap of Faith
The Story of the Jews - Episode 4 - Over the Rainbow
The Story of the Jews - Episode 5 - Return

The Story of the Jews - Episode 1 - In the Beginning

This epic five-part series presented by historian Simon Schama explores the story of the Jewish experience from ancient times to the present day.

Simon Schama looks at the impact of the Jews and those moments when the Jewish experience - what Jews have thought and written, uttered, mourned and acclaimed - has changed the fate of the world. Drawing on his scholarship, his original viewpoints, and his own family history, Schama presents a series about the Jewish story that is at once deeply historical and bracingly contemporary. Travelling the globe from New York to Odessa, Berlin to Jerusalem, he tells ancient and modern stories that illuminate the passions and perplexities of the Jewish people today. Sure to capture a wide and appreciative audience, The Story of the Jews rests at heart on the difference between distinctiveness and isolation. Since the creation of the Bible, the Jewish world has been distinct, but never truly isolated. The Jewish story needs to be told afresh because it is a story of our deep human connectedness.

The story of the Jewish experience begins 3,000 years ago with the emergence of a tribal people in a contested land and their extraordinary book, the Hebrew Bible, a chronicle of their stormy relationship with a faceless, formless, jealous God. It was loyalty to this 'God of Words' that defined the distinct identity of the ancient Jews and preserved it despite all that history could throw their way - war, invasion, deportation, enslavement, exile and assimilation.

The story unfolds with a dazzling cast of historical characters: Sigmund Freud dying in exile in London; Victorian evangelicals and explorers following 'in the footsteps' of Moses; Jewish mercenaries living, prospering and intermarrying in the pagan land of Egypt; Messianic Jews dreaming of the Apocalypse; and a Jewish historian, Josephus, who witnessed first-hand the moment when the apocalypse finally came and the Romans destroyed the Jewish High Temple in Jerusalem.

See other parts of this series:
The Story of the Jews - Episode 2 - Among Believers
The Story of the Jews - Episode 3 - A Leap of Faith
The Story of the Jews - Episode 4 - Over the Rainbow
The Story of the Jews - Episode 5 - Return

Faith and Fate

This documentary introduces the uniqueness of Jewish history in the 20th century within the context of world history.

The longest hatred

Why can't Jews and Arabs coexist? The answers are deep-rooted, complex, and fully detailed in this stunning history of Jewish persecution.

"They are the other. They are not us." Throughout time, words such as these have been used to justify and vilify. "The Longest Hatred (1991)" takes an unsparing look at the ways such words have shaped the experience of Jewish people in this revealing history of anti-Semitism, a hatred with roots long before the Holocaust and enduring intensity that continues to erupt in the violent conflicts of today.

Part 1: FROM THE CROSS TO THE SWASTIKA
"From the Cross to the Swastika" traces an image that begins with the earliest writings of Christianity, which leveled the charge that Jews were responsible for Jesus' death. In this segment, historians show how demonizing dogma has affected Jews through the centuries — in Italy, Spain, England, and Germany — reaching its zenith with the development of Nazi ideology.




Part 2: ENEMIES OF A NATION
"Enemies of a Nation" shows how anti-Semitic sentiment has accompanied a growing nationalism in Europe in recent decades, causing a mass exodus of Jews from Russia, and even resurfacing in Poland and Austria, where few Jews remain. And in Germany, the remarkable collapse of the Berlin Wall has been followed by the rise of neo-Nazism among German youth.




Part 3: BETWEEN MOSES & MUHAMMED
"Between Moses & Muhammed" takes a humanistic look at relations between Arabs and Israelis, once linked by pseudo-science under the degrading label "Semite" and now enmeshed in one of the world's most violent conflicts. Experts on both sides tell how Arabs and Jews, who for centuries lived in relative peace, have been dramatically alienated by political turmoil — and how the anti-Jewish propaganda now disseminated in the Arab world is so eerily like that seen in Europe before World War II.

Heritage: Civilization and the Jews

Winner of the coveted Peabody Award, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews (1984) is the monumental nine-part series spanning three millennia of Jewish history and culture. The series is hosted by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Abba Eban, who describes it as "a celebration of our common humanistic and moral heritage, explored through the mysteries of preservation, renewal, and resonance of the Jewish people." From the stony heights of Sinai to the shores of the Dead Sea, from a Greek amphitheater in Delphi to the Forum of ancient Rome, out of the ashes of concentration camps to the rebuilt cities and villages of Israel, "Heritage" brings to life the long and complex history of the Jews and their centuries-old interaction with the rest of Western civilization.

Part 1: A PEOPLE IS BORN (3100 — 586 B.C.E.)
In the experience of exile the vision of the early Israelites was transformed, and the Jewish people was born. In Jewish tradition, the emergence from Egypt has been celebrated by generation after generation in the springtime holiday of Passover, a festival of liberation as passionately observed as any nation's independence day. Through liberation the exiles saw the hand of a universal God. All the world's nations were linked in a common destiny, but bound together by a moral law with inescapable consequences.




Part 2: THE POWER OF THE WORD (586 B.C. — 72 C.E.)
"The Power of the Word" begins in the abundant land of Babylon, where the exiled Jews of Judah had settled after the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonian forces. They had their own vision. They came to believe more profoundly than ever before that there was a universal dimension to their faith — that their God extended to all lands, to all times. "It was here in Babylon that Jewish scribes compiled writings they had brought from Judah — the history, the laws, the legends of the Jewish people and combined them with what had been passed down by word of mouth to form the first five books of the Bible — the Torah," explains Mr. Eban in the program.




Part 3: SHAPING OF TRADITIONS (30 — 732 C.E.)
Ambassador Eban continues the story of the Jewish people, when Rome was the ruler of the world and the Jews lived scattered throughout the Mediterranean. Wherever they lived, communities of Jews continued to obey the laws of their own faith. By the year 135, the Roman armies of the emperor Hadrian had crushed the land of Judea. For several years, the teaching of Judaism became a capital crime. "The Shaping of Traditions" chronicles the decline of the Roman Empire, a process extending over four centuries, and shows how the Jewish faith continued to survive throughout these turbulent years.




Part 4: THE CRUCIBLE OF EUROPE (732 — 1492)
In Islamic Spain, despite periodic persecution, the Jews found a "golden age" in the tenth and eleventh centuries. "In Spain, for more than two centuries, Arabs and Jews lived together, side by side, bound to each other despite differences, by a common love of beauty and knowledge, poetry and music, art and philosophy," explains Mr. Eban. "The Crucible of Europe" then travels to Northern Europe, where the Latin Church was gradually consolidating its authority. The program looks at the Spanish Inquisition and the disastrous course of events that followed as the Jewish people found themselves trapped in a politically and economically untenable position.




Part 5: THE SEARCH FOR DELIVERANCE (1492 — 1789)
This program picks up the thread of Jewish history as the intellectual awakening of the Renaissance began to alter the attitudes and habits of all people. Such scholars as Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johanes Kepler, and Galileo began to examine the world around them with new eyes. Abba Eban takes viewers through the narrow alleys of the Venetian ghetto, as he explains the reality of ghetto life. Jewish composers, artists, and poets achieved fame the transcended the ghetto walls. Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had escaped the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition flocked to Amsterdam, known as the "New Jerusalem" where refugees from religious intolerance were welcomed.




Part 6: ROADS FROM THE GHETTO (1789 — 1925)
"Roads from the Ghetto" covers the struggles for the enfranchisement of the Jews and other minorities. In country after country for a brief time following the conquest of Napoléon — in Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary — medieval restrictions were swept aside and political rights were granted to all. For about a decade, until the collapse of Napoléon's empire, Jews were offered political equality and citizenship in the nations of Europe. The program also documents the infamous Dreyfus case in France, which served as springboard for "anti-Semitism"; the birth of Zionism and other modern expressions of Judaism; and the waves of Jewish emigration from Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century.




Part 7: THE GOLDEN LAND (1654 — 1930's)
"The Golden Land" describes one of the most important and exciting chapters in Jewish history — the relationship between the United States and the Jewish people. Never before had a country accepted Jewish people with so little resistance. And never before in their 3,000-year history had Jews made such a significant contribution to the shaping and growth of a country. With the wave of pogroms of Russia and the rise of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe in the late 1800's, a new chapter in the American Jewish story was written. Some two million Jews from all over Eastern Europe converged on the United States from 1880 to 1920.




Part 8: OUT OF THE ASHES (1919 — 1947)
"Out of the ashes comes the understanding that no one's life can be guaranteed without constant struggle. Belief in the ultimate ability of humankind to overcome the darkest, most brutal of forces is the light which must carry us forward," declares Ambassador Eban in this haunting hour which attempts to illuminate the universal meaning of the Holocaust. Through dramatizations of the anguished words of victims of Nazi terrorism and through rare archival photographs and moving film footage, "Out of the Ashes" paints a picture of life in the European "shtetl" and later in the concentration camps. "Out of the Ashes" attempts to treat the Holocaust not only as a devastating memory of yesterday, but as a profound challenge for today.




Part 9: INTO THE FUTURE (1880 — 1990's)
"Into the Future" picks up the thread of Jewish history after World War II and the devastating effects of the Nazi Holocaust. Although many of the survivors found a haven in the United States, there were still many borders closed to Jewish refugees. Their only hope rested in the Middle East, in Palestine, part of the disintegrating British Empire. This "Heritage" episode includes interviews with various Israelis, some of whom emigrated to Palestine in the early years of the twentieth century, as well as some who settled in Israel following World War II. The program examines Israel's relationship to American Jews and modern Jewish communities elsewhere in the world. It reviews the distribution and the state of Jews and addresses the long-rage issues which confront them.

UN Rights Council ignores Syria poison gas attack, slams Israel

"Let us state the truth: if the UN allocated just one-hundredth of the moral outrage it uses against the only democracy in the Middle East, murderous dictators like Assad might have been shamed, isolated and weakened, instead of elevated, celebrated and strengthened as champions of human rights." - UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer, addressing UN Human Rights Council, Sept. 10, 2013.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar: “Arab states can’t make peace with Israel because they lack internal peace”

Dr. Mordechai Kedar, an expert on Islam, the Arab countries and the Middle East, directly and clearly answers the question: "Why is there no peace between Israel and the Arabs?" He explains this through a proverb in Arabic which means "You can not give someone something you do not have." Until the Arabs stop killing each other and learn to live in peace among themselves, there will never be peace between Israel and the Arabs.