Hunters

Hitler is alive and in hiding in the final season of 'Hunters,' Amazon's series about Jews hunting and killing Nazis in the 70s.

He was presented with awards from Hebrew schools; visited Israel many times and helped build a youth center in Nazareth; owned a $10,000 yarmulke; and even gave his son, Frank Sinatra Jr., the Jewish middle name of Emmanuel. In the universe of the show, the fake Meyer played by Pacino is friends with Wiesenthal, a seasoned Nazi hunter. Meanwhile, in flashbacks to 1975, Pacino’s Nazi “butcher” works furiously to cover his tracks as he poses as a successful Jewish businessman and philanthropist in the United States. As part of Al Pacino’s character’s disguise as a Holocaust survivor in postwar America, he becomes an active philanthropist to Jewish causes. But of course there were Nazis who successfully escaped persecution at Nuremberg by fleeing to South America, and “Hunters” crafts its Hitler narrative on the scaffolding of their real-life stories. (Also throwing things for a loop: the reveal that Pacino’s character, who had presented himself as the hero’s Holocaust-survivor grandfather, was secretly the Nazi “butcher” they had been hunting in disguise, and the man they killed after a season-long hunt was the real survivor.)

“You look as if you've seen a ghost!” Meyer Offerman says directly to the camera at one point in Hunters' Season 2 premiere. And at first, it feels like we ...

He calls Hitler “my Fuhrer,” then accepts Hitler’s invitation to sit at the table and dine with them. When she adds that her work obsession led to a break-up with her girlfriend, the priest starts to go in on the sin of her homosexuality. When she presses him, asking why he screamed “Meyer!” in his sleep, he says he doesn’t know a meyer. He says he has a research trip to Israel for a few weeks, to finish his thesis. Later, she breaks into the rectory and tries to get him to confess his crimes while she records the conversation. He’s engaged to a British woman who’s also a student, and they appear to truly be in love. She immediately starts to cry, then rushes home and is in the process of destroying evidence when there’s a knock at her door: It’s Jonah. But she stops him, saying she’s there for his sins, not hers: He collaborated with Nazis in Lithuania during World War II, and she’s there to arrest him. When she pulls out a knife and threatens him, he admits that the town’s Jewish citizens were rounded up and put on railcars headed to concentration camps, and that the shop he runs used to belong to a Jewish family. He calls the latter when he arrives at home, pretending to be from the government census board. He skedaddles home, reviewing a list all of the people who are, or could be, aware of his secret. She demands to know where the despot was headed, and the shopkeeper gives her some information.