How Meryl Streep helped the Nazi hunters
… After the blockbuster success of the miniseries “Roots” on ABC, about an African slave and his descendants, executives at rival NBC wanted their own miniseries, one with the emotional resonance of slavery. They chose the Holocaust. The director, Marvin J. Chomsky, had been one of the directors of “Roots” and was a television veteran, with episodes of “Star Trek,” “Gunsmoke,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Hawaii Five-O”among his credits. The novelist Gerald Green, author of “The Last Angry Man,” was given the difficult task of squeezing the fates of millions of Jews into one identifiable and sympathetic group, the Weiss family.
A single ambitious SS officer, Erik Dorf, played by the actor Michael Moriarty, later of “Law & Order” fame would serve as the primary carrier of German guilt. James Woods and Meryl Streep also starred in the miniseries as a recently married couple who would face unimaginable trials. Few would have predicted at the time that a mainstream entertainment aimed at an American audience would have a significant and lasting effect on Germany’s attitude toward its war crimes. The result was an unlikely national catharsis that would lead to greater public support for the pursuit of war criminals decades after the war. Far from flagging with the passage of time, investigations into Nazis were pursued with new vigor and growing resources. This continues today.
As The New York Times reported on the front page this week, prosecutors from what is known as the “grandchildren’s generation” are still hard at work trying to win convictions of death camp guards. Now they are using three-dimensional virtual models of camps to help juries visualize what they would have witnessed. They have access to the kinds of computerized databases that were not available to their predecessors. The other thing that was missing for the first German Nazi hunters was probably the most important element: popular support.
Today Germany is studded with plaques and bristling with statues in honor of the victims of the Holocaust but its people were not always so quick to accept or even discuss the war crimes and genocide committed by the Nazi regime. One of the main reasons they are hunting Nazis nearly 70 years after the war is that neither the Allies nor the Germans themselves did enough in the postwar years.
After the war, many German citizens, struggling with deprivation and occupation, blamed the upper echelon of the Nazi leadership for their own suffering at the end of the war and were happy to see them brought to account. Others grumbled about victors’ justice, a complaint that would grow with each new trial. Many Germans equated the civilians killed in Allied bombing raids over Hamburg and Dresden with the massacres in the east. The German people might have tolerated seeing Nazi leadership in the dock, but they wanted their privates, sergeants and lieutenants home, whether they served in the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS….