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Hitler is alive and in hiding in final season of ‘Hunters,’ Amazon’s series about Jews killing Nazis
Spoilers for the first and second seasons of “Hunters” follow.
(JTA) – When Amazon Prime released the first season of “Hunters” in 2020, it advertised its Nazi-hunting TV show as “Inspired By True Events.”
That was true only in the loosest possible sense of the term. Starring Al Pacino and Logan Lerman and produced by Jordan Peele, “Hunters” told a bloody, souped-up, almost entirely embellished story of a Jewish-led team of multiracial Nazi hunters in the 1970s trying to stop a “Fourth Reich” from rising in the United States.
The show was immediately controversial: Series creator David Weil, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, had to defend his show from the Auschwitz Memorial, which harshly criticized “Hunters” for — among other scenes — depicting a human chess game at Auschwitz that never took place.
Despite all that, “Hunters” still had some basis in reality. There were, in fact, a handful of Jewish Nazi hunters active across the Americas at that time, most famously Simon Wiesenthal (played in the series by Judd Hirsch), who did succeed in bringing several prominent Nazis to justice.
Three years later, “Hunters” has, similarly, used the historical record as a mere suggestion for its second and final season, which debuts Friday and tells an outrageous story about hunting Hitler himself. Here’s how viewers can separate fact from fiction in season 2.
Hitler in Argentina
The end of the first season hinted that things were about to go seriously off the rails, as the “real” Hitler and Eva Braun were revealed to be happily alive and hiding out in Argentina — seemingly validating decades’ worth of baseless conspiracy theories about the Nazi leader’s supposed escape from his Berlin bunker in 1945. (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.)
In the second season, the disbanded Hunters reunite in 1979 to follow Hitler’s trail to Argentina, where many real-life Nazis did hide out. 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.
Hitler-survival conspiracy theories seem to, well, keep surviving. In the decades since the war’s end, many conspiracy theories regarding Hitler’s fate have proliferated, and a good number of them coalesce around the unsupported claim that he, like other top Nazi commanders, was ferreted out of Germany and into South America via a secret underground network. “Hunting Hitler,” a recent top-rated History Channel docuseries, milked three seasons out of the idea.
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. The most infamous case involved death camp commander Adolf Eichmann, who hid in Argentina until Mossad agents uncovered his location and kidnapped him in 1960’s Operation Finale to stand trial in Jerusalem.
The Kreisky-Peter-Wiesenthal Affair
In the universe of the show, the fake Meyer played by Pacino is friends with Wiesenthal, a seasoned Nazi hunter. When the two meet in 1975 in an early episode of the second season, Meyer congratulates Wiesenthal on his recent success in Austria.
This is a reference to a real-life 1975 political scandal, in which Wiesenthal and a team of researchers revealed the past Nazi activities of Austrian politico Friedrich Peter as the country’s Jewish chancellor, Bruno Kriesky, prepared to offer Peter’s right-wing party a role in his ruling coalition.
Wiesenthal’s actions led to a falling-out between him and Kriesky, who variously called him a “Jewish fascist” and a member of the Gestapo. But the Nazi hunters declared victory over having rooted out the S.S. past of a prominent postwar politician. (Peter’s party never joined the coalition.)
‘Reclaiming’ Jewish-owned businesses in Europe
In an early scene of the second season, one of the disguised hunters walks into an Austrian candy shop in 1979 and innocently inquires how long the shopkeeper has owned it. The store has been in his family for generations, comes the reply.
But, the hunter muses, there is a strange indentation on the doorpost — almost like a mezuzah. Could the shop have, in fact, been Jewish-owned before the Nazis came to power?
It turns out the hunter is right, and the shopkeeper will pay dearly for his denials. Again, the general arc of this narrative starts with real history, as there are countless examples of Nazis having seized Jewish-owned properties and businesses and destroyed the records of Jewish ownership, making it nearly impossible for surviving Jews after the war to reclaim their properties.
Author Menachem Kaiser recently explored how Nazi property seizures altered his own family history in the nonfiction book “Plunder,” which won the Sami Rohr prize for Jewish literature.
Frank Sinatra’s Jewish activism
As part of Al Pacino’s character’s disguise as a Holocaust survivor in postwar America, he becomes an active philanthropist to Jewish causes. At one point, he can’t help but brag that he convinced Frank Sinatra to make a hefty donation.
In fact, the famous crooner, despite not being Jewish himself, was a vocal and documented supporter of Jewish causes. 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. After Sinatra’s death, to avoid paparazzi, his body was hidden in a Los Angeles Jewish funeral home for decades.
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A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel
Something significant is happening between Israel and Syria, and it deserves more attention than it is getting.
With the backing of the United States, Israeli and Syrian officials have agreed to create what they call a “joint fusion mechanism” — a permanent channel for coordination on intelligence, de-escalation, diplomacy and economic matters — during meetings in Paris. It appears to be the beginning of institutionalized contact between two countries that have formally been at war since 1948.
If this process continues, it will count as a genuine foreign-policy success for President Donald Trump’s administration.
To understand how profound that change would be, it is worth recalling the two countries’ shared history.
Israel and Syria — which the U.S. struck with a set of targeted attacks on the Islamic State on Saturday — have fought openly or by proxy for decades. Before 1967, Syrian artillery positions in the Golan Heights regularly shelled Israeli communities in the Hula Valley and around the Sea of Galilee. After Israel captured that region in 1967, the direct shelling stopped, but the conflict did not.
Syria remained formally committed to a state of war; Israel entrenched itself in the Golan Heights; both sides treated the frontier as a potential flashpoint to be managed carefully. After Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, Syria became Israel’s most dangerous neighboring state.
A 1974 disengagement agreement created a United Nations-monitored buffer zone, which mostly ensured peace along the border, but did not resolve anything fundamental. In Lebanon, Israel and Syria backed opposing forces for years, and their air forces clashed briefly during the 1982 Lebanon War. Later, Iran’s growing role in Syria and Hezbollah’s military buildup added new threats. The Syrian civil war then destroyed basic state capacity and created precisely the kind of militia-rich environment Israel fears along its borders.
Now, with the dictator Bashar al-Assad gone and the former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in power, Syria is a broken country trying to stabilize. Sharaa’s past associations, disturbingly, include leadership of jihadist groups that were part of the wartime landscape in Syria. But today he governs a state facing economic collapse, infrastructure ruin and a population that needs jobs and basic services. His incentives are simple and powerful: ensure the survival of his regime, invite foreign investment, and secure relief from isolation and sanctions. Those goals point toward the U.S. and its partners, including Israel.
The Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to see new Syrian cooperation with Israel, with the suggestion that progress with Israel will become a gateway to international investment, and to a degree of political acceptance that Syria has lacked for years. Al-Sharaa’s willingness to engage is therefore not a mystery.
Israel’s motivations are also straightforward. After the Gaza war, Israel is facing a severe reputational problem. It is widely viewed abroad as reckless and excessively militarized. The government is under pressure over not only the conduct of the war but also the perception that it has no political strategy and relies almost exclusively on force. A diplomatic track with Syria allows Israel to present a very different picture: that of a country capable of negotiations with ideologically opposed neighbors, de-escalation, and regional cooperation.
There are significant security incentives, too.
Israel wants to limit Iran and Hezbollah’s influence in Syria. It wants a predictable northern border. It wants assurances regarding the Druze population in southern Syria — brethren to the Israeli Druze who are extremely loyal to the state, and who were outraged after a massacre of Syrian Druze followed the installation of al-Sharaa’s regime. It wants to ensure that no armed Syrian groups will tread near the Golan. A coordinated mechanism supervised by the U.S. offers a strong diplomatic way to address these issues.
The U.S. will benefit as well. The Trump team is eager to show that it can deliver lasting diplomatic achievements in the Middle East after the success of the Abraham Accords in Trump’s first term. A meaningful shift in Israel–Syria relations would be a very welcome addition, especially as the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in the Gaza war faces an uncertain future.
The main questions now are practical. Can the “joint fusion mechanism” function under pressure? What will happen when there is, almost inevitably, an incident — a drone downed, a militia clash, a cross-border strike? Will the new system effectively lower the temperature, or will it collapse at the first crisis?
Will Iran — facing its own profound internal political crisis — accept a Syria that coordinates with Israel under U.S. supervision, or will it work to undermine al-Sharaa? How will Hezbollah react if Damascus appears to move away from the axis of “resistance” and toward a security understanding with Israel?
How would an Israel-Syria deal impact Lebanon’s moribund efforts to dismantle Hezbollah’s military capacity? Al-Sharaa has already helped significantly by ending the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through his territory. Might he also actively help with the disarming of the group?
No one should expect a full peace treaty soon. The question of possession of the Golan Heights probably remains a deal-breaker. Public opinion in Syria has been shaped by decades of official hostility to Israel, and Israeli politics is fragmented and volatile.
But diplomatic breakthroughs can confound expectations. They usually begin with mechanisms like this one, involving limited cooperation, routine contact and crisis management.
If this effort helps move the border from a zone of permanent tension to one of managed stability, that alone would be a major shift. It would also send a signal beyond the region: U.S. engagement still matters, and American pressure and incentives can still change behavior.
The post A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Netanyahu Hopes to ‘Taper’ Israel Off US Military Aid in Next Decade
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on Friday that he hopes to “taper off” Israeli dependence on US military aid in the next decade.
Netanyahu has said Israel should not be reliant on foreign military aid but has stopped short of declaring a firm timeline for when Israel would be fully independent from Washington.
“I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years,” Netanyahu told The Economist. Asked if that meant a tapering “down to zero,” he said: “Yes.”
Netanyahu said he told President Donald Trump during a recent visit that Israel “very deeply” appreciates “the military aid that America has given us over the years, but here too we’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities.”
In December, Netanyahu said Israel would spend 350 billion shekels ($110 billion) on developing an independent arms industry to reduce dependency on other countries.
In 2016, the US and Israeli governments signed a memorandum of understanding for the 10 years through September 2028 that provides $38 billion in military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defense systems.
Israeli defense exports rose 13 percent last year, with major contracts signed for Israeli defense technology including its advanced multi-layered aerial defense systems.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Israel supporter and close ally of Trump, said on X that “we need not wait ten years” to begin scaling back military aid to Israel.
“The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the US military,” Graham said. “I will be presenting a proposal to Israel and the Trump administration to dramatically expedite the timetable.”
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In Rare Messages from Iran, Protesters ask West for Help, Speak of ‘Very High’ Death Toll
Protests in Tehran. Photo: Iran Photo from social media used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law, via i24 News
i24 News – Speaking to Western media from beyond the nationwide internet blackout imposed by the Islamic regime, Iranian protesters said they needed support amid a brutal crackdown.
“We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help. Snipers have been stationed behind the Tajrish Arg area [a neighborhood in Tehran],” said a protester in Tehran speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. He added that “We saw hundreds of bodies.”
Another activist in Tehran spoke of witnessing security forces firing live ammunition at protesters resulting in a “very high” number killed.
On Friday, TIME magazine cited a Tehran doctor speaking on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital recorded at least 217 killed protesters, “most by live ammunition.”
Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Setare Ghorbani, a French-Iranian national living in the suburbs of Paris, said that she became ill from worry for her friends inside Iran. She read out one of her friends’ last messages before losing contact: “I saw two government agents and they grabbed people, they fought so much, and I don’t know if they died or not.”