did everyone forget the star trek episode where this scientist was rebuilding a colonial society and turned them into a new Reich and used the native life forms as substuite jews?
I remember right when kirk stops the genocide and arrests the scientist he says " out of all the societies in galactic history you could of picked from why the hell did you pick the worst one"
and the scientist whines " it was the most efficient one for the rebuilding "
I think you’re referring to the second-season’s “Patterns of Force,” where an Earth historian established a “benign” Nazi system on another planet in the belief it could “accomplish its goals without sadism.” The “substitute Jews” were people from a neighboring planet, “Zeon.” (Subtle, eh?)
Has anyone yet mentioned Hogan’s Heroes?
The ridiculous TV show Danger 5 has the eponymous team fighting Hitler and the Nazis during WW2 in season 1 (as a parody of '60s TV shows), and in the '80s in season 2.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea had an episode where the Seaview discovers an undersea base with Nazis in suspended animation.
…AND another episode where Adm. Nelson is kidnapped by Nazis planning a Fourth Reich.
Back in the '60s, actors like John van Dreelin and Hans Gudegast cleaned up playing Nazis in series like that.
In the second season of Batman, Col Klink and Sgt Schultz popped out of a window while the Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder were scaling a high-rise in Gotham City.
I guess they would have been ONs in 1967, if they’d survived the War.
Freewheelers was another (children’s) series on British TV which used this trope. Later on, as they tried for international sales, including West Germany, they dropped this and developed more generic villains.
Yeah, I watched a few episodes of that around the same time I watched Champions.
I was particularly interested in the use of villains who were actively trying to reassert the Nazi way of life/win the war/start a new Reich rather than just those who just have a history or or are just garden variety evil and now working for pesonal power or money.
Those weren’t old Nazis. They were actual Nazis. The show was set in WWII.
It’s easy to forget that in e.g. 1960, WW-II was only 15 years ago! :eek:
Meanwhile, 9/11 is 23 years ago now. It was 1968 when WW-II was as old then as 9/11 is now. And WW-II was rather a larger deal, for both the USA and the UK.
Nazis being popular villains just a few years after they were real is no more surprising than Islamic terrorists or revolutionaries being popular villains today.
There’s a 1951 movie called The Whip Hand, about a reporter vacationing in Minnesota who notices some mysterious goings-on and some shifty characters, and discovers that a notorious Nazi scientist, now working for the Commies, is attempting to poison America’s water supply.
The original plan for the film was even more Nazi-heavy. The original title was intended to be The Man He Found, and the reporter was going to discover that Adolf Hitler himself had actually survived the war and was now hiding out in rural Minnesota.
Howard Hughes, who was the head of RKO at the time, declared that Nazis weren’t the world’s villains anymore, Communists were, so the story was quickly rewritten. It’s not a bad little film, as those things go, although nothing spectacular. One of the aforementioned shifty characters is Raymond Burr, six years before Perry Mason, in the days where he was mostly playing bad guys.
Here’s a transcript of Kirk’s conversation with the historian. He was supposed to observe the alien culture, not tinker with it. He violated the “Prime Directive” of noninterference:
KIRK: Gill. Gill, why did you abandon your mission? Why did you interfere with this culture?
GILL: Planet fragmented. Divided. Took lesson from Earth history.
KIRK: But why Nazi Germany? You studied history. You knew what the Nazis were.
GILL: Most efficient state Earth ever knew.
SPOCK: Quite true, Captain. That tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated, rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.
KIRK: But it was brutal, perverted, had to be destroyed at a terrible cost. Why that example?
SPOCK: Perhaps Gill felt that such a state, run benignly, could accomplish its efficiency without sadism.
KIRK: Why, Gill? Why?
GILL: Worked. At first it worked. Then Melakon began take over. Used the… Gave me the drug.
The myth of Nazi efficiency, BTW, is pure bullshit. Nazi Germany was a chaotic patchwork of competing agencies that Hitler used to pit his minions against one another and see which ones would come out on top. No reputable historian believes in the myth any more, if they ever did.
And all the pre-war economical efforts and “progress” were built on debt, debt and more debt.
Allied leaders played with the idea of assassinating Hitler, but it was clear by 1944 that the surest way of winning the War was to just leave him be. Stauffenberg et al. tried to eliminate him on their own, and they botched it completely with poor planning.
The rather strange comedy movie Iron Sky is about a group of Nazis who fled to the Moon after WWII and have been living in a moon base on the far side, building a fleet of spaceships with which they plan to conquer the Earth in 2018.
It’s very interesting that no one has mentioned Artie Johnson yet.
But stupid
Barney Miller had an episode where a Jewish survivor recognized a Nazi guard or something similar from the concetration camp he was held at. The old Nazi ran a novelty store and was always being funny until the truth came out and he was detained by the feds.