Simon Wiesenthal

Like, it was such a great conversation, I wanted to, like, listen to it again and remind myself what that person had to say." But people are always finding me from old content.

I, um, have the privilege, the tremendous privilege of mentoring somebody who's in the Simon Wiesenthal internship program, and it so happens that he has questions that I have podcast episodes that specifically answer that question and more.

And so I feel like this poor kid, half of the internship program is him just listening to my podcasts.

[laughs]

In a way, yeah.

He ends up collaborating with a vigilante Mossad agent and the real life Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal.

Which is brilliant.

Having Wiesenthal as a character really anchors the fiction in reality.

That's the terrifying jump Forsyth made in 2013.

So a shadowy joint US-UK agency called TOSA, Technical Operations Support Activity, puts The Preacher on a literal kill list.

They send a hunter, a tough ex-Marine known only as The Tracker, to find him.

But The Tracker can't do it alone with just a rifle and a map.

But also, if you're somebody engaged with the historical process, whether as a secret policeman or an intelligence agent or a military man or just a nobody kind of documentarian like me, this is a valuable score, a person like Eichmann.

And what's interesting is Simon Wiesenthal, who was proven to be a total liar.

I'm not talking about what he alleged about events in World War II, although that obviously wasn't credible either.

But he made a whole career out of making up stories about being involved in capturing these Third Reich figures.

you really get a sense of its significance.

I, um, I think I mentioned earlier, obviously the seminal treatment other than the various documentaries that have been made because the proceedings with Eichmann were, were filmed, you know, uh, pretty much in their entirety.

And, uh, Simon Wiesenthal launched his career essentially by insisting that he was involved in all these intrigues to capture Eichmann, which was a total lie.

Simon Wiesenthal was a career liar.

yes, because he's also back with his German accent, although this time he's a Nazi.

And in The Boys from Brazil, he was Simon Wiesenthal.

The Nazi hunter.

And because they – because the clips of Jesse Owens brings it back to that time period when Hitler wanted to use the Olympics as his proof of the superior Aryan race.

bounty justice is so fun.

He reminded me of Simon Wiesenthal, like a lot of the Nazi hunters after World War II who were hired.

Exactly.

It's taken too long to get these fuckers.

And he tricked his government, and later the Austrian government, into allowing him into the archives and got all the photocopies of this death march.

And then when we found that one of the guards was still alive and kicking, but there was no way of getting his address, I got on to Lord Jenner at the House of Lords here, who was on the Nuremberg trials, who put me on to a fellow called Simon Wiesenthal, who's good at getting what you can't get.

And he wrote back saying, I'm sorry, I can't trace this guy.

But Mike Cobble, aged 22... ...tricked them into giving the current address of that last surviving guard... ...who killed 220 women, and I have the proof of that.

The

thing about this is… I don't know, because Simon Wiesenthal is the famous Nazi hunter and all the rest of it.

There's some challenges over, you know, how effective he was.

These guys weren't hard to find.

Not soldiers, not judges, but trackers, archivists, obsessives.

One of them was Simon Wiesenthal.

He survived multiple camps.

Barely.