What would you do if you had the chance to get back at someone who made your life a living hell? Murder is the option Isabel chose when she came upon the opportunity to meet her father’s murderer, a Nazi who oversaw Mauthausen, a concentration camp. “Jaguar,” Netflix’s new series from Spain, follows Isabel and a Nazi hunting crew’s plight to catch escaping officers before they cross the ocean to South America. It’s high action and fast-paced, so hold onto your seats.
In Madrid in 1962, Isabel works at a German restaurant, waiting for Otto Bachmann, the man who killed her father at Mauthausen twenty years previously, to dine at the establishment. Her attempt to kill him goes awry and she is recruited by a group of Nazi hunters, some of whom survived concentration camps, who find the escapees and take them to Nuremberg for trial. The only problem is that because of the protection of Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator, and the Vatican, people like Bachmann have become comfortable living in Spain and are easily able to ship their more well-known comrades into hiding in Argentina and Brazil. The Nazi hunters make it their mission to stop Aribert Heim, also known as Doctor Death, from escaping to South America. Despite their fraught history, Isabel must get close to Bachmann and his family and gain their trust, so that she can find out when Aribert Heim will arrive in Spain. There are many close calls and times where you don’t think they will make it, but somehow they seem to get lucky.
This series touches an unknown part (at least to me) of Spain’s history and involvement in World War II. In the spring of 1940, 15,000 Spaniards were shipped off to concentration camps, such as Mauthausen, to construct things for the Nazis, and half of the Spainards died in those camps. After the war, Francisco Franco decided to protect the Nazis in Spain because of their help in the Spanish Civil War, which he obviously won. Many of the people who aided or caused terrible things to happen got to live in peace as if nothing had happened a couple years before. The show tackles what it means to live in the aftermath of it all, and how to best deal with a passion for vengeance.
I highly recommend this series for those wanting to come to Spain for Adventist Colleges Abroad (ACA), a program that gives students the opportunity to study outside of the country for a period of time, such as Spain. This show will get you used to the accent and you can learn a piece of its history while you’re at it. Season one is currently streaming on Netflix at your convenience.
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