 The Portage to San <unk> of <unk> is a 1981 literary and philosophical novella by George Steiner , in which Jewish Nazi hunters find a fictional Adolf Hitler ( <unk> ) alive in the Amazon jungle thirty years after the end of World War II . The book generated considerable controversy after its publication because in it , Steiner , who is Jewish , allows Hitler to defend himself when he is put on trial in the jungle by his captors . There Hitler maintains that Israel <unk> its existence to the Holocaust and that he is the " benefactor of the Jews " . 
