Amazon in Holocaust row over ‘Hunters'

WARSAW (Reuters) – The Auschwitz Memorial criticized Amazon on Sunday for fictitious depictions of the Holocaust in its Prime series Hunters and for selling books of Nazi propaganda.

Hunters, released on Friday and starring Al Pacino, features a team of Nazi hunters in 1970s New York who discover that hundreds of escaped Nazis are living in the United States.

However, the series has faced accusations of bad taste, particularly for depicting fictional atrocities in Nazi death camps, such as a game of human chess in which people are killed when a piece is taken.

“Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers,” the Auschwitz Memorial tweeted.

“We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”

The Auschwitz Memorial is responsible for preserving the Nazi German death camp in southern Poland, where more than 1.1 million people, the great majority of them Jews, perished in gas chambers or from starvation, cold and disease.

“While Hunters is a dramatic narrative series, with largely fictional characters, it is inspired by true events. But it is not documentary. And it was never purported to be,” the series’s creator and executive producer David Weil said.

“In speaking to the ‘chess match’ scene specifically… this is a fictionalized event. Why did I feel this scene was important to script and place in series? To most powerfully counteract the revisionist narrative that whitewashes Nazi perpetration, by showcasing the most extreme – and representationally truthful – sadism and violence that the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews and other victims,” he said.

The Auschwitz Memorial also criticized Amazon for selling antisemitic books.

On Friday, the Memorial retweeted a letter from the Holocaust Educational Trust to Amazon asking that antisemitic children’s books by Nazi Julius Streicher, who was executed for crimes against humanity, be removed from sale.