Amazon in Holocaust row over ‘Hunters’ series

The Auschwitz Memorial criticised Amazon on Sunday for fictitious depictions of the Holocaust in its Prime series Hunters and for selling books of Nazi propaganda.

Seventy-five years after the liberation of the Nazi German Auschwitz death camp by Soviet troops, world leaders and activists have called for action against rising anti-Semitism.

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 US.

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 honour the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”

The Memorial is responsible for preserving the Nazi German death camp in southern Poland, where more than 1.1m people, most 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 a documentary. And it was never purported to be,” David Weil, creator and executive producer of Hunters said in a statement.

“In speaking to the ‘chess match’ scene specifically… this is a fictionalised 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,” Weil added.

The Memorial also criticised Amazon for selling anti-Semitic 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.

“When you decide to make a profit on selling vicious antisemitic Nazi propaganda published without any critical comment or context, you need to remember that those words led not only to the #Holocaust but also many other hate crimes,” the Auschwitz Memorial tweeted on Sunday.

“As a bookseller, we are mindful of book censorship throughout history, and we do not take this lightly. We believe that providing access to written speech is important, including books that some may find objectionable,” an Amazon spokesman said in a comment. —

It is not a documentary. And it was never purported to be