Auschwitz Memorial criticises Amazon for Hunters show and antisemitic books
The Auschwitz Memorial criticised Amazon on Sunday, for fictitious depictions of the Holocaust in its TV series Hunters and for selling books of Nazi propaganda.
Seventy-five years after the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by Soviet troops, world leaders and activists have called for action against rising antisemitism.
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.
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.
In its review of the series, the Guardian said the scene “felt like exploitation – maybe fetishisation – and part of a cloud of doubt that settles over the whole”.
The Auschwitz Memorial tweeted:
“Inventing a fake game of human chess … is not only dangerous foolishness [and] caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. 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, most of them Jewish, perished in gas chambers or from starvation, cold and disease.
The Memorial also criticised 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 the 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 Memorial tweeted on Sunday.
In an email, an Amazon spokesman said: “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.”
Amazon said it would comment on Hunters later.
In December, Amazon withdrew from sale products decorated with images of Auschwitz, including Christmas decorations, after the Memorial complained.