Auschwitz Memorial Slams Amazon Prime Show ‘Hunters’ Over Human Chess Game Scene

The Amazon Prime series Hunters, starring Al Pacino, is igniting more controversy. The 10-part fictional series about Nazi hunters in the 1970s has already been accused of “Jewsploitation” by some critics. Now the Auschwitz Memorial is slamming a particular scene in which prisoners at the concentration camp must kill each other during a game of human chess, calling it “dangerous foolishness & caricature.” A tweet from the memorial adds: “It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”

The show’s creator, David Weil, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, said in a statement: “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. And why did I feel the need to create a fictional event when there were so many real horrors that existed? After all, it is true that Nazis perpetrated widespread and extreme acts of sadism and torture—and even incidents of cruel “games”—against their victims. I simply did not want to depict those specific, real acts of trauma.”