In the Amazon series Hunters—a 1970s-set drama that revolves around a group of vigilantes finding and killing Nazis hiding in the U.S.—there’s a particularly brutal flashback scene that takes place at a concentration camp. In the scene, captive Jews are forced to play a violent game of human chess, charged to kill each other as the game advances. In a statement released Sunday, the Auschwitz Memorial denounced the historically inaccurate scene, calling it “dangerous foolishness and caricature.”
“Auschwitz was full of horrible pain & suffering documented in the accounts of survivors,” the statement, released on Twitter, reads. “Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”
The Memorial followed that statement with another tweet on Monday, tagging Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, among other entities, and calling on the mega-corporation to “make a decision to find vicious, antisemitic, racist, Nazi propaganda ‘objectionable.’”
Released Friday, Hunters stars Logan Lerman and Al Pacino, among others, as members of a secret Jewish vigilante group. It was created by David Weil and executive produced by Oscar-winner Jordan Peele.
On Sunday, Weil released a lengthy statement in response to the Auschwitz Memorial, noting that his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor and saying he wants Hunters to keep the stories of survivors alive. Furthermore, he added, the show is not intended to be a documentary. The chess scene in particular was written 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 wrote, per Variety.
“And why did I feel the need to create a fictional event when there were so many real horrors that existed?” he continued. “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.”
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