The Auschwitz Museum Is Slamming Amazon’s New Show About Nazi Hunters for Taking Creative Liberties With the Holocaust

Amazon has come under fire for
its new show Hunters, inspired by the true story of
vigilante Nazi hunters in New York in the 1970s, which critics say
is taking too many creative
liberties with the facts surrounding the holocaust.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial
and Museum in Poland took to Twitter this week to criticize
Hunters for a scene depicting a human chess game at a
concentration camp. In it, prisoners are moved around like pawns
before being murdered. Such an event never took place, the museum
says, adding that the show undermines the violence that did occur
at concentration camps. 

“Auschwitz was full of horrible
pain & suffering documented in the accounts of
survivors,” the institution
wrote on Twitter. “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.”

David Weil, the creator and
executive producer of the show, responded in a statement saying
that the show “is a dramatic narrative series” and that it never
purported to be a documentary. “In creating this series it was most
important for me to consider what I believe to be the ultimate
question and challenge of telling a story about the Holocaust: how
do I do so without borrowing from a real person’s specific life or
experience?” he wrote, adding that his grandmother was an Auschwitz
survivor.

“[W]hy did I feel the need to
create a fictional event when there were so many real horrors that
existed?” he added. “I simply did not want to depict those
specific, real acts of trauma.”

In response to Weil’s statement, a spokesperson for the museum,
Pawel Sawicki, said, “I believe that even authors of fiction have a
responsibility to preserve factual reality when they decide to use
an authentic place of human suffering in their work. This way they
can honor and respect the victims but also educate their
audiences.”

Amazon did not immediately
respond to a request for comment. 

Earlier this month, the museum
also joined the UK-based Holocaust Educational Trust in demanding
that Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, stop selling a trio of
children’s books written by Julius Streicher, the founder of an
anti-Semitic newspaper known for perpetuating Nazi
propaganda.  

In a letter addressed to Amazon
UK, the Holocaust Educational Trust’s chief executive, Karen
Pollock, honed in on Streicher’s book The Poisonous Mushroom, which overtly compares Jews to the titular
fungi. (“Just as poisonous mushrooms often lead to the most
dreadful calamity, so the Jew is the cause of misery and distress,
illness and death,” reads a passage in the book.) The book was used
as evidence against Streicher during the Nuremberg trials, where he
was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to
death. 

“As the Holocaust moves from
living history to history, our survivors regularly raise the
concern that Holocaust denial and antisemitism still persist,”
Pollock writes. “It is worrying that distinguished publishers like
Amazon would make available products that promote racist or hate
speech of any kind, let alone those from the darkest period of
European history. 

After first rejecting the
Holocaust educators’ demands, saying in a
statement that “we
believe that providing access to the written word is important,
including books that some may find objectionable,” Amazon has since
removed Streicher’s books.

The post The Auschwitz Museum Is Slamming Amazon’s New Show
About Nazi Hunters for Taking Creative Liberties With the
Holocaust appeared first on artnet News.