Auschwitz museum criticizes Amazon series Hunters for imagined human chess scene

“Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers,” it stated.

David Weil, the creator of the show about a 1970s postwar hunt in New York for Nazi war criminals, responded in a statement to Deadline, claiming the “dramatic narrative series” is “not documentary” and “was never purported to be.”

“In speaking to the ‘chess match’ scene specifically … this is a fictionalized event,” he said. Weil argued it was important “to most powerfully counteract the revisionist narrative that whitewashes Nazi perpetration” by showing “extreme and representationally truthful sadism and violence that the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews and other victims.”

The series, starring Al Pacino, came out last week.

In defending the chess scene, in which Auschwitz inmates are figures in the game and are killed upon being removed from the board, Weil said that Nazis carried out “extreme acts of sadism and torture and even incidents of cruel ‘games’ against their victims” and that he chose not to depict the “real acts of trauma.”

The Auschwitz museum also criticized Amazon for selling books that are “vicious antisemitic Nazi propaganda published without any critical comment or context.”

An Amazon spokesman said the bookseller was “mindful of book censorship throughout history” and “providing access to written speech is important, including books that some may find objectionable” in an email to the Guardian.

Amazon said it plans to release a statement on Hunters.