Hunters debuted on Amazon Prime earlier this month, bringing a star-studded and genre-bending take on the concept of Nazi hunters. The show follows a diverse group of people in the 1970s – several of whom are Holocaust survivors – who discover that thousands of Nazis are hiding in plain sight in America. The series has no shortage of controversial and uncomfortable moments, many of which try to illustrate how macabre things were at the concentration camps. One particular sequence, which occurs in the series’ first episode, has already garnered backlash from the official Auschwitz Memorial. In a tweet, which you can check out below, the organization calls the scene in question “dangerous foolishness” and a “caricature”, and argues that it welcomes “future deniers” of the historical tragedy.
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Auschwitz was full of horrible pain & suffering documented in the accounts of survivors. 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. pic.twitter.com/UM2KYmA4cw
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) February 23, 2020
The scene in question occurs midway through the episode, when Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino) tells Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) about one of the atrocities that he and Jonah’s grandmother witnessed in the camps. In a deeply upsetting flashback sequence, we learn that one of the Nazis soldiers orchestrated a game of chess between himself and one of the prisoners, a Jewish chess master. The game used other prisoners – many of whom were stripped naked – as game pieces, and each prisoner was violently killed as their piece was taken off of the board.
In a series of additional tweets, the Auschwitz Memorial revealed that it offers consultation services for movies and TV shows that want to portray historical accuracy, but that “not many of them” act on that offer.
Of course, For filmmakers, writers, journalists, artists… Sadly, not many of them come for a consultation.
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) February 23, 2020
The memorial also called the scene “disrespectful and dangerous”, even within the context of a fictional series.
In other words, you say: “a movie can lie about reality as it is just a movie’. Here we absolutely disagree. This is disrespectful and dangerous.
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) February 23, 2020
Hunters also stars Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother), Jerrika Hinton (Grey’s Anatomy), Lena Olin (Alias, The Unbearable Lightness of Being), Carol Kane (Gotham, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), Saul Rubinek (Unforgiven, True Romance), Greg Austin (Class, Summer of Rockets), Tiffany Boone (Beautiful Creatures, The Following), Louis Ozawa (Supergirl, Bosch), and Kate Mulvany (The Great Gatsby, Lamb of God).
The first season of Hunters is currently available on Amazon Prime Video.
