The Auschwitz Memorial criticized Amazon for inventing Nazi atrocities in its thriller series “Hunters,” warning that this could provide ammunition for Holocaust deniers.
The Al Pacino-starring series depicts a group of Holocaust survivors and their allies extrajudicially hunting fugitive Nazi war criminals in the U.S. in the 1970s. The memorial singled out a flashback in which concentration camp prisoners are forced to play life-sized chess pieces and killed when they are “taken” in the game.
“Auschwitz was full of horrible pain & suffering documented in the accounts of survivors. Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprimeis not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers,” representatives for the memorial tweeted. “We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”
The memorial also called on the online retail giant to pull the 1938 book “The Poisonous Mushroom,” an anti-Semitic picture book, from its site. The book’s author, Julius Streicher, was also the publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer, and was executed in 1946 for crimes against humanity.
“When you decide to make a profit on selling vicious antisemitic Nazi propaganda published without any critical comment or context, you need to remember that those words led not only to the #Holocaust but also many other hate crimes,” the memorial tweeted Sunday.
An Amazon spokesperson told Reuters “we are mindful of book censorship throughout history, and we do not take this lightly. We believe that providing access to written speech is important, including books that some may find objectionable.”
The museum responded that it hoped “one day” Amazon would join other institutions “and make a decision to find vicious, antisemitic, racist, Nazi propaganda ‘objectionable.'”
-Updated Feb. 24 at 11:27 a.m.