It is the latest blockbuster series from Amazon and boasts of being “inspired by true events”, but Hunters has been accused of “Jewsploitation” in sensationalising the horrors of the Holocaust.
The 10-part drama series, released on Amazon Prime on Friday, follows a ragtag bunch of Nazi hunters in 1970s America led by an Auschwitz survivor played by Al Pacino, appearing in his first television series at the age of 79.
But critics and Jewish groups have recoiled at a scene in the first episode, set in Auschwitz.
It depicts Pacino’s character having a flashback to his time at the death camp, where nearly a million Jews were murdered between 1941 and 45.
He watches SS officers force 32 Jewish prisoners to play human chess, one side naked, the other clothed in the camp’s blue-and-white striped pyjamas. The inmates are ordered to move across the grass board. When one “piece” takes another, the first prisoner is forced to slice the other’s throat.
Laurence Rees, Britain’s leading authority on Auschwitz, said he had “never heard of this macabre chess game” during his years of research.
Dan Gretton, author of I You We Them, an investigation of crimes against humanity, said: “The reality of what has happened is so catastrophic, it is so beyond horrific, that the idea of fictionalising anything connected with the Holocaust is totally immoral. I am so angry. It absolutely did not happen. There is no basis for it.”
Read the article by Grant Tucker in The Australian.