The official Auschwitz Memorial castigated the writers behind Amazon’s political revenge pornography series “Hunters” for their invention of a ludicrous “human chess” scene set at at Auschwitz.
According to Auschwitz Memorial, the creation of new Holocaust lore by the showrunners is “dangerous foolishness and caricature” that “welcomes future deniers.”
“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,” Auschwitz Memorial wrote. “It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”
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 show “Hunters,” whose executive producers include Win Rosenfeld and bit comedian-turned-political film director Jordan Peele, features a scene where Jewish inmates are forced to play “human chess” for the amusement of evil Nazi camp guards.
These and other fictional events are seemingly meant to make the audience enraged and eager for the poorly choreographed CGI murder and torture of white “Nazis” later in the show’s plot.
Unfortunately for “Hunters,” the age-old Hollywood trope of using World War Two as fodder for current-year political comparisons and glorification of political violence seems to have run its course.
Racialized marketing for the show included a YouTube video titled “NFL Players React to the Hunters Trailer” which featured an all-black assortment of athletes watching and commenting on the trailer.
The video received a dislike-to-like ratio of over 15 to 1.
Producer David Weil later defended the human chess scene as something which would “most powerfully counteract the revisionist narrative that whitewashes Nazi perpetration, by showcasing the most extreme — and representationally truthful — sadism and violence that the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews and other victims.”
“Representationally truthful,” the human chess scene is not. In fact, it’s so untruthful that the official Auschwitz Memorial had to come out and condemn it.
