Auschwitz Memorial Museum Criticizes Hunters For Historical Inaccuracies, Including Human Chess Scene

Following the path of other shows like American Horror Story and Peaky Blinders, Amazon's Hunters series blends real-life events with fictional ones, and the characters on the show are also a mix of real and fabricated.

However, the stakes are a bit higher for Hunters , as the show deals with the Holocaust, white supremacy, and its after effects. And while real-life Nazi hunters did exist, the show is coming under fire for its scenes set in Auschwitz, with the most notable being a "human chess" game where concentration camp prisoners were placed on a large board and operated as a chess gamewith eliminated "pieces" being actually murdered.

As Entertainment Weekly reports, the Auschwitz Memorial Museum preserves the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in Poland, and they recently tweeted about their displeasure with the scene:

"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 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)

And while some fans pointed out that Hunters is not meant to be a documentary, the museum responded. "Auschwitz was a real place where people suffered. It would be much better if the authors of the movie tried to raise awareness of a true event of the Holocaust," its official account wrote in a Tweet.

Auschwitz was a real place where people suffered. It would be much better if the authors of the movie tried to raise awareness of a true event of the Holocausts by showing something closer to the truth rather than choosing to create a fake story that never happened in Auschwitz. Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum)

Hunters creator David Weil later released a statement about his own connection to Auschwitz, which you can read in full here . "Years ago I visited Auschwitz and I saw the gates my grandmother was forced to enter decades earlier and the barracks she was forced to live in as a prisoner," he wrote. "It was the moment consecrated in time and memory that I sought to make good on doing my parthowever big or however smallto ensure the promise of 'Never Again.'"

Weil also addressed the controversy about the chess scene, and explained why he chose to create it:

"In speaking to the 'chess match' scene specificallythis is a fictionalized event...Why did I feel the need to create a fictional event when there were so many real horrors that existed? After all, it is true that Nazis perpetrated widespread and extreme acts of sadism and tortureand even incidents of cruel 'game' against their victims. I simply did not want to depict those specific, real acts of trauma."