Amazon under fire for Hunters series and anti-Semitic books

Amazon has been caught up in a Holocaust row after releasing a new series, Hunters, on its Prime Video offering.

Starring Al Pacino, this features a band of Nazi hunters living in 1977 New York who discover hundreds of high ranking Nazi officials are conspiring to create a Fourth Reich in the US.

The show has been accused of bad taste, particularly for fictional scenes set in Nazi death camps. The Guardian said it was “dangerously insensitive” and “fetishised the horrors of the Holocaust, with stylised violence and a total lack of morals”.

Meanwhile, the Auschwitz Memorial tweeted to its one million followers: “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 honour the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”

The Memorial also retweeted a letter from the Holocaust Educational Trust to Amazon asking that children’s books by Nazi Julius Streicher, who was executed for crimes against humanity, be removed from sale.

“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,” it said.

Amazon did not respond to our request for comment.