Los Angeles (AFP)

"Hunters" series produced by Amazon, which features Nazi hunters in the 1970s, contains historically untrue scenes, lamented the Auschwitz death camp memorial, fearing that it would encourage theses Holocaust deniers.

"Auschwitz was filled with excruciating pain and suffering, documented in the accounts of the survivors. Inventing a false human chess game for (the series) Hunters is not only dangerous nonsense and caricature. It is also an invitation to future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving the accuracy of the facts, "wrote the Auschwitz Museum (Poland) on Twitter.

The message was accompanied by a photo from the scene of the "Hunters" in question, showing prisoners from Auschwitz on the huts of a giant chessboard.

Contrary to historic mini-series, "Hunters" draws its inspiration directly from superhero comics, and is eyeing Tarantino's version of "Inglourious Basterds" (2009). Al Pacino plays Meyer Offerman, a wealthy New Yorker who survived Auschwitz, at the head of a gang of Nazi hunters.

The series began broadcasting on Amazon on its video-on-demand platform on Friday.

The creator of the series, David Weil, defended criticism of the Auschwitz memorial on Monday, highlighting the fact that it was a work of fiction.

"Hunters" may "be inspired by real events", "it is not a documentary. And it never claimed to be," he wrote in a statement sent to AFP.

The author, who points out that he visited the concentration camp where his grandmother was deported, thus describes the chess scene as a "fictionalized event".

For him, this scene was important in order "to show the sadism and the extreme violence committed by the Nazis against the Jews and the other victims" and thus "to counter revisionism".

Nazi Germany created in 1940, after occupying Poland at the start of World War II, this death camp where more than one million Jews from all over Europe and 100,000 non-Jews were murdered.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the death toll was highest, was part of a large network of camps across Europe established as part of the "Final Solution" ordered by Adolf Hitler and his regime, in view of the genocide of around 10 million European Jews.

© 2020 AFP