In 2020, streaming platform Amazon Prime released Hunters, a thriller mystery about apprehending and eliminating Nazi war criminals living incognito in the United States.

The 18-episode, two-season series, starring Hollywood legend Al Pacino, depicts one particularly haunting scene where a concentration camp guard plays a game of deadly human chess with prisoners used as the pieces.

As pieces are captured, the terrified people are shot. What unfolds on screen is ghastly, but completely fictional. Amazon Prime Video used its X-Ray feature — an interactive overlay that allows viewers on a computer to pause and hover over a scene and access explanatory or historical annotations — to explain the scene fabrication.

As a scholar of Holocaust literary and film narratives, I have been increasingly troubled by the presentation of fictionalized Holocaust atrocities since first watching this show.

Were there not enough real acts of unimaginable violence? Why is there a need to make things up? This excess of creative licence for the sake of drawing in audiences can be desensitizing or can even fuel a fetish for Holocaust horror.

Perhaps, as journalist Tanya Gold wrote regarding John Boyne’s Holocaust novels instrumentalizing Jewish suffering to serve non-Jewish stories, audiences “are greedy for our tragedy.”

More recently, after watching the 2025 Netflix limited series, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, I am again exceptionally troubled by how the Holocaust is being portrayed with

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