Hollywood Inaccurately Portraying Nazis Is Not Only Wrong. It’s Downright Dangerous.

It is not an exaggeration to say that every Jewish person has a family story rooted in persecution. The roots of Judaism are synonymous with adaptation, expulsion, and regrowth. Even though these stories are common in Jewish circles, with Jewish people only making up 0.2% of the world’s population, they are not widely known outside of the Jewish community. These stories fall into generalized categories based on greater events, such as the Roman Empire, the Spanish Expulsion, and of course World War II.

As cinema continues to evolve into more action franchises that rely on tropes rather than new storylines, it is increasingly important to re-evaluate how movies address and distort painful atrocities. The action-adventure genre within Hollywood uses Nazis as easily identifiable villains, which trivializes the real history of the Holocaust and harms not only the Jewish community, but also the historical understanding of these horrific events and the collective cultural memory.

While films like “Indiana Jones,” “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” and “Inglorious Basterds” use stereotypes created in the 1940s to produce an easily identifiable “good versus evil” storyline that reduces Nazis to buffoons and demeans their violent history, television series also have a long history of WWII-set stories that are used in action-adventure shows.

In the Amazon Prime TV show “Hunters,” a group of Nazi hunters comes together in 1977 in New York to find and kill Nazi officers who hid in the United States after the war and are planning to start the “Fourth Reich.” The show’s protagonists are Jewish characters, which is a clear deviation from others shows and movies that did not include Jews at the heroes. Still, the representation doesn’t change the insulting nature of the show’s Nazi characters. “Hunters” fictionalized parts of the Holocaust to try to add deeper levels of barbarity to the Nazis.

The series premiere includes a scene in which Al Pacino’s character, Meyer Offerman, is recounting a story about witnessing the officers of a concentration camp playing chess and using the prisoners as the pieces. When one piece would capture the other, the prisoner was forced to kill the person in the spot they were taking. The female prisoners were stripped and forced to play naked. The scene contains aerial shots of the chess board, with dead bodies littered on the sides.

While the scene takes place at a concentration camp and has the male prisoners in historically accurate striped uniforms, there is no truth to Nazis ever playing a game of human chess. The scene gives an exaggerated sense of the complete savagery of Nazi actions. This falsification diminishes the Holocaust because the evils are intensified an incomprehensible amount and distort the truth about what really happened.

As the Auschwitz Memorial articulately stated in a tweet after the premiere, “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 a dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers….”.

Creating a fake situation located in a real spot of historical significance lessens the impact and knowledge of the real events that unfolded. By fictionalizing the past, future generations are more susceptible to false information and denying the Holocaust completely. Also, there is more emphasis on the spectacle of atrocities in the show rather than dynamic character studies of the Nazis.  It would be much tidier if, as a society, we could blame great atrocities on people being unabashedly evil, but that line of thinking also creates a bystander effect of people absolving themselves of the reality that sheer indifference contributes to such horrendous acts.

The portrayal of Nazis as psychopaths and sociopaths obscures the fact that evil acts are often the results of everyday people. When people see fake accounts of torture and killing, with one-dimensional officers, hearing true stories can seem “not as bad” because they don’t have the same Hollywood touch. This cycle breeds more ignorance and Holocaust denial. When Nazis become caricatures to signify the greatest evil, the film or TV show erases the truly despicable nature of the Nazi party and absolves bystanders of any guilt.

In order to move forward, filmmakers and audiences must approach Holocaust and Nazi rhetoric with historical context. It is not the filmmakers’ job to provide the audience with every detail of WWII or the Holocaust, but it is also their responsibility to accurately portray what they’re focusing on with respect and grounded characters. Then, they will not dishonor or distort true stories.

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