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.”
When storytelling becomes sensationalism
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 the integration of convicted war criminal Ilse Koch as a gruesome role model for the title character.
The series has received criticism for portraying Gein, a murderer and ghoulish pilferer of human remains, in a sympathetic light. But instances of fictionalized Holocaust portrayals have a larger potential impact.
For audiences, this can lead to misinformation, misrepresentation or, more dangerously, the questioning of how much content they consume is real or worse, distortion and denial.
Koch appears as a character in the series, portrayed by Vicky Krieps, an actress originally from Luxembourg. The title character, Ed Gein, portrayed by Charlie Hunnam, is obsessed with the Nazi concentration camps in a way that can only be interpreted as fetishism.
In modern Poland, this phenomenon of fetishized consumption of Holocaust content is referred to as “holo polo,” defined by cultural anthropologist Sylwia Chutnik as:
“A way of dealing with the ‘discomfort’ of the horrors of war and violence, by creating a more comfortable version of it. Instead of describing the horrors of the Holocaust, Holo-polo trivializes and misrepresents its significance, depicting melancholy, sentiment, and nostalgia in the light of a pop-cultural emotional trap. Kitschy clichés are misused and certainly do not serve memory, literature or respect for Holocaust victims and survivors.”
Repackaging Koch as seductive, sympathetic
Ilse Koch was the inspiration for the 1975 Canadian exploitation film Ilse She Wolf of the SS, rooted in the countless reports of the historical figure’s cruelty, sadism and twisted sexual appetites.
There has been debate over the extent of Koch’s sadism and sexual deviancy, but the “Witch of Buchenwald,” as she was known, was certainly guilty of war crimes regardless of possible media embellishment.
This newest dramatization portrays Koch as an attractive sexual temptress with dark impulses, but as the title protagonist idolizes her, her abuses fail to appear as sinister, but rather as fetishism. The series takes documented events and creatively amplifies them.
Koch and her husband, Karl Otto Koch — who served as commandant of Buchenwald and Majdanek — did build a massive indoor equestrian riding facility but the series portrays this as a gruesome circus where a scantily clad Krieps wearing an SS hat chases an almost nude female concentration camp prisoner while whipping her inside the backroom of a lavish party. Koch was known to ride on horseback whipping prisoners, but the farcical mockery and dramatization could leave viewers pondering what is fact.
At times, the fictionalization of the story goes as far as to depict a transatlantic ham radio conversation between Gein and Koch. The clandestine friendship is purely a fabrication of Gein’s troubled mind, but nevertheless allows Koch to passionately plead her innocence through Krieps’ performance.
Artistic licence: Real consequences
While artistic licence in historical dramatization is part of the process of storytelling, it must be undertaken responsibly to preserve the authenticity of true events.
Fictionalization is the fabrication of events that never took place for the sake of manufacturing a more compelling narrative. But fictional content can quickly morph into fetishization where the invented portion of story is packaged in a way that intends to exploit history to satisfy audience fascination with the macabre.
Read more: How Jan. 27 came to be International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
In Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Koch emotionally chastises authorities for taking her fourth child, born during her incarceration, from her arms, illustrating maternal tenderness and evoking compassion and sympathy from viewers. Before hanging herself, as the real Koch did on Sept. 1, 1967, Krieps’ character is driven mad by an unseen golem that has been dispatched to exact vengeance for the countless Jewish deaths she was responsible for.
Koch was a woman who used tattooed human skin to make artifacts such as a lampshade, and despite this too being chronicled in the miniseries, the crimes come off as eccentricities rather than heinous acts of barbarity.
Leah Abrahamsson, an influencer from the Orthodox Jewish community, writes on her blog, Jew in the City in response to watching Hunters:
“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.”
Could society be feeding diluted history to a new generation that won’t heed the lessons learned from the Holocaust?
A 2025 report from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance corroborates that denial, distortion and revisionism are on the rise in Europe.
The study offers a stark assessment of this in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy and Poland. It shows “how antisemitic narratives adapt to societal crises, are exploited for political gain, often evade legal accountability, and erode historical truth with harmful consequences for Jewish communities, Holocaust survivors and their descendants.”
With Holocaust denial posing a very real threat globally it becomes increasingly vital that storytellers be more responsible with their fictionalizations and use of artistic liberties.
Regan Lipes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
