‘Hunters': Were Those Nazi Concentration Camp Flashbacks Based on True Stories?

(This article contains some spoilers for “Hunters” on Amazon Prime Video)

“Hunters,” as you almost certainly know if you found your way into this article, is the story of a group of vigilantes, most of whom are Jewish, in the 1970s who are hunting down former Nazis who have been living in America since World War II. Several of these folks are Holocaust survivors, who managed to make it out of Nazi death camps alive — though certainly not unscathed.

These older hunters — Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), Ruth Heidelbaum (Jeannie Berlin), Murray Markowitz (Saul Rubinek) and Mindy Markowitz (Carol Kane) — are of course marked by their time in those concentration camps, and a few of their targets are folks who were responsible for some of the truly astonishing crimes against humanity these four had witnessed.

It’s pretty heinous stuff. We get a story about a Jewish master chess player, who is forced into a game of chess in which the pieces are other prisoners in the camp. And when a piece is taken, the person is killed. Then there was the one where the Nazi running the camp forced a group of prisoners to sing a Nazi song, and if he would shoot anyone who he thought missed a note until only one was left. Then there was the one about a Nazi scientist who would force prisoners to drink seawater until it killed them, just to see what would happen.

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There are more horror stories from the camps on “Hunters,” but those are the most extreme atrocities that were depicted in season 1. These bits are all very disturbing, but they’re also a bit, ah, out there. The Nazis proved over and over again that they were more than capable of that kind of pure madness, but some of these tales are so crazy that it felt like they might have been examples of creative license taken by “Hunters” showrunner David Weil and the writing staff.

Such license is to be expected, since “Hunters” is not a true story, and the main characters were not real people. This is a fictional tale. So their traumatic histories don’t have to match up exactly with those of real historical people who experienced the horrors of the Nazi regime.

And it turns out, they generally don’t. The chess story and the murderous singing competition appear to be original to the show, but the seawater thing is definitely not an invention of “Hunters.” The Nazis performed all sorts of the most horrendous “medical experiments” on prisoners at the camps, like freezing people in order to test hypothermia treatments. Or taking sets of twins and attempting to manually conjoin them, which is another thing that is mentioned on the show.

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At Dachau, Nazi scientists would force prisoners to ingest salt water that had been filtered by various means, allegedly in order to find a method of making seawater drinkable. It didn’t work and nothing was learned, and the only effect was extreme dehydration of the subjects, who weren’t allowed to eat or drink anything other than salt water during the experiments.

But the addition of those other concentration camp stories is in line with the way “Hunters” plays with history. At another point in season 1, New York City experiences a blackout after an explosion occurs at a power plant. This was a real blackout that really happened, but the circumstances that caused it are different on the show than they were in real life.

And the disturbing singing competition and the earlier scene in which members of a small Jewish orchestra, forced to play for new arrivals at a concentration camp, are killed when they play the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila” are certainly rooted in a very real musical tradition in the camps. Auschwitz, for example, had an orchestra with dozens of musicians. And having them play for new arrivals was a real thing.

Those Holocaust stories that are original to “Hunters” take place in real settings during true events, but for these fictional characters the exact details of their circumstances are a bit different than they were for real people.