LOS ANGELES (AFP) - The Auschwitz museum has slammed e-commerce company Amazon's new television series Hunters, saying that a fictionalised scene depicting a human chess game from the show starring American actor Al Pacino was "dangerous" and would encourage "future deniers (of the Holocaust)".

"Auschwitz was full of horrible pain and suffering documented in the accounts of survivors," tweeted the Auschwitz Memorial, which preserves the site of the Nazi death camp in Poland.

"Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness and caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. We honour the victims by preserving factual accuracy." The tweet was accompanied by a photo of a scene from the series that showed humans being used as chess pieces.

The drama series, which stars Pacino as a Holocaust survivor, is set in 1977 and follows a group of Nazi hunters who discover hundreds of high-ranking Nazi officials living in the United States and conspiring to create a Fourth Reich.

The series, advertised on its website as being inspired by true events, premiered on Amazon's streaming service on Feb 21.

Its creator, David Weil, hit back at the criticism on Monday (Feb 24), saying in a lengthy statement sent to AFP that he had visited the death camp, where his grandmother was imprisoned.

"While Hunters is a dramatic narrative series, with largely fictional characters, it is inspired by true events," he said. "But it is not a documentary. And it was never purported to be."

Operated by Nazi Germany from 1940 until 1945 in then-occupied Poland, Auschwitz was part of a vast and brutal network of camps across Europe set up as part of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" of genocide against an estimated 10 million European Jews.