Amazon Prime asked to remove film over Holocaust misappropriation

The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) has issued a request to the popular streaming site Amazon Prime to remove the Indian film Bawaal due to its use of the Holocaust as a plot device. 

The movie, which is set in the contemporary era, features the main character traveling to the death camp Auschwitz where he is sent into a gas chamber wearing striped pajamas. The movie also includes the use of Hitler as a metaphor for human greed, as the main character tells his wife “We’re all a little like Hitler, aren’t we?”

“Auschwitz is not a metaphor. It is the quintessential example of Man’s capacity for Evil,” explained Rabbi Abraham Cooper, SWC’s Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action. “By having the protagonist in this movie declare that ‘every relationship goes through their Auschwitz,’ Nitesh Tiwari trivializes and demeans the memory of six million murdered Jews and millions of others who suffered at the hands of Hitler’s genocidal regime.”

“If the filmmaker’s goal was to gain PR for their movie by reportedly filming a fantasy sequence at the Nazi death camp, he has succeeded. Amazon Prime should stop monetizing Bawaal by immediately removing this banal trivialization of the suffering and systematic murder of millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust.”

Amazon’s history of hosting antisemitic content on its platform

In November 2022, activists condemned Amazon for refusing to remove Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America, an antisemitic film shared by Kyrie Irving.

“As a retailer of content to hundreds of millions of customers with a lot of different viewpoints, we have to allow access to those viewpoints, even if they are objectionable — objectionable and they differ from our particular viewpoints,” Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy said at the time of the initial outrage.  

The site has also hosted a number of best-selling antisemitic books shared by Irving.