Postcards From Berlin #34: Gaming and the Third Reich

By Jeff Allers
December 9, 2008

German Word of the Month: Gedächtnis (Remembrance)

Christmas decorations are coming out earlier every year, it seems, though my German friends still do not understand why we decorate our Tannenbaum weeks before Christmas Eve. Still, with the major shopping areas glowing from strings of lights, and little wooden stands on market squares already displaying nutcrackers and gingerbread, there is one thing the season – and Germany – cannot seem to escape: its past.

Last month, the 9th of November marked the 70th anniversary of the Kristallnacht or “night of broken glass”, the first of the Nazi’s pogroms when Jewish businesses and synagogues were destroyed, and tens of thousands of Jews were deported or sent off to concentration camps. It made front page news. Again.

Every nation has skeletons in its closet and dark moments in its history, but I have never been to one that keeps the memory of its abuses alive in the collective consciousness of its citizens for so long. School children learn about the Holocaust at a young age, viewing the sickening films of the camps years before we would allow our children to be exposed to such horrors. And although there is freedom of speech in this young democracy, it does not extend to anything related to Nazi Germany; swastikas and stiff-armed salutes can get you jail time here.

There are also limitless museums and memorials dealing with that period. Every corner of Germany has a former death-camp-turned-memorial, and every avenue of Berlin is haunted by goose-stepping ghosts and built over the remains of Albert Speer’s bombastic fascist architecture. It is odd to live in a city where the two main attractions for tourists are the Wall and the Holocaust Memorial, both places that represent two of the greatest tragedies of Western civilization in the 20th century. It is no doubt a heavy place to plan a vacation, but no less oppressive for the Germans who live here, nor is it for me.

No matter how much I see of it, in fact, I never feel that I am in danger of becoming desensitized. There is always – unfortunately – something new to learn, something that still has the power to unnerve.

It happened again a few years ago as my wife and I were spending time in Nuremberg, a city we had avoided for too long due to its part in World War II history. It is one of the most beautiful cities in Germany – but it also has an enormous memorial to the crimes of the Third Reich on the former parade grounds where some of the first Nazi rallies were held, a stark contrast to the historic buildings and picturesque canals of the old city.

After perusing the many photographs and explanations in the exhibition – information I have come to know much too well – we watched interviews of Holocaust survivors, tears welling in our eyes as we heard them recount their personal tales of desperation and loss.

We then left the viewing room to return to the exhibits when something caught my eye. It was an area showing the Nazi’s influence on German school children. In the glass cases were drawings of crooked-looking men with oversized noses, sketched by children as young as 4 years old. Some children had even practiced their cursive by writing the propaganda slogan “Die Juden sind unser Unglück (The Jews are our misfortune)” across their drawings. I shuddered to think of the teacher who would have encouraged the class, displaying the sketches on her bulletin board, or the parents who might have proudly attached their child’s work to their refrigerator door.

A few display cases farther, and I came to an original copy of a board game which had been produced at that time, decades before the game market in Germany would explode, and even longer before I would become a gamer. I was hooked on German games now, though, and my heart sank at seeing how a medium conceived to promote community and enjoyment could be twisted.

Again, I found it difficult to imagine myself in a typical family setting from that period, getting together in the living room to play Juden Raus, a game about moving Jews, represented by pawns with pointed hats, to “collection points” outside the city walls for deportation. I tried to imagine explaining the goal of the game to my children – while at the same time the neighbors would actually be disappearing.

There were no box cars included in the game, however, and no crayon route building to the concentration camps. The average family did not want to know the details. That was left to the men gathering at Wannsee Lake, where the figures for the “Final Solution” were calculated like some sick resource management game. But very few in this country stood against them.

Not surprisingly, many Germans who lived through that time are still hesitant to speak of it. The taboo nature of National Socialism in normal conversation may even be counterproductive, as may be the overexposure to the Holocaust at a young age. Tolerance has been the word ever since, and modern Germans are careful to show their support of the Jews still living in their country, although most do not know any personally.

Before outsiders begin pointing their fingers at the Germans, however, we must ask ourselves if we are really any different than those who stood by and did nothing to oppose Hitler, passively supporting the Nazis. After all, the United States knew about the genocide of the Jews long before it entered the war, yet the government took little action until it was too late. The sins of omission, it appears, had a much more universal nature. That is why after the war, the nations of the world agreed to never forget, and to never allow the Holocaust to happen again. But even with all of the memorials, it seems people the world over have chosen not to remember. Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur are but a few of the mass graves along the road of those post-war good intentions.

And as for the committing of heinous acts towards ethnic groups under the auspices of national self-interest, I doubt that the hands of any nation are clean. But unlike the extensive educational curriculum in Germany, very little of my own country’s dark history with ethnic minorities was ever brought into the classroom when I was a student. I hope that has changed, especially when many of my teachers rightfully preached that we often learn more from our failures than from our successes.

A biased version of world events can lead to embarrassing situations when living abroad. I always believed, for example, that my country had fought the “just war” against the Germans in an honorable way. I even have many relatives of German descent who served in the U.S. Army and Air Force in World War II, and I am proud of them for their sacrifice and for the perspective they gained through their experiences. Then I met German survivors of the massive bombing of Dresden which took place at the end of the war, and I realized that it was possible that not all the Allied soldiers and officers acted honorably. For three days in February 1945, the baroque city center, which was devoid of factories but was swelling with thousands of refugees, was targeted by allied planes. Friends recall seeing the firestorm from miles away, as civilians hiding out in homes and churches were incinerated. Some even saw Allied planes gunning down those who tried to escape to the River Elbe.

We do not need to look far to be confronted with the scars our nations have left on human history. The undisputed depravity attained by the Nazis is a lesson for all of us, in every nation. If we allow it, anything can be twisted: government, religion, school curriculum…even something so small and seemingly insignificant as a board game.

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