The game, manufactured in Nazi Germany by an obscure company called Guenther, is likely to have been on sale at the end of 1938
A new exhibition at the Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust at Israel’s Tel Aviv University is featuring the appalling children’s board game “Jews out!”
The game, manufactured in Nazi Germany by an obscure company called Guenther and Co., is likely to have been on sale at the end of 1938, following the events of Kristallnacht. In the board game, players are tasked with collecting six “Jew hats” from Jewish residential and commercial areas in the city. The first player to bring them to one of the roundup spots wins the game.
One of the captions on the board reads “Go to Palestine!”
Prof. Emeritus José Brunner, the Academic Director and Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Wiener Library, said the game was a clear sign that antisemitic acts against Jews were at every age of German society.
“Jews out is clearly the outcome of years of blatant incitement and antisemitism which prevailed in German society in the 1930s – so much so that someone got the idea that driving out the Jews was a suitable theme for a children’s game.”
Interestingly enough, the game was not as popular as one might perceive at that time. Despite going on sale at the peak of antisemitic acts and sentiment in Nazi Germany, Brunner said it was not well-received by the Nazi establishment.
In an article published in the SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps on December 29, 1938, the writers criticized the game, claiming that it was disrespectful to the policy of cleansing Germany of Jews, because it presented systematic planning and execution as a game of chance, instead of a methodical plan.
Tel Aviv University received the game in the 1970s together with the entire Wiener archive from London, containing tens of thousands of documents from the Nazi period. The Library’s collection also includes the Das Schwarze Korps paper, where criticism of the game was published in 1938.
