Nazi toys: When Hitler came to the nursery

Who hunts the most Jews from the city? The manufacturer advertised "Jews out" as "extraordinarily cheerful and contemporary parlor game". The players roll in turn, train by train wooden police dolls comb through the streets. Anyone landing in a field marked "Salomon, money lending" or "Jacob, costume rental" may collect a Jew, depicted as a hat with a grotesque grin. But the hijackers can scavenge each other's loot.

The goal is to tow as many as possible hats through the six city gates and park at a meeting point. "Go to Palestine!" stands on one side of the board - and on the other the rhyme: "If you succeed in chasing out six Jews / you are victorious without asking."

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In the fall of 1938 the company Günther & Co. from Dresden brought this 50 x 60 centimeter board game onto the market. But even the SS was the anti-Semitic combination of "catch the hat" and "human trouble not" too clumsy. Thus wrote the SS-Kampfblatt "The Black Corps" in 1938: "This 'invention' is a downright punishable idea, perfectly suited to pour water on the Hetzmühlen the international Jewish Journal."

In which edition "Jews out" was made, is not secured. One thing is for sure: the board game is one of the tastelessest things that the toy industry produced in the "Third Reich".

GröFaZ is pushing into the nursery

And it produced abundantly: Immediately after the seizure of power by the National Socialists, the industry flooded the market with brown products. Whether as a Hitler puzzle, leader quartet or elbow-swinging Elastolin male: With power pushed the GröFaZ into the German nursery.

Soon swastikas on whistles and balls, flutes and wind turbines, pocket mirrors and pencil sharpeners. Board games such as "Through Fight to Victory" and "The Victory Run of the Swastika" were designed to playfully inspire children for Nazi politics.

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With a steel helmet under the Christmas tree (1938)

In addition, tanks, warships, and armies of uniformed workers were scraping across the floors. "It's over with the stupid pacifist rush of the so-called peace societies and women's leagues against all military toys," rejoiced in 1933, the Association of German pewter manufacturers.

"Friedewald" with movable right arm

In their eagerness, the toy manufacturers did not follow orders from above - they volunteered to serve the National Socialist cause. "After 1933, the industry, which had been hit hard by the global economic crisis, tried to make commercial use of the national dizziness," says historian André Postert from Dresden in a one-day talk.

To be sure, most of the toys in the "Third Reich" were without direct Nazi reference. Nevertheless, especially smaller companies with all sorts of Nazi brands, according to Postert, author of the book "Children's Game, Gambling, War Game". Even the larger ones committed themselves to the Nazi regime in order to increase their sales.

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Child's play, gambling, war game

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Thus, the doll manufacturer Käthe Kruse in the summer of 1933 with three Nazi models. "More up-to-date than ever" was the advertising slogan for the puppet boy "Friedebald", who was available either as an SA man or a Hitler youth - of course with a movable right arm.

A brown cuddly terrorist from the house of Steiff could also lift him up for the Hitler salute: The company produced the SA felt figure with googly eyes and a button in his ear until the spring of 1934.

Off for the SA-Jumping Jack

After that it was over. According to a representation close to the company, the Württemberg Landing Licensing Office banned the SA doll by saying that it was "capable of offending the dignity of national symbols".

Self-irony was not the thing of the Nazi fanatics - they were embarrassed not to be ridiculed. So the regime pocketed hundreds of products, with the crunching toy industry out of the red. They fell victim to the so-called Anti-Kitsch Act of 19 May 1933.

It forbade the silly SA-Hampelmann as well as the harmless Hitler coloring page: Not to imagine that a child accidentally denigrates the face of the "leader"! The test centers controlled each product - and the National Socialists were not particularly interested in toys, according to Postert: The German youth should rather steel their muscles during sports than to soften them up while puzzling.

Lead soldiers on the Christmas table

At the same time, the regime was well aware of the propagandistic value of toys. In the summer of 1933, the Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment called for toys to be used more than ever before "in the service of upbringing to the fortified and patriotic spirit."

The Nazi ideologues put special emphasis on war toys: "In the future, there should be no boy who does not find at least one box of lead soldiers on his Christmas table, which familiarizes him with the Wehrmacht and national thought." The industry rejoiced; for the Christmas business 1935 reported the toy specialized press over a sales increase by 25 per cent.

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Fanatic meets Santa Claus: Goebbels on a PR tour in the department store

In the run-up to Christmas, Hitler, Goebbels and Göring had themselves photographically photographed with children in department stores where they distributed presents, stroked heads and posed with Santa Claus. The message: We love children, and children love us.

In order to win people over to their cynical ideology, the Nazi regime exploited one that was almost forgotten at the beginning of the twenties: the Kasper. The puppet show is a "weapon that we can not do without in this fight", so 1938 a publication of the KdF organization. The following year, the "Reich Institute for Puppetry" was founded in Berlin.

From then on, the Kasperle would sometimes spoil the Marxist, sometimes the British Prime Minister, but most of all the Jew, depicted as a devilish caricature with a gigantic hooked nose and bulging lips. The figure was the work of puppeteer Harro Siegel. He had designed them out of fear of the concentration camp, justified himself seal after the war.

Ghetto Monopoly from Theresienstadt

While children delighted in how the brown Kasper sealed Siegel's Jewish doll, systematic mass murder was running at full speed in the camps. In spite of everything, people also thought of games there - they testify to despair and the will to survive.

One of them is the "Ghetto Monopoly" by Oswald Pöck. On November 30, 1941, the Jewish artist was deported to Theresienstadt and was probably active in the technical department. On brown cardboard Pöck painted the camp town with fine lines, around the individual stations of the ghetto: lock, "disinfestation", construction yard, prison.

According to the historian Postert, Pöck probably developed his monopoly to ease children's orientation in the camp. Whether he also invented a second game guaranteed for Theresienstadt is not certain. Only the rules of this board game are handed down: mercilessly it dealt with the struggle for survival in the concentration camp.

Anyone who comes to fields, where he meets family members or gets hold of a post, may leap forward - who gets lice or ill, must pause. The winner is the player who first lands on board # 50, labeled "Soph" (Hebrew for end or end).

But the likelihood of the desired rescue is low: The game fields 48 and 49 are called "transport". A fate that also befell the man who may have invented the game: On September 29, 1944, Oswald Pöck was deported to Auschwitz and murdered.