Groups Urge Germany and Austria to Crack Down on Neo-Nazi Games

Jewish groups and a U.S. senator are urging the Austrian and German governments to crack down on the proliferation of neo-Nazi video games in their countries.

An Austrian newspaper poll published last month reported that 22 percent of high school students in the municipalities of Graz and Linz have played such games, which are apparently manufactured in Germany.

There are currently some 140 such video and computer games, according to the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which held a news conference here Wednesday to call attention to the problem.

Reporters were given a demonstration of the "Aryan Test," which rewards players for answering multiple-choice questions with pro-Nazi responses and penalizes those giving anti-Nazi ones.

Another game, which is played to the tune of the German national anthem, challenges players to efficiently manage the Treblinka concentration camp by accumulating enough gas to kill as many "Turks" as possible.

The game, which has colorful graphics of Hitler and concentration camp scenes, awards additional points for extracting gold fillings from the victims’ teeth and selling the victims’ remains for dog food.

Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.), who hosted the news conference, wrote Wednesday to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, urging them to invoke hate crimes statutes to ban distribution of the games in their countries.

D’Amato, backed by the Wiesenthal Center, also asked the U.S. Customs Service to consider banning their import into the United States. Although no English-language versions have yet to be discovered, some of the German-language games promised to become available in English.

FIRST AMENDMENT CONCERNS CITED

Bill Anthony, a Customs Service spokesman, said his agency is trying to determine if such a ban can be made without violating free-speech guarantees contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. "One of the problems might be there may not be any laws under which this is covered," he said.

Gottfried Haas, the spokesman at the German Embassy here, said the distribution of such games in Germany is "against our penal law."

"As soon as we have any clear evidence of that, our prosecutors will act immediately for sure," Haas said.

Ulf Pacher, the Austrian Embassy spokesman, said his government began investigating the matter on April 20, when the Austrian poll of high school students appeared. The date is also the anniversary of Hitler’s birth.

Pacher said that although none of the games were apparently created in Austria, some may have been made by Austrian groups connected with German ones.

Pacher said he doubted any such game had been created in Austria, because "it’s not a big enough market," although distributors in a larger market such as Germany "obviously have an incentive to come in."

The American Jewish Committee raised the issue last week with both the German and Austrian ambassadors to the United Nations. It also wrote Kohl and Waldheim, urging them to "be vocal in their denunciation of these games" and to "initiate prosecutions."

Kenneth Stern, AJCommittee’s program specialist for anti-Semitism and extremism, said the group will likely not press for any Customs Service restrictions on the basis that such games do not travel in packages "with pictures of Hitler on the front."

Since such games would enter the United States through underground means, Stern said his group would focus on raising awareness of them in communities where they are discovered.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, dismissed the argument that publicizing the games would only make them more popular. "I can’t see any outcome that is positive unless we stop this," he said.

Hier said such games have allowed neo-Nazi groups to "tap into the mainstream" of Germany and Austria.

Games glorifying the Holocaust are not new in Germany. In September 1984, a court in the southwestern German city of Zweibrucken convicted a woman of devising and circulating a board game in which pawns representing Jews were sent to death camps by the throw of dice.