Juden Raus!–The Board Game

Naturally, I looked up the game on Wikipedia, and this is some of what I learned:

Juden Raus! — literally, “Jews Out!” — was a cross-and-circle-style board game, somewhat like Monopoly, published in Germany by Günther & Co. in 1936. It was advertised as “entertaining, instructive, and solidly constructed.” It was marketed not only to adults, but also as a children’s gift.

Imagine German parents wrapping that game and placing it beneath a Christmas tree. I can.

The game included dice, a game board, and figurines depicting Jews wearing exaggerated pointed hats — caricatures rooted in medieval antisemitic imagery. Players rolled dice and moved their “Jews” across the board toward collection points outside the city walls for deportation to Mandatory Palestine. Printed on the board were the words:

“If you manage to send off six Jews, you’ve won a clear victory!”

What makes the game especially chilling is that it was not officially produced as Nazi propaganda and contained no overt Nazi symbols. It was a commercial product — a form of family entertainment. According to Ben Barkow of the Wiener Holocaust Library, the game may have sold in significant numbers, though historians debate whether those claims were exaggerated in advertising material. An article in the International Board Game Studies Association notes that the game’s true commercial success may never be known, especially because it was criticized in an SS journal for trivializing antisemitic policy.

That detail is surreal.

Even within the Nazi system, there were debates — not about morality, but about presentation and seriousness. The SS objected not because the game was hateful, but because they believed hatred should not be treated lightly. That fact alone reveals how deeply institutionalized antisemitism had become in Germany by 1936.

Only a few copies of the game are known to survive today, including one in a museum in Tel Aviv. A smaller travel edition sold at auction in 2024 for nearly $19,000. The Board Game Studies Journal called it “history’s most infamous board game,” writing:

“Juden Raus! shows that after decades of propaganda, antisemitism was so deeply rooted in German society in the 1930s that someone thought it would be a good subject for a children’s game… a terrifying example of the banality of evil.”

After reading about the game, I went to YouTube and, to my amazement, found numerous videos discussing it, including a segment from Antiques Roadshow in England.

The existence of Juden Raus! is horrifying precisely because it collapses the distance between genocide and ordinary domestic life. The terror lies not only in the game itself, but in the normalization of hatred it represents: families gathered around a table, rolling dice, laughing, and casually rehearsing the symbolic removal of Jews from society.

The Shoah did not begin with gas chambers.

It began with language. With mockery. With exclusion. With propaganda. With the gradual conditioning of ordinary people to see Jews as less than human. A board game like Juden Raus! demonstrates how antisemitism seeped into everyday culture — into toys, schools, newspapers, entertainment, and casual conversation.

The phrase “the banality of evil,” coined by Hannah Arendt after observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, feels painfully appropriate here. Evil rarely arrives wearing horns. More often, it arrives disguised as something “normal,” “fun,” “educational,” or “patriotic.” That is what makes this game so profoundly disturbing.

Imagining parents placing Juden Raus! beneath a Christmas tree forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: many perpetrators and enablers were not cinematic monsters. They were ordinary citizens participating in a culture that had normalized cruelty.

Even after decades of studying the Holocaust, artifacts like this still shock us. Perhaps that is because many people learn about the Holocaust primarily through its final catastrophic stage — ghettos, deportations, concentration camps, extermination — rather than through the social conditioning that prepared an entire society to accept, ignore, or participate in those crimes.

The fact that the game later appeared on Antiques Roadshow is itself revealing. These objects survive not as curiosities, but as warnings. Historians and museums preserve them because they demonstrate how prejudice becomes embedded in ordinary life long before violence becomes visible.

“Juden Raus! is a warning to us all.”

That may be the most enduring lesson of all. Democracies and civilized societies are not immune to moral collapse. When hatred becomes entertainment, when dehumanization becomes casual humor, and when propaganda becomes normalized culture, societies can drift toward atrocity far more easily than most people wish to believe.