“A democracy was created on the ashes of this terrible crime,” Black said. The solution, in many cases, was not to talk about it. Because many of those in the Third Reich actually were integrated into the government system and the economic market, it was almost impossible to rebuild an entire functioning political system without people who had such experience.

There was also, says Black, an unspoken agreement that further cemented the public confrontation of Nazi symbolism and made sure such signs were not tolerated in public. Anyone who denigrates an individual or group based on their ethnicity or religion or rouses violence against a specific group could, after that, face prison time. At the same time, the concept of Volksverhetzung - “incitement to hatred” - was codified as well. The Allies’ ban on swastikas and other Nazi symbology was further codified when the new Constitution of Germany was created in 1949 in West Germany. “Everything from the names of street signs to postage stamps, blowing up whole buildings or chipping Nazi symbols from the facade of public buildings across the country.” “There was also the very public removal of symbols of Nazism,” she says. “If such a use of prohibited symbols in computer games were permitted,” the court stated, “it would hardly be possible to counteract a development towards their increasing use in public.”īut, in April, the German Attorney General ruled that video games could also fall under the the same art exemption applied to films, stating that the Wolfenstein ruling was outdated now that age ratings were in place for video games. The court ruled that it did not matter that the symbols were located in the areas of the game given to the enemy. The precedent for taking Nazi symbols out of games was set in 1998 when a German court ruled that an earlier version of the game, Wolfenstein 3D, could not use any of the symbols.

However, the German version of the game replaces swastikas with triangles and strips the game’s reality of other historical symbols, including Hitler’s mustache, from the game’s visuals. The game depicts an alternate version of history in which the Nazi regime was not defeated in World War II players must fight to bring the world out of Hitler’s control. The debate that culminated in the change was sparked by the video game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

Hitler stache in regs