Read more: Join in – xenophobia
Numerous books focus exclusively on board games. But games also appear in books where you wouldn’t expect them. In the series Continue Reading, we present these books. Today: Die Zelle – Rechter Terror in Deutschland, published in 2012 by Rowohlt. The book has 272 pages and costs about 15 euros.
This article is from “Null Ouvert – Magazin für analoge Spielkultur”. You can find more information about the magazine in this post.
The first sentence
It is an ordinary Monday morning in January at the Böhnhardt family home in Jena.
The content
The National Socialist Underground (NSU) murdered migrants in Germany for more than ten years without being caught. The book aims to explain how this could happen and how three middle-class children, Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos and Beate Zschäpe, became terrorists. The authors describe how the three extremists carried out their crimes, who helped them and how they organised their daily lives.
The authors
Christian Fuchs works for the investigative department of Die Zeit. He won the award “Leuchtturm für besondere publizistische Leistungen” and has been named “Journalist of the Year” several times. John Goetz is
a freelance contributor to Süddeutsche Zeitung and an NDR editor for investigative research at the ARD capital studio. The journalist was involved in uncovering the CIA secret prisons.
The game
Pogromly is a dehumanising and inciting Monopoly clone. The authors present it on pages 120 to 126. If you buy houses with Reichsmark, you can cover small Stars of David and make cities “judenfrei”. Instead of train stations, there are concentration camps. On SS and SA cards, antisemitic and anti-left slogans are written in blackletter. Example: “You crapped on a Jewish grave. Unfortunately, you caught an infection in the process. Medical costs: 1000 RM.”
There were numerous peculiarities and unanswered questions surrounding the NSU investigations. Several
investigative committees dealt with them. Pogromly also played a role. The leadership of the Thuringian intelligence service knew from intercepted phone calls and from their informant Tino Brandt that the terrorists, among other things, financed themselves through the sale of Pogromly games. And they knew the middleman who distributed the racist boards in Jena. So they decided to create artificial demand for this game. Brandt received at least 1,000 marks from public funds and bought three, four or five games from a certain André K. No one is quite sure of the exact number today. K. was supposed to pass the money on to the trio. The agents wanted to observe the handover. But they lost the trail. A second attempt also failed.