(This takes 3¾ minutes to read.)

Turning to my examination of West German Naziware, I begin my discussion with KZ-Manager—arguably the most notorious of the C64 releases—in which players are tasked with running an extermination camp like a business, a cynical detail given that the [Third Reich] approached the Final Solution like an industry. The game appeared around 1988 and was put on the Index by the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Minors in July 1989, before being banned one and a half years later. Unsurprisingly, the ban did little to remove KZ-Manager from circulation.

Compared to later adaptations—such as the one on the more advanced Commodore Amiga with its significantly improved processor—the C64 version must be considered technically limited with little to no non-textual elements. KZ-Manager does not contain representations of human beings dying in the gas chambers. As such, it exemplifies the “super-rational element […] reflected in the early games’ graphics, which have a spare, modernist feel,” adding a dark twist to the frequently abstract quality of 8-bit games in that it gives pixeled gestalt to the [Axis’s] inhumane “rationality” (Slovin 139).

The goal of the player is to kill a specified number of people—some versions mention Jews while certain mods focus on Turks or Sinti and Roma—in a race against time, while keeping an eye on the public opinion and other contingent factors that determine the success of the virtual death camp officer. The interface uses drop-down menus to allow players to execute certain orders and most of the information is displayed in writing as KZ-Manager makes explicit the murderous goals that the player must meet.

Along these lines, it is noteworthy that it takes real effort to fail in this game, the program suggesting that the Final Solution is only a matter of time, and that the extermination of European Jewry can hardly be botched. As such, the game mechanic utilizes and then corrupts ludology’s tenet that “one of the primary reasons to play a game is to gain a sense of being effective in the world” (Skelly xiii).

The Anti Türkentest is entirely text-based—except for a swastika intermittently placed prominently in the center of the screen—and presents the player with a selection of ten randomly selected multiple-choice quiz questions whose content is racist throughout. A “correct” answer to any of these questions will yield a euphoric “Richtig Nazi” (“Correct, Nazi”), one of the rare voice effects on the C64.

After the test’s completion the player will be judged according to his answers, similar to the popular “character tests” that can be found on Facebook and other social media sites today. The questions in the game are culled from ethnically charged jokes that circulated in West Germany during that time, making it immediately obvious which answer is the desired one and often offering only one that is clearly deemed incorrect, which in this case is synonymous with “not racist.”

Anti Türkentest differs from KZ-Manager not only in terms of genre, but also in that it hides its xenophobia behind a shield of faux humor.¹⁵ In contrast to KZ-Manager, the genesis of Anti Türkentest has been better documented. In 1989, the German magazine Der Spiegel published an anonymous interview with the Berlin-based programmer of the Anti Türkentest, quoted in their article “Bravo, Hitlerjunge” [Well done, Hitler-Youth], who claimed “dass er sein Spiel im Informatik-Unterricht entwickeln konnte, der Lehrer ‘habe nichts eblickt” [that he was able to develop his game during IT-education, since the teacher ‘did not realize what his student was doing’].

The interviewer added, “die Eltern offenbar auch nicht” [same with the parents, apparently] and concludes “Das Produkt des 18jährigen fand sofort reißenden Absatz” [the 18-year-old’s product became a hot commodity immediately]. The programmer finally confirms that: “Viele in meiner Klasse wollten diesen Test haben, weil sie über Ausländer genauso denken wie ich” [a lot of my classmates wanted to get their hands on the Test because they have the same opinion about foreigners that I have] (29/1989).

The last statement makes it clear that the impetus to code Anti Türkentest grew out of a deep-seated bias toward Turkish immigrants in Germany that was amplified by the programmer’s assenting cohort. This said, as soon as the game left behind the school environment in which it had been initially conceived, the original intent of its programmer ceased to play a major rôle.

The offensive software spread across Germany—it went viral, to use today’s parlance—by being copied from storage medium to storage medium, often hidden among several other, professionally produced games so that there would not have been any direct connection to the Berlin programmer who had written and originally distributed it among his classmates—but not, it should be noted, as part of a right-wing group. In many instances, to speak from personal experience, one simply came across the game, whether one had been aware of its existence or not.

The Axis never attempted to annihilate Turks — in fact, Istanbul and Berlin were on good terms for most of World War II. So why were they the targets of German neofascist software? Mostly because petty bourgeois Germans were in competition with Turkish immigrants, though the desire to circumvent the law might have been another reason.

To watch some gameplay of KZ Manager Millenium: Hamburg Edition, click here. Cheers to TheCrazyEven for suffering through some of it for us. I thanked him therefor as it must have been an embarrassing experience, but he confided in me that while he was not exactly embarrassed playing it, he was still deeply uncomfortable—for obvious reasons. (Note that the music in the video, despite its triumphantly gloomy tone, was not part of the game. It was merely something that TheCrazyEven had playing in the background.)