A dangerous game. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

Today we'll be talking about a board game, but not just any board game. This particular game

is called History's Most Infamous Sport Games, which is a tall order. Seeing as in researching

this episode, I found a lot of horrifically, horrifically racist board games inspired by the

Antibillum South. And yet, here we are. Talking about Juden Rouse. A German-made cross-and-circle

game that translates in English to mean out with the Jews, or more succinctly, Jews out.

Juden Rouse is a cross-and-circle, like I said, style dice game. Think trivial pursuit,

or sorry, where you go around in a circle, racing your opponents to different marks on the board.

Distributed by Rudolf Febrecius, knew Salza Spretzburg and published by Gunther and Co

and Dresden in Drumroll, 1936, it was meant for children or as a party game for adults,

advertised as, quote, entertaining, instructive, and solidly constructed.

In the Juden Rouse box is a pair of dice, a game board with an abstract,

walled town printed on it, and several angry-looking game piece figurines with brown hair and

large pointed hats meant, of course, to be your Jews. In a game that vaguely plays like Candyland,

or a very bare-bones version of Monopoly, you take turns rolling the dice and moving your Jews

around the board towards clear, quote, collection points outside of the game's city walls

for prompt deportation to Palestine. Written on the game board, it says, quote,

if you manage to see off six Jews, you want a clear victory. Ben Barkow of the Holocaust Museum

at the Werner Library recounts it being documented as a, quote, considerable commercial success,

with possibly a million copies of it being sold, but that might just be what the advertising

material said, especially because the game was condemned by the Third Reich, and in fact,

had no Nazi insignias anywhere on the box, materials, or board. The SS published a negative review of

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