German neo-Nazi gang 'developed Monopoly-style game with death camps'

A neo-Nazi gang suspected of murdering 10 people developed their own version of the board game Monopoly featuring death camps and gas works.

Called "Pogromly" and intended for other far-right extremists the game has the names of four Nazi concentration camps instead of the railway stations found on the traditional Monopoly board. Players have the chance to buy Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck, with each camp costing 4,000 reichsmarks, the currency used in Hitler's Germany.

A number of sets of the game were discovered in a garage used by the gang the self-styled National Socialist Underground amongst bomb-making equipment and unused nail bombs last month.

Players start on a square emblazoned with a swastika and also have the chance of landing on a numbers of squares marked with the SS emblem. The board also comes with pictures of Hitler and sinister looking Jews. It is thought the game is based loosely on events surrounding Kristallnacht. On the night of November 8, 1938, the Nazi's unleashed a violent pogrom against German Jews, destroying hundreds of synagogues and Jewish-owned business, and arresting 30,000 people, many of whom were sent to concentration camps.

The gang, apparently, produced dozens of Pogromly sets, which retailed on the underground far-right scene for about £42, as a way of supplementing their finances from 2000 to 2011. The games were sold by an associate of the gang Andre K., who has since been arrested, although, apparently, they suspected he was pocketing too much of the proceeds.

A report by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine said that gang members called other extremists to complain about the lack of money they were receiving from their colleague.

Pogromly comes as the latest lurid twist in the scandal surrounding the operations of the National Socialist Underground. Despite murdering nine men of immigrant background and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007, and conducting 14 bank robberies, police remained oblivious to the gang's existence.

It was not exposed until a botched bank raid last month led to two members committing suicide and the survivor handing herself into the police.

Daily Telegraph