The BBC visited the exhibition over the weekend and were introduced to five toys that, they say, ‘will never be sold again‘: a smiling Hitler in a Dinky-style staff car; a tiny model German Landser of 1914–18 gripping a French poilu by the throat and preparing to plunge a dagger into his chest; two toys sold in America during and after the second world war, one encouraging kids to drop a bomb on Hiroshima (this is actually just one of those little ‘roll the silver ball into a hole’ games, which is one of the most weirdly inappropriate disproportions of comparison I’ve ever seen) and the other—more openly racist but on balance perhaps less offensive—a darts game entitled ‘Get those Japs!’; and another bit of Hitler memorabilia, this one a tile game for very young children learning their letters and shapes. Spell the Führer’s name, happy German child!
I’m not so sure that toys like these will never be sold again, though, and that’s not just because I’ve seen Nazi memorabilia on public display in a junk/’antique’ shop window recently (and am sure there’s a roaring trade in the stuff on the internet). Check out the model Predator and Reaper drones over on Agamben Toys—an excellent and alarming tumblr that isn’t updated often enough—to see how far we’ve come. It takes a lot to make a skull-faced and muscle-bound baddie extruded by late industrial capitalism look like a relic of more innocent days, but I think Playmobil riot police are scarier than Skeletor any day.