History’s face-punchiest man, Adolf Hitler, is the star of a new sex game, fittingly titled Sex with Hitler. (Heads up, that link is very NSFW.) It’s currently riding high on Steam’s “New Releases” charts, but as Vice reports, some players are upset about a minor feature: The genocidal dictator has two testicles. Historically, it’s been long speculated that he had one.
Ostensibly, the game is an isometric-shooter-cum-extremely-adult-visual-novel. Action-focused sections, in which players shoot at Allied forces, are punctuated by poorly animated sex scenes starring Hitler and a range of cartoon ladies. I haven’t played, because it looks pretty dreadful, based on the particularly unpleasant scenes flaunted on Sex with Hitler’s Steam page. But that’s not the issue being raised by customers.
“Terrible game. First off, Hitler was known to only have one testicle (nut),” one player wrote in one of Sex with Hitler’s negative reviews. “However, the game gets this wrong twice. In one scene he has both of his nuts.”
Indeed, as Reuters reported in 2015, citing medical records from the 1920s, Hitler possibly suffered from cryptorchidism — basically, an “undescended testicle” — on the right side. While there’s still disagreement, alongside a persistent rumour that he lost one of his little friends in the Battle Of Somme, Sex with Hitler, however, very blatantly shows fully descended, intact testicles in screenshots and in a trailer.
Sex with Hitler is rife with other historical anachronisms. For one, Hitler’s portrayed as an adonis, statuesque and utterly ripped. (He was famously neither.) For another, the Nazi armband doesn’t feature a swastika. Nope, it has — to shamelessly borrow language from John Walker, Kotaku’s in-house Brit — a winky.
You get the unmistakable sense that developer Romantic Room is just shamelessly courting controversy via overt silliness, rather than attempting some sort of pro-Hitler narrative. (Sex with Hitler is unaffiliated with a similarly dictator-centric, tongue-in-cheek sex game, Mova Games’ Sex with Stalin.) On the one hand, portraying Nazis in a comedic light is a theoretical act of declawing. But amid a historic rise in global anti-Semitism, it’s clear Nazism still has its claws in many.
In 2018 alone, anti-Semtic crimes spiked by 74 per cent in France, per figures cited by the UN. Similar stats were reported across Europe and the United Kingdom through 2017 and 2018, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2020, a survey found that 10 per cent of American adults under 40 weren’t convinced the Holocaust happened. (It did.) A further 11 per cent said that Jews were responsible for it. (They were not.) These beliefs, stoked by the American right, are having real ramifications. Earlier this month, one man held multiple hostages at gunpoint in a Texas synagogue, which the FBI is considering a hate crime and an act of terrorism. A recent survey found 25 per cent of American Jews have experienced direct acts of anti-Semitism, while another 39 per cent of respondents said they’d altered their behaviour in an effort to mask their Jewish identity.
And hey, remember that one time, five years ago, when a bunch of neo-Nazis walked down a Virginia street waving tiki torches?
Nazis are very real and very scary, and surely we’re well past the point where we’d find it funny that they’d be played for laughs in silly sex game? No matter how many testicles might be on display.
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