Germany banned the game about shooting Nazis — partly for its swastikas, under laws written to suppress Nazi propaganda, in one of the medium's most instructive collisions between law, history, and art.
The story is usually told as a single absurdity, but there were two separate actions with different reasoning. Regional courts in Munich and Berlin banned the game under sections 86 and 86a of the German penal code, which prohibit the dissemination of Nazi symbols and propaganda. Independently, the federal agency BPjM added it to the index of media harmful to youth — and notably, the indexing had nothing to do with swastikas at all. The BPjM objected to the violence, to what it saw as a glorification of vigilante justice, and to a sarcastic treatment of death and suffering.
German law prohibiting Nazi symbols has always carried an exemption for art, which is why Schindler's List and Downfall could depict the Third Reich without difficulty. Wolfenstein 3D could not claim that exemption, and the reason is the whole point of the story: German authorities did not consider video games to be art. The game was not punished for being pro-Nazi — it is emphatically the opposite — but for being a game, and therefore, in the eyes of the law, mere entertainment with no claim to the protections extended to serious work.
The court orders lapsed in 1997 and 2004, though the BPjM continued to treat the game as blacklisted for years afterward. The genuine resolution came in 2018, when German regulators finally accepted that video games could qualify for the same artistic exemption as film and literature, allowing Nazi imagery where it serves an artistic or educational purpose. Wolfenstein's German exile is therefore not really a story about censorship at all. It is a story about a medium waiting to be recognised as art — and the moment the ban lifted is the moment that recognition was formally granted.
Banned by regional courts under Nazi-symbol laws and indexed by the BPjM for violence; the bans lapsed in 1997 and 2004, and in 2018 Germany granted video games the same artistic exemption other media had long enjoyed.