Interestingly, Wolfenstein was censored for decades in Germany, until suddenly it wasn't. Turns out it was legal all along to put Nazi symbols in video games... on the baddies that you're killing. I mean, fair enough.
As always the actual law is more nuanced than what fits in a tweet. Showing Nazi symbols in support of Nazis is forbidden in Germany, showing the exact same symbols in an educational context or in art, science, news or as a measure against nazis is perfectly fine. You're allowed to show people what a swastika looks like, and you are allowed to burn swastikas, but put it on your armband and you are in trouble.
For video games it's of course even more complicated, they have an age rating given out by an industry board (just like movies in the US) and their views on what's acceptable shift drastically over time.
> For video games it's of course even more complicated, they have an age rating given out by an industry board (just like movies in the US) and their views on what's acceptable shift drastically over time.
They also did a lot of weird stuff like replace red blood in games with green blood making the enemies "zombies" and thus making the game less violent somehow.
I would recommend against drawing any conclusion of reason from the decisions of this particular board.
They replaced the blood in Team Fortress 2 with nuts and bolts, making the characters robots.
Many countries regulate depictions of human vs. nonhuman characters differently -- even the USA. The USA taxed imported toys differently depending on whether the character depicted by the toy was human, prompting Marvel to argue in a court of law that the mutants from X-Men were not human in order to score a tax break on X-Men toys manufactured overseas. Which is just the opposite of X-Men's major themes.
For a long time, video games were considered, under German law, to have insufficient artistic or scholastic merit to permit Nazi symbols on the basis of context. So no consideration was given to context for Wolfenstein, it was just "swastikas in a video game = bad". Only recently did that law change.
Not a law change, no, "merely" a change in interpretation by the relevant agencies which got convinced that the old court decision they based their rules on wasn't all that good and not giving enough weight to the merit argument that has been in the law the entire time. (i.e. it's quite likely someone could have successfully sued against the rules before, but understandably that's not something the industry had much appetite for)
