There was something very familiar about
EA’s botched roll-out of a premiumBattlefield V character skin a few weeks ago, where the company slapped the name of a significant anti-Nazi resistance member onto a laughably overdone German super-soldier. Even as it apologized for using a completely inappropriate name for the character, EA attempted to clarify that he was definitely not a Nazi, but just a German soldier. It was further evidence, if any were needed, that EA’s and DICE are ill-equipped to deal with the historical context of their own game.
They're hardly alone. In the weeks since the tempest-in-a-teapot around a set of DLC characters, we've seen further evidence of the extent of
militant, officially sanctioned white supremacy, the ongoing affinity modern white supremacist fascists have for the symbolism of the Third Reich, and we've also seen how much mainstream cultural discourse
struggles to comprehend that connection. A man
recently accused of planning a mass shooting at a synagogue stated his wish to carry it out in a "Nazi uniform." The place he made those threats? Steam.
The issues with responsibly depicting German combat forces in World War 2, and their connections to Nazi crimes against humanity, are well-known at this point and have been a point of increasing discussion and debate among historical hobby gamers for years. EA’s flagship shooter might be on the cutting edge of mainstream video gaming, but it’s naive politics are years behind the state of historical research. The argument that a character fought bravely and heroically for Germany, but not the Nazis, isn’t just naive, but it’s one that was aggressively promulgated by German war criminals themselves.
In the years following the Nuremberg trials, there was an increasingly concerted effort to whitewash the record of the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of the Third Reich. As a brief peace transformed into Cold War, and the Soviet Union became the new enemy of the United States and its European allies, NATO leadership sought both to rearm the Federal Republic of Germany as an anti-Communist breastwork in central Europe, and to bring German officers back into the respectable professional fold so that NATO militaries could learn from their experiences fighting the Red Army. It was cynical, self-interested, and perhaps irrevocably distorted the historical record of the Wehrmacht even as World War 2 historiography was taking shape.
This had a major spillover into popular culture, and perhaps one of the best books on this is
The Myth of the Eastern Front by Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies. It details how German officers released self-exculpatory memoirs, how their colleagues in Allied militaries lent their names and prestige to mainstreaming German commanders like Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein. But it also details how those memoirs and their ideological bent informed the nascent field of tabletop wargaming.
