Strategy game – “Hearts of Iron 4”: Nazi criminals as “normal” game characters

Since 2018, the depiction of people and symbols of National Socialism in video games has no longer been completely banned in this country. Since then, they have appeared there more often than in other international entertainment formats. In one of the best-known strategy games, “Hearts of Iron 4,” players can extensively simulate the historical situation before the Second World War. Including a military victory march by Hitler’s Germany and its allied “Axis powers”. This possibility brought many right-wing radical players to the game published in 2016 by the Swedish company Paradox.

But the game offers a variety of options. It is possible to defeat the NSDAP under the leadership of Adolf Hitler in a civil war, to close the Allied alliance early in order to put Germany in its place or to convince the Americans to intervene in the Second World War a little earlier . Nevertheless, the game is a German countryman’s wet dream. Paradox is probably aware of this too. This month, the software company released an additional downloadable content pack called “Götterdämmerung.” The new content has met with great criticism in this country. “The player can protect his favorite Nazis and appoint them as Reich leaders,” says strategy game expert Steinwallen on YouTube, describing one of the newly introduced mechanics in the game. These include the Nazi politicians Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, Fritz Todt, Martin Bormann, Rudolf Heß and Joseph Goebbels.

The presentation of Heinrich Himmler in the game particularly stands out. The Reichsführer of the SS and organizer of the Holocaust is prominently displayed – surrounded by a laurel wreath – and gives the player strategic advantages when deployed. Not a single word is used to classify the war criminal historically. On the contrary: an attached description makes him appear in a good light. The fact that the industrial mass murder of Jews plays no role in strategic simulations of the Second World War has hardly been discussed for decades. However, this ultimately led to a portrayal of National Socialist war criminals as “normal” game pieces, sometimes also as playfully valuable masterminds in a strategy game.

Another explosive mechanic in “Twilight of the Gods” is the “economic policy of conquest”. In it, the exploitation of millions of forced laborers, the expropriation of Jewish property and the plunder of Eastern Europe are playfully disguised. You can use Alfred Rosenberg’s various “Reich Commissariats” to stimulate the German economy in the game. As an ideologist of Nazi racism and as Reich Minister for the occupied eastern territories, he was responsible for the systematic extermination of Jews and Slavs.

With the new content, the way the game deals with the most important officials of the NSDAP will also change aesthetically. So far – at least in the German version – these people have not been shown with a portrait. That is no longer the case. There is also no option to deactivate the newly added images. For the YouTuber Steinwallen, all of these changes are crucial in order to clearly distance himself from them in a video and to explain to his viewers why such an ahistorical representation in a computer game should be rejected. In the comments on his video, he was thanked many times for this and the new content was unanimously described as having “a clear imbalance”.

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