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Therumancer said (POSTED: 28 October 2012, on the Escapist forums, on a topic about playing WW2 from a Nazi perpective.):
To put things into perspective, being a real war, we massacred German civilians to break Germany. Arthur "Bomber" Harris was decorated by the US and UK (where he was knighted, he was a brit) largely for bombing the crap out of german civilians, factories, farms, and even our own people who were captured and beinf forced to work. The germans called him "Butcher" Harris. While he's especially infamous, the Allies pretty much bombed the crap out of Germany harder than they did during The Blitz. During the end german civilians tried to defend their homes in a milita called "The Volkssturm" we pretty much murdered them to a man, and anyonethat was run into for fear of being a sympathizer, they were dumped into mass graves. The Hitler Youth, we killed them, kids as young as six who never took the field were being executed by GIs simply for Nazi affiliation. There is all kinds of stuff about it out there if you start looking at the whole "why people hate Americans" angle. Wars are ugly, that's just how it's done when you go to war for real. The point is that from a German perspective we weren't any better than the crap they do in the video games, indeed we were probably worse which is why we won.
Then there is the whole holocaust thing which is paticularly contreversial right now. According to the stories Jews were basically forced into these giant murder factories and killed with mechanical presician and then dumped in mass graves. In many cases they were tortured and had their skin used to fashion lampshades and things, and the Nazis used to have mobile bone grinders they used for disposing of bodies in the field, sometimes feeding jews into them when they weren't dead. While there is a lot of truth there, if you look up the truth behind the human flesh lampshades, bone grinders, etc... they were debunked. Indeed the human flesh lampshades the war department used for early movies turned out to be goat skin when tested (they were in the Holocaust museum). Not to mention simple questions about how if the Nazis forced Jews into murder factories, there were so many alive with tatoos proving they were in death camps, many of which survived decades due to it being a long term marking system. By definition there would have been no reason to mark anyone, and there would have been no survivors. Bring this stuff up people call you a "holocaust denier", but in reality it's more a matter of acceptance but realizing it was greatly exagerrated for purposes of propaganda. People just aren't ready right now to accept World War II as anything but black and white pitting white knights against a bunch of cartoonish villains.
The issue of Nazi manpower is also an issue, the popular conception has Hitler and a small group of people holding Germany in a reign of terror, and somehow also managing to be omni-present in occupying huge parts of Europe. The truth is that Hitler was hugely popular and his military was made up of followers from all over the world, he didn't need a police state in Germany as the people virtually worshipped him. Likewise nations like Romania and even France provided huge amounts of willing manpower. The French resisance being largely a myth, based on small groups of french patriots and hardliners backed by Russian intelligence. France gets insulted as being "surrender monkeys" because basically what happened is they surrendered to Hitler in part because fighting him was relatively unpopular, they then backed him as they saw him as the winning side, but when the tide turned France realized it was in the way and even if it turned around for Hitler it would be smashed by the allies. The whole "surrender monkey" thing is the allegation that they surrendered twice in the same war, once to each side, and the acceptance of German occupation and French resistance is kind of a political fiction that everyone would agree to when things finished. That's not a perspective you hear much, but understand Hitler couldn't have occupied France and turned it into a police state while doing everything else he was up to, especially not with native Germans. He simply didn't have the manpower to do all of the things he suppodedly held down even allowing for the idiocy of the Russian Campaign. Nobody has that much manpower.
As a result World War II games for the moment kind of need to be a pretty straightforward "Nazi Shooting Gallery", where the bad guys are pretty much always going to be german, or maybe occasionally an Italian if the writers are feeling especially bold. I don't think I've even fought one Romanian in a World War II game, and the Romanians in paticular welcomed Hitler helping them with their Jew problem and looked forward to the "Re-Romanianization" of land and property after their removal. France is always portrayed as a victim, rarely is there anything even remotely ambigious about their role in the war or questions about how the heck Germany ever managed to achieve a virtual police state with an SS member on every street corner as often portrayed while doing anything else (I mean think about how many dudes it would take to occupy France, if it was hostile he would have just flattened it).
That said WW II shooting games have never been my strong suit.
I've actually thought it might be cool to do a "Wierd World War II" game from the german perspective. A very dark one where pretty much everyone is an arsehole (except for maybe you), and you play as a team of Hitler's Occult Task force out to recover magical treasures, ancient mysteries, and artworks for the Nazis during World War II. A game that would eventually lead to saving the world while caught between Nazi thugs, and allied morons, an affair made plausible simply by the fact that being a Nazi operation it was covered up after World War II. Something that would stay away from all of the holocaust stuff. I originally thought it would be amusing as an idea because in all of the "Weird WW II" stuff I read it always seems the Nazi mad scientists and occultists get all the fun toys like the cloned dinosaurs or whatever. Playing with that in the same setting without being the bad guy (due to personal perspective) might actually be kind of fun. Of course my tastes are odd to say the least.
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