At least in part because of technical limitations, early games had opponents that were either absolutely equal to you (the other Pong paddle, for instance), or that were non-human or inanimate (Pac-Man’s ghosts, Donkey Kong and his barrels, Asteroids, etc.). At 8-bit resolution, it was difficult to distinguish the “good” humanoid figures from the “bad” ones — Luigi was, after all, just a recoloring of Mario in 1983′s Mario Bros. However, as technology flourished, plaerys could more easily distinguish human characters from one another. Suddenly, entering JUSTIN BAILEY in 1986′s Metroid meant a totally different Samus model, not just a palette swap. During the late 1980s, games began moving out of 2D and into 3D, with a first-person perspective being used in simulations like Battlezone. While the first First Person Shooter is arguably 1973-1974′s Maze War/The Maze Game, the FPS genre did not take off until the 1992 release of Wolfenstein 3D, which also introduced the most common FPS trope of all time: the Nazi villain.

Those early games often used non-human antagonists because it was a very quick story shorthand: the Human (or yellow pizza-esque head-thing) is fighting against the dangerous Animals (or scary Ghosts). Ta-daa, no need for involved cutscenes. Jumpman’s cutscenes were as long as it took to show King Kong kidnap a damsel, and no longer.

However, 1992′s Wolfenstein took a different approach to storytelling. Instead of tapping into the more common “man vs nature” trope used in gaming, it tapped into a different natural evil: the Nazis. No complex plot was needed (you escape from a Nazi prison, find Evil Experiments going on, and you shoot Nazis) because They Are Nazis and You Are Not. Very simple, and no cutscenes or exposition were needed. In fact, in the Let’s Play linked below — ironically, narrated by a German — you can see that the first level is basically an exercise in opening doors and shooting stuff.

Wolfenstein 3D was notable for two other things: one, the first episode (one third of the game, totaling 10 levels) was shareware, meaning it was widely and rapidly distributed around the gaming world. Two, each episode’s tenth level was a secret level, and the secret level for the third episode (in which you face off against Hitler)

was an FPS version of Pacman. An amusing and telling tribute, highlighting the fact that the antagonists in both games could be swapped out. A faceless ghost-enemy is structurally equivalent as the game’s Nazi enemy, as the game has no plot.

When Wolfenstein 3D came out, North America had just undergone an intense change in Holocaust commemoration. (Note: I won’t into this at length here, and my sources for this section will be found at the end of the post. I’ve written graduate-level papers about this and I study religion — albeit in a totally different context — in a Master’s program, so I’m not just pulling things out of my rear end.) The short version of this is: without the discovery of Mengele’s bones and their significance in the 1980s, Wolfenstein 3D may have had simple everyman Nazis instead of sorcerer-zombie-magicians Nazis.

The “too long, didn’t read” version is that for a very long time after the Holocaust, the Holocaust was not really publicly commemorated. Holocaust survivors were not invited into schools, Holocaust survivors were often told to downplay their experiences and to avoid discussing them, Holocaust museums did not really exist, there were no widespread days or weeks of remembrance. Instead, commemoration, especially in the United States itself, often focused on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as the American Jewry felt a need to be part of a “victorious” culture of post-war Americana instead of being victims. The United States Holocaust Museum, linked above, began during the late 1970s, along with Washington’s first public Day of Remembrance. This lead to a general spreading and normalizing of Holocaust commemoration in the 1980s, which spread north up into Canada.

As a consequence, World War Two re-entered the public conscience during the 1970s and 1980s, instead of being forgotten. However, this didn’t happen so much in American film — no, the Americans shot their WWII film wad very early, during the 1960s, with films like The Great Escape. The 1980s belonged to central and Eastern European countries — like Germany and Poland — and their films about the war, like the monumental Das Boot. The few American WWII films released during the 1980s tended to focus on the Pacific front, as in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, or the (rightfully forgotten) Farewell to the King.

So, basically, Wolfenstein 3D is a giant puzzle of a concept: while it does tap into a simplistic story (Nazis Bad! Kill Them!) that had been around for fifty years by that point, it also came at a profoundly odd time during the American consciousness: the focus on Nazis had dropped off, and Holocaust commemoration had quite literally just finished moving away from the “heroic resistance” trope that was epitomized in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to a new understanding of the Holocaust as a tragedy. Where the heck did this “heroic resistance” game come from?

This Gamesradar article actually posits an interesting theory. Basically, it points out the (obvious) interest of the creators in the WWII movies of the 1960s. But where it gets interesting is that Wolfenstein’s very emphasis on the Nazis as creating evil monsters is probably a vague callback to the idea of Mengele’s experiments in the camps. Wolfenstein attempts to give these experiments a more “deliciously evil” purpose than Mengele’s idle curiosity.

And when did Mengele’s experiments in the camps become more commonly known? It was during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when (1) Holocaust commemoration changed and Jewish-Americans felt more comfortable accepting the victimization of people in the Holocaust, and (2) the reveal in 1985 — and confirmed in the same year that Wolfenstein 3D was released — that Mengele had died in South America in 1979. While Mengele was well known before this, especially thanks to the likes of Simon Weisenthal, actual captured Nazis like Adolf Eichmann were better-covered in the news of the 1960s and 1970s, especially as Mengele was often presumed dead. A quick search of the Time Magazine archives reveals just a handful of stories about Mengele before 1985, and the focus of those stories was not Mengele’s actions, but Weisenthal’s hunt for Mengele.

The vast majority of the Mengele stories are post-1985, and tend to focus on Mengele as the personification of the injustice and horror of the death camps. (However, Mengele was well-known before 1985, with a 1977 Time Magazine article even providing a postscript about all the fictional representations of Mengele.)

One article even declares that Auschwitz “was probably the most concentrated expression of human evil in all of history, and Mengele was the emblem and embodiment of Auschwitz.”

Compare this to the coverage of the Eichmann Trial, which the philosopher Hannah Arendt famously used as a jumping-off point for a theory of the “banality of evil” in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann is not Satan, he is merely a bureaucrat, according to Arendt’s famous and controversial thesis. A 1961 Time article about the trial ended “the only life Eichmann ever struggled to save was his own” and called him “Bureaucrat Eichmann.” This is a far cry from Mengele’s portrayal in the 1985 articles.

Mengele provided a new template for the Nazi Villain. Yes, there is the everyman, the grunt — seen in Wolfenstein 3D — but there is an aura of madness, experimentation, sorcery. Mengele’s association with sorcery has no real basis in reality but it has stuck to him.

However, this focus on the occult is not Mengele’s fault, but is the merging of the Mengele-archetype with the characters seen in 1981′s Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. The slimy Toht planted the seed for the combination of occult and Nazism in the public mind. This connection did have basis in reality, with high-ranking members of the Nazi party spending time trying to find Atlantis or the Atlanteans in Tibet, among other things. Interestingly enough,

Spielberg: “Our biggest dispute was that I had this heavy-metal view of the character of Toht (Ronald Lacey). I saw him with a prosthetic hand that was in fact a machine gun and a flamethrower. He was like the Terminator before The Terminator. We’ve got the artwork to prove it. That’s where George put his foot down and said, “Steven, you’re crossing out of one genre and into another.” I agreed. All that hard work just became refuse in the art department.” (Empire’s Oral History of Raiders, day 3).

Yes, Virginia, Goerge Lucas once preached restraint.

So you add the occult elements of Raiders, the over-the-top obsession with technology presaged by Spielberg in his original idea for Toht, Mengele’s experiments (which in Wolfenstein 3D became Operation: Eisenfaust), and you have a game where the final boss is a robot-Hitler whose minions include an undead army and sorcerers who shoot fireballs.

Essentially, Wolfenstein 3D tapped into the new Holocaust commemoration and its openness about Mengele, but did so in a way that directly recalled the jingoistic war films of the 1960s. Wolfenstein 3D then deliberately made everything over-the-top so as to provide a more interesting gaming experience… hey, there are only so many ways you can kill a Nazi, but put one in a robot suit and it’s a whole new thing! Without the newfound prominence of Mengele in the public consciousness, I would argue that Wolfenstein‘s Operation: Eisenfaust would not have been a cruel experiment on humans, but a straight-up occult theme, more like id’s next major game, Doom.

And no one can really get offended over the killing of Nazis — German censorship was more concerned with the swastikas and other iconography — so it was essentially safe from controversy. This choice to use Nazis, however, could have the potential to radically change the perception of the Nazi in gaming and the rest popular culture. Eventually, the resurgence of Nazis in the popular culture of the 1990s lead to a more general growth in the war film genre, culminating in movies like Saving Private Ryan, which in turn lead to… more Nazi games.

Next week: More Nazis!

Holocaust commemoration sources
Bialystok, Frank. Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community. Montreal: McGill University Press, 2000.

The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America, edited by Marc Lee Raphael. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Sheramy, Rona. “‘Resistance and War’: The Holocaust in American Jewish Education, 1945-1960.” America Jewish History 91 no. 2 (2003): 287-313.

The World Reacts to the Holocaust, edited by David S. Wyman, project director Charles H. Rosenzvieg. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996.