This is the second half of the third part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) of our long-delayed series looking at the theory of history advanced by Paradox Interactive’s Hearts of Iron IV, one of the most popular strategy games today.
This part (both halves together) is fundamentally about politics and policy and the implications that HoI4‘s choices – and its chosen omissions – have on the vision it presents of the history of the 1930s and 1940s. Last time, we looked at HoI4‘s political simulation and concludes that in an effort to streamline the political aspects of the game – to better facilitate the player getting to the ‘good stuff’ of fighting the war – HoI4 adopted a top-down, state-power-centered, frictionless vision of politics which was essentially authoritarian in nature. Democracy, meanwhile, was presented as something between meaningless and simply a collection of penalties. Such a vision of politics, we noted, is hardly required by the period, but is instead a product of the effort at simplification to ‘meme politics.’
For this second part, I must lead with a content warning, as we are going to be talking about mass murder, war crimes, intense human suffering and in some detail. I am going to include images, many of which you ought to find disturbing. While often in discussing history, there is value in remaining purely dispassionate it is also important sometimes to feel something in order to understand some portion of the import of a moment. I am thus including some difficult images because I want you to stop and feel something, to imagine the humanity of the victims, their suffering, their loss. If we do not feel something of the empty pit in our soul where these people should be, we have not fully absorbed the lesson.
Because of course the politics of the previous part did not merely happen on the abstract moving of numbers, they happened to people. Millions upon millions of people. It is, on some level, fundamentally disingenuous to discuss World War II and the countries that fought it, without discussing those millions. They were part of World War II – indeed, the experience of a civilian being brutalized, murdered or starved to death was a far more common, a far more typical experience of WWII than that of the soldier fighting on the front lines.
So we are going to discuss them and then we are going to discuss Hearts of Iron IV‘s decision not to discuss them. Buckle up, folks, this one is going to be rough.
(Bibliography Note: Estimates for the human toll of World War II and the crimes of the Axis regimes vary to a significant degree and the following overview does not purport to be an exhaustive review of estimates. Chronologically speaking, this is not my area of expertise and I have simply done my best to relate the scholarly consensus, as best I can. I have relied in the first instance generally on the estimates collected in the “The Geography of Death” chapter in J. Parshall, 1942: Crux of War (2026), 904-908. For greater specificity, on the conduct and implications of the ‘Hunger Plan,’ see relevant sections of A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (2006). On atrocities in Eastern Europe more broadly, see W.W. Beorn, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (2025), T. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2012) and A.J. Kay and D. Stahel, “Crimes of the Wehrmacht: A Re-evaluation” JPR 3.1 (2020). On non-Jewish victims of Nazi extermination efforts, especially Soviet POWs, note T.E. Porter, “Hitler’s Forgotten Genocides: The Fate of Soviet POWs” Elon Law Review 5.2 (2013). On the horrors of the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ while somewhat dated, S. Ienaga, The Pacific War (1978)’s chapter on the topic provides a strong sense of the extent of atrocity and also how strongly linked they were to purely ‘military’ operations.)
The Grim Tally of Inhumanity
The scale and extent of human suffering – most of it suffered by civilians, not by soldiers – in World War II is so astoundingly vast that it beggars our feeble capacity for understanding. We reach for the simplest seeming question, ‘how many’ – a question vast in its implications and yet fundamentally bloodless in its imagination – and the figure is so enormous that even the best estimates have error bars larger than the populations of many countries. And yet the horror of it, the crimes of its perpetrators, are also so vast that even quite well educated and informed people are often unaware of entire swaths of the suffering that took place.
It is worth, in that context, attempting an overview, however incomplete Jon Parshall in his recent 1942: Crux of War presents the following map of the ‘geography of death’ representing the death toll, civilian and military, by country, with larger circles indicating larger death tolls:
I want to focus here principally on civilian deaths. What follows is not intended in any way as an exhaustive list, but rather an exercise in setting the terms here, of giving a sense of the scale, variety and physical extent of the horrors of this period and of their strong connection to the strategy of the war. And to be frank, it is simply worthwhile to cover even just the basics, even in an incomplete way because these things need to be understood and remembered.
We can start with strategic bombing in both Europe and Asia. The morality of strategic bombing remains a deeply fraught question; we have discussed its limited efficacy already. The US Strategic Bombing Survey after the war estimated 305,000 civilian deaths in Europe from Allied (American and British) strategic bombing; this was actually a higher figure than official German statistics. Modern historians have tended to edge this figure up; Richard Overy estimates around 350,000 while other estimates push north of 400,000.1 The United States maintained that its bombing campaign was ostensibly targeted at industrial facilities important to the war effort, not aimed at producing civilian casualties, but of course it did produce civilian casualties as its architects knew it would; the Royal Air Force, by contrast, openly practiced ‘morale bombing’ (what they would call ‘terror bombing’ when others did it) aiming to use civilian disruption and death to try to collapse German support for the war (in addition to industrial and military disruption), a strategy which did not work then and has never worked since in any war ever, despite repeated attempts.
The United States also engaged in strategic bombing against Japan. Official estimates by the post-war Japanese government calculated some 323,495 civilian deaths from bombing, including the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; subsequent academic estimates have tended to be fairly close to this figure. American bombing against Japan was notably significantly less concerned with even the token avoidance of civilian death shown in Europe, in no small part for racist reasons. We might thus give a very loose estimate of some roughly 700,000 civilian deaths from Allied strategic bombing across all theaters.
That is already an enormous amount of human suffering and yet at the same time a number small enough to fit within the error bars of what we’re about to discuss.
Of course the Western Allies were not the only parties engaged in strategic bombing and indeed they did not engage in terror bombing first. In Asia, the Japanese began terror-bombing against Chinese cities in 1938, before the war in Europe had even started (and in fact had terror-bombed Shanghai already back in 1932). The first German terror bombing attacks directed against Poland occurred on September 1, 1939, the very first day of the war. And of course the Germans also engaged in terror bombing against Britain from 1940 onward. The Axis powers first unleashed terror bombing as a tactic in the war and then complained that the Allies were better at it. It is rather late in the game to deplore knife fights after you have stabbed someone and only belatedly discovered that everyone else present have longer knives.
I have found it almost impossible to find a clear estimate of the number of casualties of Axis terror bombing – in many cases the loss of life in areas that came under Axis occupation was so high that it obscures the impact. Some 40,000 British civilians were killed by German terror bombing during the Blitz and many tens of thousands more must have died from Axis bombing in Poland, China and elsewhere, but I have no secure figure for their numbers. Those deaths will be rolled into statistics below.
Next, we can consider what we might term the ‘deaths of indifference’ – significantly unintentional deaths that nevertheless resulted from the war and the incompetence or apathy of the major powers. There are two major entries in this category: the Iranian famine (1942-3) and the Bengal Famine (1943). In the former case, Britain and the USSR had jointly invaded Iran in August of 1941 to secure supply lines to the USSR and secure Iran’s oil resources, which they feared falling into Axis hands; the invasion and subsequent allied use of the country’s infrastructure, compounded by a bad harvest caused major food shortages. The USSR banned any food from entering the territory (claiming they needed it for the front), while the United States and Britain both failed to backstop food supply in the part of the country Britain had occupied. The death toll from this famine remains highly contested, anywhere from 3 to 7 million, though most estimates cluster towards the bottom of this range, from 3-4 million.
Meanwhile, a combination of labor and resources shifted to the war effort, the Japanese occupation of Burma (and the British response to it) which closed routes for food shipment and the prioritization of food shipments to Great Britain itself – which was, we must note, also facing food rationing – resulted in severe food shortages in South Asia, worst in Bengal but felt in British India as well. Britain failed to allocate sufficient shipping to relieve the crisis, prioritizing the on-going Battle of the Atlantic and so Churchill and his war cabinet bear some clear responsibility for these deaths too. Once again, the death toll remains contentious, but the scholarly consensus tends to be in the 2-3 million range. Thus the combined indifference by the western allies (to be blunt, chiefly Britain, but also the USSR and United States) to starving peoples over whom they had a fairly clear duty of care may have contributed to a total death toll of 5 to 7 million deaths.2
The Axis powers also starved huge numbers of people in territories they occupied. Japanese occupation and continued fighting caused a major famine in Henan province in China in 1942 with an estimated death toll between 2 to 3 million dead. Imperial Japanese conquests elsewhere also severed food routes and Japan was even less willing to divert any of its shipping towards the relief of conquered peoples than the allies, leading to famine in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies which – combined with brutal occupation and forced labor policies – resulted in 3.5 to 6 million deaths. Germany meanwhile employed hunger as a deliberate weapon of genocide, which will be discussed below.
Which brings us, at last, to the largest total by far – the crimes of malice. The German Wehrmacht and SS entered Poland at the very beginning of the war in Europe already with specialized death squads intending to murder Polish leaders, intellectuals, clerics, teachers and, of course, Jews. It should be stressed that even at this point, the Wehrmacht was fully complicit and both facilitated and participated in war crimes including the mass murder of civilians. So once again, for everyone in the back, the regular German military, the Wehrmacht was fully involved and complicit in Nazi war crimes, alongside the SS and the rest of the Nazi regime.
And those crimes were astoundingly vast. Nazi death squads, the Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht wherever it went (with its full compliance), murdering as they went. Others – Jews, Roma, Soviet POWs, Soviet and Polish civilians – were forced into brutal labor or extermination camps and there murdered in the millions. Yet more were intentionally starved as the Nazi regime used starvation as an intentional weapon of genocide as part of the ‘Hunger Plan,’ the execution and implications of which were inextricably wound through German military and economic planning as Adam Tooze notes in The Wages of Destruction (2006).
The numbers defy comprehension. The Nazis murdered roughly 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust; non-Jewish victims of Nazi extermination efforts were at least as numerous.3 Nazi Einsatzgruppen murdered roughly 1,350,000 people in the territory of the USSR alone already by the end of 1942. The Nazi Hunger Plan (alongside active extermination efforts) resulted in the deaths of roughly 4.2 million civilians and 3.3 million Soviet POWs, essentially murder by starvation. The plan had intended to murder more – as many as forty-five million people. Estimates for the total number of Soviet civilians killed by the Nazis range upwards from ten million.4 While the gas chambers of Nazi extermination camps are rightly infamous, most of the Nazis’ murders were done with bullets. The scale of Nazi murder is so vast it is difficult to describe any part of it without feeling like one risks minimizing the other parts of it, but all of it was of a piece with the murderous Nazi ideology and all of it was accomplished with the active, knowing participation of the Wehrmacht as both a direct function and an explicit goal of the Nazi war effort.
Fascist Italy’s scope for atrocity was smaller, but Mussolini’s government added its share of horror. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia (which is on-going at the start of Hearts of Iron IV‘s time frame) killed an estimated 382,000 civilians: roughly 17,000 from terror bombing, another 65,000 murdered directly and a further 300,000 who died of starvation as a result of the war. Italian occupation in then-Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania also brought starvation, mass executions, and civilians herded into concentration camps under abominable conditions. And Italy, of course, cooperated with the Nazi attempt to murder the Jews.
The Soviet Union also carried out substantial numbers of war crimes and atrocities, although at a much smaller scale than the Axis. Most infamous was the murder of 21,857 Poles as part of the Katyn Massacre, carried out in 1940 while the USSR was still allied with Nazi Germany, but this was hardly the only such incident. It is important to remember when considering the moral implications of these regimes that both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union entered Poland in 1939 with death squads, intending the murder of many thousands if not millions of civilians; neither of these regimes were ‘radicalized’ into mass murder – mass murder was part of their ideology from the beginning. Estimates of the death toll of the post-war Soviet expulsions of Germans range from 500,000 to 2.5 million. Soviet treatment of Axis POWs could also be brutal (albeit still less so than the Nazis): 37% of German POWs in Soviet hands died. By comparison, just 4% of western allied POWs in Axis hands died, but roughly 60% of Soviet POWs held by Germany died: Soviet treatment was at once inexcusably cruel and at the same time far less murderous than the Nazi extermination program.
The Pacific theater of the war was no less terrible. In China, Parshall offers a total estimate between 15.3 and 21.9 million Chinese deaths as a result of the war (soldiers included), including the famines noted above. Nationalist forces destroyed the levees on the Yellow River in 1938 in an effort to halt the advance of the Imperial Japanese Army, an action which drowned tens of thousands of Chinese and triggered follow-on famines and disruptions, with estimates for the total death toll around 500,000. The impact of American bombing, we have already discussed.
Those figures shrink, however, in comparison to the scale of intentional mass-murder by Japanese forces. Again, using Parshall’s survey of the estimates, Japanese soldiers directly killed between 8.2 and 9.0 million civilians across the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (alongside roughly 3.3 million allied soldiers, the overwhelming majority of them Chinese). That is, to be clear, a figure that is not (so far as I can tell) inclusive of the multiple major famines Japanese occupation (and the Japanese refusal to task its merchant shipping to support civilian populations) created. Japanese forces massacred civilians with bullets, bayonets and swords in Malaya, in the Philippines, in Burma (modern Myanmar), in Korea and most of all in China; functionally everywhere the armies and navies of Japan went, they brought atrocity with them. Japan infamously experimented with chemical weapons using civilians and POWs in China. Japanese forces also treated captured POWs brutally – the death rate for American POWs in the Pacific was over 40%, from executions, torture, starvation and forced labor. These actions in turn were not collateral damage but intentional policy, summarized most horribly in the official Japanese “Three Alls Policy” in China, directing Japanese forces to “kill all, burn all, loot all.”
There is sometimes a tendency to try to smudge this all over, to say that ‘oh well every country does bad things in war,’ but there is a real, staggering, horrifying difference between allied collateral damage and the intentional campaigns of Nazi, fascist and Imperial Japanese murder. Parshall estimates that over the course of the war, taking just the minimum estimates, a minimum of 39.6 million allied civilians died, the vast majority intentionally murdered as a result of the deliberate policies of the Axis powers – with gas, with bombs, with deliberate starvation and most frequently of all with bullets and bayonets. Against this is set a maximum of some 6 million Axis civilian casualties, many of whom were murdered by their own governments.
Allied governments engaged in conduct during the war that may fairly be described as callous or criminal. But once again their crimes pale in comparison with the horrors of the Axis, to the point that the entire sum of Allied atrocities can fit with room to spare inside the error bars on the estimates for the mountain of human suffering heaped up by the Axis. And of course beyond this, but for the Axis decision to have the war in the first place, there need not have been any of this.
I lay all of this out to make two points. First, of course, is the enormity of the horrors that German Nazis, Italian fascism and Imperial Japanese militarism brought with them. But equally that these crimes were not accidents, nor were they divorced from the conduct of the war. The ‘Three Alls’ policy was a military policy, it was a strategic choice about military action taken by the Imperial Japanese Army. The Hunger Plan was a military policy: the Wehrmacht‘s approach to the Eastern Front was predicated on the logistical simplification of starving the populace (so military logic depended on this policy) and the Wehrmacht was actively engaged in carrying it out (so military actions were dictated by this policy) and the entire point of invading the USSR was to produce the strategic end – the Lebensraum, ‘living space’ (devoid of its former inhabitants) – envisioned by the plan. The atrocities could not be seperated from Axis strategy: they were the ways, means and ends, by, with and for which the Axis fought.
Choosing Indifference
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Elie Wiesel, quoted by U.S. News and World Report, 1986. 5
Having done our grim accounting, the question now is asking “how does Hearts of Iron IV represent this historical reality?”
And the answer is that it doesn’t.6 Hearts of Iron IV, intentionally, deliberately chooses indifference.
The closest Hearts of Iron IV comes to addressing any of this is the occupation system, in which countries that are occupying foreign territory are free to pick from a range of occupation policies from things like ‘local police forces’ and ‘military governor’ to ‘forced labor’ and ‘brutal oppression.’ These policies impact resistance strength (which determines the possibility of uprising, though uprisings are vanishingly rare in this system) and compliance (which determines how much of the resources of the occupied territory’s can be accessed. They do not, however, impact the civilian population, despite the fact that the total size of the population (split between civilian and recruitable) is a statistic the game tracks for every state (a group of provinces) in the world.
A policy of “brutal oppression” (the unique policy available to fascist ideologies) does not result in civilian casualties the game cares to measure or model. It does not produce global shock, diplomatic incidents or strategically relevant refugee flows. It does not impact war support. All it does is reduce the resistance target (the value to which resistance will slowly move) by 75%, at the cost of requiring 25% more garrison troops (generally not a significant amount). This is, by and large, a toothless mechanic, one the player-base has already reduced to a simple calculation of garrison costs vs. resources gained that can be gamed out in a spreadsheet with no broader implications. Indeed, my sense is many players broadly ignore this system, leaving their occupation policy on whatever its default setting was.
And that is it, that is all the game models.
Their absence is not an oversight but a deliberate policy: Paradox has made it very clear that they have chosen to exclude war crimes, forced labor, rape and atrocities generally from the game. They’re also explicitly banned as discussion topics in the Hearts of Iron forums and have been since at least HoI2 if not earlier. Though I don’t know that Paradox has ever put out a single clear policy statement about this stance publicly, the basic reasons for it have been articulated here and there over the years and are well known by the player-base.
On the one hand, there is a concern that featuring war crimes or atrocities will attract players who specifically want to ‘press do-the-Holocaust-button’ and from time to time Paradox developers have made statements to the effect that they have no interest in making a war-crimes-simulator. On the other hand, there is also a commercial factor here: Paradox wants – and arguably, financially needs – to be able to sell this game in a wide range of countries and many countries (most notably Germany) have bans on the depiction of certain Nazi symbols or imagery, while at the same time discussion in game of this or that atrocity could trigger controversies that would negatively impact sales.7
And I want to say at the outset that I understand the difficult situation that the developers at Paradox Development Studios and on the HoI4 team are in. I had the chance a few years back to speak with several of them and they’re not unaware of this problem. There is a kind of impossible dilemma here: the entire Paradox approach to making their strategy games is that every country is playable, which means that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan have to be playable. And, while we’re here, while ‘just don’t make Germany playable’ may sound like an easy solution, we do not expect that of any other WWII game – you can play as the Germans in the WWII entries of Call of Duty or Battlefield or in Steel Division or Company of Heroes – and simply making the Axis unplayable would probably damage the marketability of the game to the point that it would no longer be sustainable to make, as compared to competitor titles. There is a space for ‘you can only play the Allies’ WWII titles, but not in this genre and we all know it.
But once it is decided that the Axis have to be playable – that they cannot simply be the bad guy villains in a single-player experience – the design has to envision players playing them. And therein comes the problem: do you want to make a game that is a Holocaust simulator? That problem is of course compounded by things like online streaming: a game which allows the player to initiate the Holocaust as Nazi Germany absolutely will have online streams where modern neo-Nazis film themselves gleefully initiating the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. So the solution arrived at was to simply not simulate those atrocities, to exclude them from the game’s model of WWII.
Now there is an immediate problem with Paradox’s, ‘we do not make war crime simulators’ stance, which is that it isn’t true. Forced labor – slavery – appears mechanically in Victoria III, Europa Universalis V and Imperator, along with older titles. Crusader Kings III includes mechanics for sexual slavery – characters of certain raiding cultures can take prisoners and force them into being concubines. Paradox games even feature genocide, most notably with the science-fiction themed Stellaris, where genocidal war is a major gameplay mechanic, with multiple flavors of genocidal intent. And while strategic bombing in Hearts of Iron IV does not cause civilian casualties, in Stellaris, orbital bombardment absolutely does kill civilian pops.
In short then, Paradox’ ‘no war crimes’ policy is really ‘war crimes can be depicted except during the 1930s and 1940s.’ It’s clear – particularly from the design of Stellaris (where population could easily have been heavily abstracted as it is in some other 4X type space-imperialism games) – that the ‘no atrocities’ rule is not a general design principle in Paradox games but a specific design principle about Hearts of Iron. The developers of Hearts of Iron IV have chosen indifference, indeed a strategy of indifference towards the war’s atrocities.
Now I feel I should note that Hearts of Iron IV is hardly the only game to do this. Indeed, it seems like most World War II games do, to some degree. Rarely if ever do games like Company of Heroes or Steel Division II (which takes place on the Eastern Front!) show the atrocities that armies – mostly the Axis armies – were engaged in. I can’t claim to have played every Call of Duty or Battlefield entry set in WWII either, but I certainly do not recall either franchise drawing attention to the Holocaust or other war crimes. It is an absurd and yet true statement that of most of the popular video games which feature the Second World War, precious few are as honest about the nature of the Nazi regime than the anime-alternate-history-World-War-II-with-magical-girls game Valkyria Chronicles.
Hearts of Iron IV is not worse than the norm, but equally it does no better.
Now the defense those games will raise is that they are ‘purely military’ in their focus, set entirely ‘on the battlefield’ and so war crimes and atrocities are outside of their scope. Of course as we’re demonstrating here, that defense is frankly – pardon my language – bullshit. Most Axis soldiers were either complicit or participants in war crimes over the course of World War II; not some, not many, most.8 While a lot of these games focus on the western front, which was – as the war went – the least full of atrocity, atrocity was hardly absent, particularly as allied forces pushed forward and began encountering evidence of the Holocaust.
But Hearts of Iron IV lacks even that flawed defense, because it does not just confine itself to the battlefield: it aims to simulate military, political, diplomatic and economic aspects of the war and these elements are all shot through with crimes. Manpower and strategic resources were diverted to extermination programs. Civilians starved because of disruptions to shipping, because of intentional diversion of food, died because of forced labor used in military production or the extraction of strategic resources. Countries took diplomatic stances because they had become aware of atrocities (again, such as the American reaction to news of atrocities by Japan in China), atrocities stiffened the will to resist in many places, gave rise to partisan and resistance efforts.
Cleaning the Wehrmacht
Meanwhile this particular design choice runs directly into a more serious problem: it effectively constructs a ‘clean Wehrmacht‘ simulator.
The clean Wehrmacht myth is the historical myth that seeks to separate the regular German military (the Wehrmacht) and in particular the regular German army (the Heer) from the crimes of the Third Reich by presenting those crimes as primarily perpetrated by the SS and the Nazi party. The myth has its origins in the end of the war and its immediate aftermath: former German generals rushed to get out a version of events which pinned the blame for war crimes on someone else (not the least of which because some of the criminals were being hanged) and to launder their own reputations. A lot of enthusiast knowledge of WWII remains rooted in some of these early memoirs and this idea that the officer corps of the Wehrmacht specifically was somehow waging a ‘clean’ war in parallel to Nazi crimes even shows up in the works of Cold War era American scholars like Samuel P. Huntington.9
However the clean Wehrmacht myth is just that – a myth – it has been decisively and comprehensively dismantled by modern historians, in both German-language and English-language historiography.10 But as we’ve discussed already there was never a clean seperation between the Wehrmacht and the atrocities. Indeed, as A.J. Kay and D. Stahel conclude, “members of the Wehrmacht [as distinct from the SS] may have constituted a majority of those responsible for mass crimes carried out on the part of the German Reich” and that “it would be reasonable to conclude that a substantial majority [emphasis original] of the ten million Wehrmacht soldiers deployed at one time or another in the German-Soviet War were involved or complicit in criminal conduct.“11 Indeed, given how much of the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front (and the presence of further crimes and atrocities in other theaters) it seems likely that most German soldiers participated in or observed and were complicit in war crimes and atrocities. The same, of course, is true of Italian and Japanese soldiers.
Moreover, at the strategic level, it is impossible to separate the conduct of the war, the allocation of resources, the aims of the conflict – in short the strategic and operational levels on which Hearts of Iron IV is so totally focused – from the conduct of crimes and atrocities. We’re going to come back to war aims and strategic ends in the next part, but it is necessary to note that for Hitler and thus for the Wehrmacht the purpose of invading the USSR was to commit war crimes: the goal was to free up land for large-scale German settlement (this is what the Hunger Plan envisioned) and that was only going to happen if the existing population was enslaved and murdered. Forced labor and mass murder were the objectives for which the Wehrmacht was fighting.
The Wehrmacht fought battles so that it might have the opportunity to commit massacres. That was the purpose of the war.
Likewise the forcible extraction of raw resources using local forced labor was the strategic purpose of Japanese conquest in this period, while atrocious policies like the ‘Three Alls’ were understood as military means to achieve that purpose. The Imperial Japanese military had even less separation between the units doing the war crimes and the units doing the ‘real fighting’ than the Germans, as relatively few Japanese atrocities were carried out by ‘specialist’ units and instead nearly all were carried out by regular units of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Moreover, the decision to commit atrocities had real strategic and operational impacts on the war. In general, the Axis powers were so committed to an ideology of atrocity that the atrocities they committed made their war effort weaker and yet they kept doing them anyway because the atrocities were, at a fundamental level, the point of the exercise. The Holocaust, above and beyond its moral atrocity, diverted a significant amount of soldiers and resources to the task of reducing (by murdering them) the manpower and working population available to Germany’s war effort. Nazi oppression also drove away scientists and intellectuals (when it did not murder them), not a few of whom ended up key elements of allied technological superiority. Mass murder in occupied Soviet territory had a similar effect but also encouraged resistance even in areas where significant discontent with the Soviet regime – which had inflicted its own brutalities – could have provided the basis for collaboration.
Similarly, the Japanese propaganda effort in presenting Japan’s new empire – its ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ as a crusade against western imperialism might well have found receptive ears (there was certainly no lack of discontent with imperialist oppression in Vietnam, Malaya, the Philippines and elsewhere) if the Imperial Japanese forces had been able to restrain their brutality. Instead, Imperial Japanese troops murdered, starved and brutalized the civilian populace in the areas they conquered – often fostering local resistance even as Japan itself was short on war material, manpower and labor.
On top of this, German, Japanese and Italian atrocities also served to reinforce allied moral and the will to fight on as they demonstrated that these were odious, evil regimes that had to be stopped at any cost. Indeed, without the shocking brutality of Japanese armies in China, particularly the Nanjing Massacre, it is unclear if the political will would have existed in the United States to take the steps to curb Japanese aggression that led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.12
In short then not only was Axis brutality essentially mandated by their military strategy (as well as their political ideology), it was also strategic in the sense that it was a strategic liability that made the Axis powers even less likely to win the war they had started.
Hearts of Iron IV creates the impression that there is a thing called ‘World War II’ – which includes the Wehrmacht and the IJA and the IJN – which is distinct from these other things – the war crimes – and can be discussed in isolation. And it simply is not so.
In attempting to avoid stepping into the morass of having to make hard choices about how to represent the historical atrocities that occurred in this period, Hearts of Iron IV falls into the trap of essentially producing Nazi, fascist and militarist apologia, embracing the clean Wehrmacht myth and turning the game into effectively a ‘clean Wehrmacht simulator.’ In the process, the game is actively reinforcing a long-discredited, irresponsible and deeply damaging vision of history, one prized by Nazis past and present.
Abandoning Indifference
Quite clearly, I think Hearts of Iron IV‘s approach to handling the human toll of the Second World War is insufficient. But equally I will admit that in many ways the developers at Paradox have an impossible choice: they cannot make the Axis unplayable and remain competitive in the strategy game market, they cannot have a ‘do the Holocaust’ national focus for obvious reasons and now I have said that they cannot, in good conscience, simply ignore the whole issue altogether. And yet if I am going to criticize this approach so strongly, I feel I must offer an alternative.
I think the better approach here – and I do not claim this is a perfect approach because I do not think there is one – is to represent these crimes not as player choices, made moment to moment, but rather as direct consequences of national ideology. It was not random chance that made the Third Reich and Imperial Japan engage in such atrocious conduct – their atrocious conduct was a direct consequence of their ideology, which classified entire groups of people as sub-human, worthy only of cruelty, exploitation or murder. I would thus argue that governments of this sort, with these ideologies were always going to engage in atrocities to the degree that they were able.
Incorporating that historical understanding into the game mechanics means removing a degree of player agency, but I think in this case that is appropriate. In this approach, so long as Germany remains fascist, the Nazi campaign of mass murder would continue to progress in the territory it controlled. So long as Japan remains militarist, its armies would brutalize the territory they occupy. And so on.
Based on that progression, the system would trigger events with pop-up notifications for all players providing historical context – written, I would suggest, in a fairly flat and clinical, ‘on this day, etc. etc.’ style, focusing on the scale of human suffering and the clear culpability of the regimes in question. It might even make sense to create a specific design of text-block and image to clearly distinguish between these specific historical memorials as compared to the branching or alternate history events the player engages with. These events would not involve player action – there are no choices they prompt – they would be intended instead as digital Stolpersteine (‘stumbling stones,’ a decentralized system of memorials in Europe for victims of the Nazis), a chance to make the player stop and take stock of what the war meant, what the regimes involved were and what they did.
The yet braver choice would be to also give these events gameplay impacts. Now one can easily imagine the almost immediate fear any developer would have, which is creating a game system where players are incentivized by the mechanics to simulate these atrocities. But I think we can avoid that problem neatly in two ways. First, as noted, we’ve already largely limited player choice: the atrocities happen so long as the historical regimes remain in place so there is no button to press.13 Second, I think a fair historical assessment of these atrocities would still make their effects entirely negative. Mass violence against civilians did not push any country closer to victory in the Second World War14 but they did hurt the war effort of the perpetrating countries, encouraging resistance, killing potential workers and soldiers, alienating foreign countries and consuming manpower and resources to no military end.
In that context, to me, it seems quite reasonable that the initial phases of Nazi oppression against the Jews would reduce Germany’s available manpower and probably ought to provide a non-trivial research penalty. As the Nazi campaign of extermination progressed, it might also consume industrial production (represented in factories) and further reduce available manpower. Atrocities in the territory of the Soviet Union and China (and elsewhere) could be fairly tied to create effects increasing local resistance, representing the way in which Nazi and Japanese atrocities fueled partisan warfare which in turn had real operational effects not currently effectively simulated in game. Admittedly, this would be a courageous development choice, but I think it is an honest one.
The irony is, Hearts of Iron IV already has a system that resembles this, but only for the USSR and only for Stalin’s Great Purge. In practice, so long as the Soviet Union remains Communist, the Purge is effectively guaranteed to happen (either a Stalinist purge or a Trotskyite one). And while the game remains mostly mute on the civilian impacts of the purge and Stalin’s larger campaign of oppression and the massive system of slave labor camps (the Gulag) that the Soviet Union operated, nevertheless this atrocity is not only incorporated into the game, it has mechanical effects – removing a number of possible military and civilian leaders and weakening the Red Army.
That said, even the pure ‘stumbling stone’ approach – simply documenting via in-game events with no further mechanical impact – would already be, to my mind, a more honest and accurate solution than what Hearts of Iron IV has now or indeed than most modern WWII games attempt. As noted above, it is the normal approach for games set in World War II to simply take the same cowardly dodge Hearts of Iron IV has, to pretend these things didn’t happen or that if they did happen they happened somewhere over there – off stage left, away from the ‘real’ war and the ‘real’ fighting and the ‘real’ soldiers – but this simply is not true. Moreover that approach has the unintended but very real consequence of turning every game in which it is used into a piece of ‘clean Wehrmacht’ propaganda. And that is not a neutral stance either, but instead the preferred rhetorical frame of modern fascists, Nazis and militarists.
It is, I think sincerely, a moral failing to adopt this dodge of indifference out of cowardice or commercial expediency and I think Paradox can do better and should do better. It is time to stop pretending, here and elsewhere, that World War II and the many Axis (and to a lesser degree, Soviet and other allied) atrocities can be cleanly separated, that we may treat the war in the absence of the horror of the regimes we fought in it. We cannot and it is cowardly to try.
We are charged by the voices of the past to remember and cultural products – and a video game is every bit as much of a cultural product as high literature or prestige film and TV – are part of how we remember. And we are charged to remember.
It is not enough to be merely indifferent.
- In The Bombers and the Bombed (2014)
- Though it may equally be argued that the Axis powers, by starting a war like this which would disrupt global food supplies and shipping networks, also bore a substantial culpability here as well. A significant part of the reason that Britain and the United States were not able to alleviate these famines were German efforts to sink allied shipping which made no distinction between war materiel and humanitarian supplies. Still, I think it is appropriate to lay a good deal of the blame here at the feet of western (and Soviet) imperialism here. Also I should note before we move on that I have not counted pre-war Soviet famines here, because they mostly fall outside of the chronological scope of Hearts of Iron IV, but the British Empire was hardly the only one that, sometimes through indifference, sometimes through malice, starved its subjects; the Soviet Union – we may fairly call it a Soviet Empire – surely did so as well.
- Porter, op. cit., 360
- As noted by Porter, op. cit., 359.
- As noted elsewhere, the sentiment and even phrasing are not original to Wiesel. This quote is often attributed to his book, Night (1956), but I cannot find that it occurs there, though I may have missed it; I have gone with the attribution given by Oxford Essential Quotations (2016).
- Except, oddly, the Soviet Great Purge, which is modeled in its impacts to Soviet military leadership, although not in the broader impacts to the Soviet population. Scholarly estimates put the death toll of the Great Purge around 1,000,000.
- Consider: if there was an ‘atrocity’ mechanic, would the use of the atomic bombs qualify? That would be quite the controversy in the United States, where the ethical implications of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain quite contested. They are, as you might imagine, less contested in Japan, but then an accurate depiction of Japanese war crimes implemented into the game would be quite controversial in Japan.
- As quoted below by .J. Kay and D. Stahel, “Crimes of the Wehrmacht: A Re-evaluation” JPR 3.1 (2020) for the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, but the same essentially must be true of the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy (which murdered nearly as many people, but did so almost entirely through the regular armed forces), so it seems almost certain that more than half of all combatants on the Axis side were to some degree culpable.
- In The Soldier and the State (1957). The idea that the professionalized German officer corps would be party to Hitler’s crimes is an absolutely fatal flaw to Huntington’s argument, so he just pretends it didn’t happen (in line with the elite understanding of the situation in 1957). As noted elsewhere, I think Huntington’s argument is sloppy and incorrect.
- Note especially Smelser and Davies, The Myth of the Eastern Front (2008), but equally almost anything by W.W. Beorn, esp. his Marching Into Darkness (2014). Note also, of course, on this topic C.R. Browning, Ordinary Men (1992) and the reply D.J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996).
- A.J. Kay and D. Stahel, “Crimes of the Wehrmacht: A Re-evaluation” JPR 3.1 (2020).
- And of course without the Japanese decision to launch a surprise attack on American soil, it is unclear if the political and popular will to see the war to its final conclusion at any cost would have been quite so ironclad as it was.
- And I should note, I would absolutely not craft a-historical atrocity events – no ‘extra Holocaust’ for a Third Reich player who wins the war, etc.
- With the arguable exception of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose effects are already simulated in HoI4, so that system exists and does not require adjustment here.
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Its also worth noting that these German soldiers were not compelled to commit atrocities either. The Nazi’s were aware these orders were at least dubiously legal, so ‘proper’ consequences were rare. Research has suggested that the majority who refused such orders suffered no consequences. Some suffered temporary negative consequences, though many of these still managed to get promoted before war’s end. Only a handful suffered the kind of consequences you are probably imagining. Refusing was not the optimal career move, but not fatal in either the literal or figurative sense. My understanding is in many cases the strongest driver for those unenthusiastic was a sense it would be letting down your comrades to dump the dirty work on them. Such sometimes is the banality of evil…
Which is also something to note about Nazi Germany. It was certainly authoritarian and there was quite a bit of violence at its beginning and end, but I would argue it was kind of larping at totalitarian. Even Franco ruled more ruthlessly, much less Stalin, and there are certainly many modern regimes more ruthless toward political dissent (I’d say more similar to China, then Assad, much less North Korea). Like it certainly suppressed opposition, but I am often surprised when reading opponents biographies just how long it took for them to be seriously punished given that these are the literal Nazis! Its just if you were a disabled, Jewish, Roma, or gay German this was cold comfort and if you lived east of Germany even worse.
From my understanding, the Nazi commanded their ranks less through fear, and more from actually enthusiasm and/or agreement with their leadership, in contrast to the paranoia and purges of the Stalinist regime.
I was recently reading up on the Beer Hall Putsch on wikipedia and its illuminating how patriotic Hitler was seen as. He tried to overthrow the government, attempted escape, was captured and brought to trial, then released very quickly because the judges etc saw a fiery young man genuinely trying to advance his country’s interests, but using the wrong method. It’s that “old boys club” that people decry or pine for – “we patriotic germans are all in it together, yeah sure the boys tried forcibly seizing power but his heart was in the right place and boys will be boys”.
I am left with this romantic impression that Germany was a more collegial place back then, where the mayor wasn’t some distant billionaire elite but just a fellow guy and rounding up your boys to crash his meeting was an impolite but almost valid form of political expression. Hitler still landed in jail but I suspect if you try to seize NYC with your armed militia today you won’t get a 3-month timeout, you’ll get 30 years or death on terrorism + treason charges.
That, then, explains how white nationalism got its bad rap. We let the earnest patriot off, he got the reins of power, see what he and his (vigorous, patriotic, nationalistic) movement did.
Not in Jail.
In a fortress Festungshaft – Wikipedia, a punishment intended to protect the honor and dignity of the Prisoner.
„Tun von rein vaterländischem Geist und dem edelsten selbstlosen Willen“
Acting out of purely patriotic spirit and the noblest selfless will
The funny thing is I read “Festungshaft” (fortress confinement) without clicking through and assumed some sort of supermax facility; the opposite of the velvet glove treatment that the word means.
“the judges etc saw a fiery young man genuinely trying to advance his country’s interests,”
That sounds very like saying the judges were pro-Nazi and wanted an excuse to go easy on him.
Pro conservative very conservative
I have pruned this thread of a discussion of events which were post-1950. It didn’t seem relevant.
“Hitler still landed in jail but I suspect if you try to seize NYC with your armed militia today you won’t get a 3-month timeout, you’ll get 30 years or death on terrorism + treason charges.”
It’s very relevant to the point that this happened today and it resulted in a 3-month timeout. There’s not really a way to discuss the subjective impression of this event without clarifying that there’s a very similar outcome today, if we’re talking about it.
Nowadays, we do this for the well connected and the wealthy.
Important to add that von Kahr, von Lossow, and von Seißer were part of the government which had declared the state of emergency (in effect, an act of insubordination to the democratic federal government) just over a month before Hitler’s coup; a move which Hitler supported. Bavaria was supposed to act as a “cell of order” from which the allegedly chaotic democracy was to be put to rights again. Hitler just seized the opportunity to bring the Bavarian insurrection to fully armed confrontation with the Reich – partly out of belief that the federal government was so weak it would collapse (like the Italian government had collapsed under Mussolini’s March on Rome), partly to win the leadership struggle in the Bavarian right-wing movement against von Kahr.
So, when the coup came crashing down, von Kahr and his associates had no way to pretend they disagreed on the issues with him – they clearly did not – but that they preferred a different approach (which is at least debatable). Thus, they presented him as guy with his political heart in the right spot (like themselves) who just got carried away by his youth (unlike themselves).
We did have an armed mob try to assault the capitol of the US in 2016, and no one got 30 years in jail, AFAICT .
Doesn’t seem like much of a change. It’s always been about if you are one of the “right sort” or not; congeniality has nothing to do with it. If Hitler had been a Serbian doing what he did in the name of Marxism, they would have shot him.
There is a potential caveat in that we don’t know how the Nazi leadership would have reacted if entire units (or at least significant parts of units) tasked with war crimes had refused such orders. I suspect the reaction would have been much harsher.
My go-to example for how you could avoid being part of a war crime in the German Army is Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten (1899–1997) – Wikipedia a Prussian Junker nobleman officer who refused to order the execution of 15 American soldiers captured in US Army uniform in Italy on a behind the lines sabotage raid in March 1945 and was dismissed from the Wehrmacht and returned home. His replacement, middle-class officer Anton Dostler – Wikipedia ordered the execution of those soldiers, and in turn he was executed by a US Army firing squad in December 1945 after a trial in October. Dohna lived until 1997. Saying ‘No, I don’t want to do that war crime’ didn’t get him executed, just got him sent home, a few weeks before the surrender. That was all that he faced.
Hell, I have family history that proves it wasn’t compulsory. I had a great grandfather who was an officer (major) and party member in the Wehrmacht, but since he was in comms he spent the whole war in Belgium on occupation duty.
He intervened to stop two SS soldiers from summarily executing a kid that had thrown rocks at their car by pulling rank and sending the kid home. He *did* get sent home to Germany and my grandma (teenager at the time) remembers the family being worried worse would happen, but nothing did. He was recalled to service in the desperate end days and died in a PoW camp in ’45 or ’46.
Obviously this story comes from someone with some bias, but still. You could choose to intervene to prevent atrocities and get away with it.
Is it indifference? Or is it cautiousness? The stumbling stones are a good idea, but I think even with that, there’s just an implicit understanding that “The Holocaust is not a game” that inherently makes putting it in a game disrespectful to its memory to a lot of people, and with just as good reasons on their end as you and I have reasons to want it represented. Movies had to get over this too, but movies can be dramas, where games are still stuck with the popular impression of being toys.
You’re absolutely right, & “The Holocaust Is Not a Game” IMHO is a *big* reason ALL the WWII games have gone (I gather) gone the path of indifference, focus on tactics/operations, pretending that the atrocities weren’t part of the same garment as the tactics.
Children’s books have been able to be much better than either games or movies, because their protagonists are pure civilians, nothing that happens is their fault.
As soon as you’ve put WWII into a game, the Nazis have been made part of the game. The only choice you’ve made is whether you’ve erased the Holocaust or not.
there’s also a third option of setting your WWII game outside of the European (and American) theater, where the Nazis and Holocaust is distanced enough that you can just not deal with them without neccesarily being accused of rewriting history.
of course, the question _then_ is whether you’ve erased the Rape of Nanking or not…
Yeah, it just shifts the problem to Imperial Japan which is less well known in the US but roughly as bad.
To be clear, I mostly agreed with this post. In addition to presenting the horrible facts and their implications, you did a good job acknowledging the near-impossible choice facing Paradox (hah) here and offering a possible better way. If your framing really had been about “teaching” Paradox– about what historians need to do to correct the inevitable gaps and misconceptions left by strategy games in the impressionable minds of us common folk– then I would have left it there and been happy.
But then the “moral failing” line made clear that it wasn’t. So let’s talk about the blind spots of academic history as a discipline.
It’s striking to me that most of your criticism of Paradox games is about wanting them to give the player *less* control. And not just in a “here are the rules” way, but in a “you arbitrarily get arm-twisted” way. Which is not surprising! Games are about giving players agency within structured settings. Academic history is mostly about *finding explanations for things*. And if historians have an explanation for why (or at least how) something happened that they’re happy with, they won’t be happy with a game giving players the power to change it.
Methodological bias is innocent enough, but I strongly suspect there’s ideological bias behind this too. Treating people’s decisions as fully explainable in terms of historically observable phenomena is a basically materialist presupposition, either in the technical sense of historical materialism (i.e. Marxism) or on the broader sense of metaphysical materialism (i.e. atheism). I’m sure you understand that both forms of this presupposition are *wildly* overrepresented within academia generally and history in particular. (Not that I expect you to acknowledge that on the blog, since that could be quite a career limiting move…)
The result is that professional historians have a weird impulse to delegitimize historical hypotheticals, of the kind that normal people are naturally interested in (“how would it have been different if…”: ah yes, definitely the kind of question that only a crypto-Nazi would ask). It’s not enough for history to have been written by the winners (which, descriptively, it has been, even though I’m quite happy with ascendant liberal democracy as an outcome); the winners’ victory must be presented as *inevitable*. Never mind that– to take a salient example– Nazi Germany turning on the USSR didn’t seem at all inevitable at the time, and even in hindsight seems pretty darn contingent provided we treat German grand strategy (i.e. Hitler’s choices) as an independent variable.
So when you tell Paradox to “do better”, Bret, it’s only fair to ask: what would it look like for *you* to do better, to make a “courageous” choice to defy the incentives and presuppositions of your own career path?
I don’t think that’s “less control”. The suggestion is the same amount of control as before: after all, there currently is neither a “commit Holocaust” button nor a research tree for Unit 731. It’s the fluff that would be different, portraying World War 2 (of which crimes against humanity were a key part) instead of a fictional clean conflict. And of course, if you go with the “bolder option” of implementing mechanical penalties for doing fascist shit, that would give fascist playthroughs mechanical distinctiveness of their own.
Besides, you are talking of delegitimizing historical hypotheticals, but isn’t simulating the constraints of fascist states doing exactly that work? You can’t really even pretend to be wargaming out the what-if scenario of whether Nazi Germany could have won the war, or accomplished some lesser objective like capturing Leningrad that they didn’t historically, if the entity that is in the game isn’t Nazi Germany. And anyway, what-ifs ARE the tool of understanding historical causality: it’s not like academics haven’t spilled books’ worth of ink on what-ifs like capitulation of Japan without the atomic bombings or other questions.
“Methodological bias is innocent enough, but I strongly suspect there’s ideological bias behind this too. Treating people’s decisions as fully explainable in terms of historically observable phenomena is a basically materialist presupposition, either in the technical sense of historical materialism (i.e. Marxism) or on the broader sense of metaphysical materialism (i.e. atheism). I’m sure you understand that both forms of this presupposition are wildly overrepresented within academia generally and history in particular”
Except historical materialism is a valid historical methodology. Treating people’s decisions as fully explainable in terms of historically observable phenomena works.
Your assertion that it’s overrepresented is based on an absurd premise, that methodologies are all equal and should be equally represented. No, some methodologies work and others don’t; there is no alternative to the methodology of materialism in physics, not because others haven’t tried, but because it doesn’t lead anywhere. Obviously that is the strongest version of the argument for materialism, but your argument is broad.
So the central premise here is just invalid to start.
The further assertion that atheism and historical materialism are linked is conspiracy shit. It’s just “cultural bolshevism”, just without the Jews. You’re using Hitler’s actual rhetoric about how Marxism and Atheism have infiltrated German universities, just stripped of the more rhetorically onerous racist components. It’s as invalid without those elements as it was with them.
Likewise, there is no conspiracy punishing people for saying academia is biased. In fact they get rewarded for that, it’s rhetorically useful for the anti-intellectualism movement and so there’s a cottage industry for authors and guests who will prostitute their credentials for a buck. It’s well documented.
“The result is that professional historians have a weird impulse to delegitimize historical hypotheticals, of the kind that normal people are naturally interested in (“how would it have been different if…”: ah yes, definitely the kind of question that only a crypto-Nazi would ask). It’s not enough for history to have been written by the winners (which, descriptively, it has been, even though I’m quite happy with ascendant liberal democracy as an outcome); the winners’ victory must be presented as inevitable. Never mind that– to take a salient example– Nazi Germany turning on the USSR didn’t seem at all inevitable at the time, and even in hindsight seems pretty darn contingent provided we treat German grand strategy (i.e. Hitler’s choices) as an independent variable.”
If this is your actual reason for compliant then where the hell has Bret ever condemned the ahistorical paths for these games? He’s actively doing a playthrough where he keeps the British Empire united, I don’t think he disagrees with the premise of letting the player do things differently. He might be willing to point out why it didn’t happen that way, but that’s not the same as saying it A. Must have, and B. That you shouldn’t be able to choose a different path.
This is philosophical nonsense. You don’t have to be either a Marxist or an Atheist to believe that people make decisions based on causal forces. Populations of people have been observed to change their policies and behaviors at specific places and times, is this to be taken as random or arbitrary? Or must we accept divine will? The very idea of history as a scholarly discipline makes no sense unless material chains of cause and effect are taking place in the world.
And given that cause and effect takes place in human history, how should we engage that? If you are brutal to people, their resistance to your policies increases. If you concentrate power in the hands of one man, his mistakes are amplified in their effects. If a national power restrains itself for reasons of principle, then the capacity for cooperation and organization improves. These are all testable hypotheses which presume the existence of material historical forces.
And why should video games, as a form of story telling, be based on less than as complete an understanding of those forces as practical within the confines of the game?
The “less control” section of your points are interesting. (The potshots less so, but it’s not my place to respond to those.) I think it’s worth noting, though, that Bret is not proposing arbitrary arm-twisting but conditional arm-twisting. Specifically, arm-twisting conditional on playing as an ideology predicated on atrocity. “The atrocities happen so long as the historical regimes remain in place,” therefore the players do have control over whether or not these atrocity events fire, because the players have control over whether or not the regimes remain in place via the national focus tree. If you play as Germany, you have and would still have a choice: To continue playing as the Nazi regime as it was in history, with all the attendant bonuses and maluses; or to replace that regime with one which is different in nature.
And I don’t think “playing as a fascist means you get unavoidable random atrocity events” is fundamentally different in nature than any of the other maluses and bonuses you might get depending on the nature of your governance. “If you stay on the fascist path, you get random events in which your genocides give you -N manpower” is functionally comparable to “some of the national focuses in the fascist path come with debuffs to manpower.” Mechanical drawbacks to this effect already exist in the game. The stumbling-stone implementation would be far more visceral, but not any more constraining to the player’s agency than any other cause-and-effect statement to the tune of “if you take the option that makes you better at X but worse at Y, you will be less able to do Y” is. You took the option that made you better at X but worse at not committing mass murder, so you will be less able to avoid the consequences of committing mass murder.
A Germany that is not genocidal is a hypothetical worth supporting. A Nazi regime that is not genocidal is a contradiction in terms. (Or else a misleading name for a Party of Theseus that ought to be named something else so it can be discussed separately from the historical entity that “the Nazis” describes.) If historians have an explanation for why something happened (especially one as utterly incontestable as “mass murder happened under the Nazi regime because that was the Nazi regime’s explicit primary raison d’etre“), and a game would like to give the players the power to change what happened, the answer should not be to decouple cause from effect – it should be to give players the power to change what causes were in place. Like by replacing the Nazis.
—–
Now, Bret has criticized the frictionlessness of the national focus system as well. But he has not to my knowledge gone so far as to say that players should not be able to take countries down different ideological paths than they did historically at all.
And it occurs to me that it might be possible to address a significant portion of that criticism without sacrificing player control. If you think it is desirable that the game continue to give players (for example) a “become communist button” to facilitate exploring historical hypotheticals (I do not have a well-formed position on whether or not this is desirable, so for the purposes of this post I will accept your premise that it is), and Bret thinks that the idea of the nebulous military-governmental gestalt you are playing as having a “become communist button” on hand to press is a dangerously simplified view of history and implies absurdities like governments backing movements to overthrow themselves, these two positions could potentially be reconciled by explicitly communicating that pressing the “become communist” button does not represent an exercise of the in-universe power of the governmental or military entities you are playing as but a declaration by authorial fiat that things happened differently. When taking these focuses and these focuses only, you are no longer a government backing a movement to overthrow itself, you are stepping out of the simulation to declare that such that such a movement arose or succeeded where in our timeline it did not. Once that movement takes power, focuses would return to representing the new regime wielding its in-universe power.
This would not be a magic bullet solution. There would be awkwardness in “authorial fiat” focuses competing for the same game resources as “in-universe” focuses. And the approach is primarily applicable to early major branches, once you get deeper into the tree, criticisms like the implausibility of forming Even Greater Britain would still require curtailing player control to address. But I think it might solve enough at little enough cost to be worth exploring?
This is going to sound bizarre, but have you played the Equestria at War mod? I feel demonstrates how so many of your critiques are trivially solvable within the HOI4 engine with almost no changes. Reinforcing your point about it being about choices the designers have made.
EAW does have the advantage of being essentially a cartoon world: while it more or less “plays it straight” and treats its own events seriously, there is a serious emotional and historical difference between the Nazi-coded Changelings or Reformisten implementing campaigns of extraction or extermination on Anglophone or Balkan-coded horse people and the actual holocaust. I think this is one of those areas where the distance of fiction allows it to artistically depict reality more clearly through metaphor and allegory than we would tolerate in non-fiction.
The simplest – and least mechanically intensive – solution would be a generalised research penalty or increased cost to recruit scientists
Maybe they could also be more stingy on research slots in fascist focus trees.
I am reminded of Mitchell and Webb’s sketch Are we the Baddies?
I largely agree with all your points here about the way HoI4 represents the atrocities of WW2. But I think the solution you suggest (having ideology triggering events) would open the can of worm of either representing the communist atrocities as essential to ideology and alienate the leftist part of their playerbase (in addition to the far-right one for, you know, correctly representing the Holocaust), or presenting what amounts to a “Clean historical communism” in the same way the current representation supports the “Clean wehrmaht” one.
Actual full-on Tankies are just people posting from within Russia at this point. In the West, Leftists either openly reject autocratic excesses as counterproductive or change the subject. If you find someone who tells you that fascist mass murder hurt the fascist cause and communist mass murder helped the communist cause, that person is a troll.
That “change the subject” is likely because they want to talk about actual leftist ideas and projects, instead of the authoritarian regimes that pretended to be communist. Especially modern leftism that focuses on power imbalances and seeks equity as response doesn’t have much to say about Stalin beyond: “An autocrat clearly has disproportionate power over other people with far too little accountability and responsibility, and that’s what we don’t want.”
‘Especially modern leftism that focuses on power imbalances and seeks equity as response doesn’t have much to say about Stalin beyond: “An autocrat clearly has disproportionate power over other people with far too little accountability and responsibility, and that’s what we don’t want.”’
Well when they’re not simping for extant autocracies like China, Iran, Cuba or North Korea.
For example the extremely visible influencer Hasan Piker who has gone on record calling his fanbase to murder republicans.
Leaving aside the validity of your characterization of the guy’s comments, how is asking people to kill American fascists “simping for…China, Iran, Cuba[,] or North Korea”?
Due to how the website is organized I’m not sure how to reply to the comment beneath me by endymionologist. (after a certain number of replies you are only given the option of ‘liking’ a comment).
But, in regards to Hasan Piker, not only has he called for his political opponents to be exterminated (which seems pretty fascist to me) he has openly gone to a Cuban rally in support of the authoritarian goverment.
He has also told a North Korean that he should’ve died.
His unhinged comments demonstrates a popular extremist position in the left, that if allowed to become the dominant position would act in a far more authoritarian manner than anything proposed by the republican party.
In fact a common view within the right is that ‘fascist’ is simply a label used to justify bodily violence whether the person is or is not a fascist.
Well, you know an awful lot about the guy. I won’t pretend I think you got that knowledge by watching him stream every day, which would be ‘primary sources’ in history blog terms. So what you know about him is from sources curated by others, which is fine; everyone needs to have trusted curators if they want to keep up with the pace of information in the present. I don’t trust your curators, though, they seem to have left you incapable of answering a simple question:
How is asking people to kill American fascists “simping for…China, Iran, Cuba[,] or North Korea”?
Geo: “Hasan Piker who has gone on record calling his fanbase to murder republicans.”
Endymionologist: “how is asking people to kill American fascists “simping for…China, Iran, Cuba[,] or North Korea”?”
A. I see we’re adopting the “as-ordered-by-Stalin” KPD definition of fascism.
B. If you can’t figure out how making the US’s political and social stability worse than it already is might be helpful to China, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, your ignorance is willful.
@60guilders, the Republican Party is using their control of government to divert public subsidies into an openly racist paramilitary that snatches people into unmarked vans and films themselves shooting people dead. They have reclassified multiple non-white populations living in America as ‘illegal.”
They have also leveraged state security forces into personal feuds both within their political coalition and outside it.
What more on the fascist checklist do you want? Random monumental architecture? Oh wait…
@Endymionologist: You live in a very dramatic timeline. Tell me, how did you gain access to a dimensional portal?
<i>not only has he called for his political opponents to be exterminated (which seems pretty fascist to me</i>
there’s nothing necessarily “fascist” about that, it’s just garden variety authoritarianism. There are lots of stripes of authoritarianism, right and left, most of them aren’t *fascist* which is a very historical thing.
Also, I’m not going to feel very sorry for your side here. If you don’t want to do the time, then don’t do the crime.
<i>he has openly gone to a Cuban rally in support of the authoritarian goverment.<I>
Good for him. Neither the Cuban government, nor him, is fascist though. And I obviously disagree with you that it’s unhinged, i’d say the Cuban government and revolution is very much worth supporting.
it would have the same issue of identifying allied crimes as being essential to democracy. how would this system model Jim Crow? is the pop up tied to America being a democracy as it happened under democracy historically? do we assume it would still happen under another ideology? fascism sure but communism? does Jim Crow escape mention?
As Bret himself mentions, there is an issue of degree. Jim Crow should hurt American war capacity, but it won’t hurt them as much as the Holocaust hurt Nazi Germany. I think that approach is both honest and morally acceptable.
Jim Crow also probably prevented the formation of pro-German white supremacist terrorist organizations, or rather prevented the retooling of white supremacist terrorist organizations in the American South into pro-German actors. Costs and benefits to morally vile policy are a thought trap.
Er, I’m pretty sure it didn’t.
Well it’s a counterfactual, we can’t know. The Klan did joint ventures with the German-American Bund, in the North. Did the South fail to “Rise again” during the opportunity created by the war because there was too little white supremacist grievance to motivate such a move, or for some other reason? I believe the former, because we see all the cases of violence that cause commits itself to whenever their racism isn’t sufficiently catered to.
Interestingly, IIRC, South African apartheid *does* exist as mostly a negative (it greatly reduces availible manpower) technically US segregation works the same way, it’s just coded as abolishing segregation giving increased manpower rather (IE: A green number for abolition rather than a red number for having it) it’s also less important beause the US generally has plenty of manpower.
In the game, abolishing segregation (fully, there’s a preceding armed-forced desegregation focus based on, IIRC, Truman’s policies) is one of the ways you get on the communist path. (because the other side tries launching a revolt)
Does it not already?
It presents the political purges as limited to some politicians and officers. How do you think it would fly if the whole Holocaust was shown as merely a few preeminent Jewish figures behind executed?
Given that a great deal of effort has gone into portraying communism (and often socialism) as inevitably leading to mass murder, any kind of ‘clean communism’ is going to upset a lot of people. The ideological nuances are probably hard to render, but it is fair to say that war and violence were central to fascism (seen as good things in themselves, going back to Sorel and the Syndicalists), and inseparable from Nazism, with its obsession with racial struggle.
It’s not so clear with communism – after all, Stalin was followed by leaders who did not indulge (yet were committed communists), the communist regimes mostly gave way with very little violence for so drastic a change (recall that the Russian Civil War killed more than World War I) and socialist governments have come and gone in peaceful ways. So one can draw a distinction between the violence intrinsic to revolutionary change and violence as an inherent goal.
I doubt this level of analysis would sell to any side.
@PeterT,
As someone generally much more sympathetic to the communist than the capitalist side of things, I’d generally say this:
1) I think <i>some</i> level of authoritarian control is probably baked into the cake of a serious communist project (just as it is to establishing a comprehensive social order based around nationalist lines, religious lines, socialist lines etc.). The pressures of revolution, and the degree of control you would need to ensure that property relations don’t re-emerge, seem like they would require more social control than liberals would accept.
2) Whether or not you think some level of authoritarian control can be “worth it” is an issue on which people are going to disagree (I’d obviously disagree with Professor Devereaux about that).
3) That said, stuff like the Ukrainan famine are obviously *not* mechanically baked into the cake of communism. as much as some people would like to argue otherwise. We know that since A) like you suggest with the purges, Stalin’s agricultural policy was intensely controversial within the Communist Party, B) the Soviet Union itself, while they continued to struggle with agricultural production, had no more famines after Stalin’s death, C) most communist countries never had any famines, and D) some of them had quite productive state-farm or socialized farm sectors, and some like Hungary were even major food exporters.
4) I also think that as far as political purges go, there was nothing mechnaical or inevitable about the intensity and scope of the 1930s purges in the Soviet Union. As you say, we know that since different countries varied quite a bit in the degree of political repression, and also since political repression eased up over time.
5) I think the better comparison here with communism as a general category is with somethng like, say, nationalism. Is a state based around a specific ethnic identity going to be somewhat repressive towards minorities? Sure, unless they’re so trivial in size that the titular nationality doesn’t feel threatened. But, is a state founded as an ethnic homeland inevitably going to end up with mass deaths? Well, no, stuff like the Holocaust is actually very unusual, most nationalist states are probably going to resemble, say, modern Estonia or Slovakia rather than Nazi Germany.
“I think some level of authoritarian control is probably baked into the cake of a serious communist project…”
I would argue that this makes the purges inevitable.
An authoritarian regime is going to seek to perpetuate itself. All groups with any sort of power or influence inevitably do. It’s to the benefit of the people in charge of such groups to do so, even if it’s not always to the benefit of the people they are in charge of, and even if it contradicts the ostensible ideology of the group.
Once you have an authoritarian regime, it’s going to attract people who want that sort of power. These people will inevitably either have enemies they need to destroy to get to where they are, or will have to deal with enemies once they get into power (anyone in power will make unpopular decisions). And authoritarian regimes tend to attract the worse sort of people, the sort who view murdering a few hundred people as a normal way of handling disagreements. It’s worth noting that these regimes can turn people into the sort of person who thinks that way. Communism, at least as practiced by Russia, is, I believe, particularly susceptible to this because it treats humans like interchangeable machines. The mere act of planning an economy means you need to view people in a way that inures you to individual suffering, and this will, over time, inure you to mass suffering. (For what it’s worth, I’m thinking of military officers as an example–a general CAN’T let his plans be dictated by the loss of a few men.)
The two facts mean that sooner or later you will inevitably get a tyrant who conducts purges of one sort or another.
You can argue that this isn’t baked in because it’s not part of the structure. However, humans are, and calling any predictable and inevitable consequence of an idea not baked-in seems a bit silly.
One can make very similar arguments against democracy and republics–I in fact have, as an argument on why Republicans should be restraining Donald Trump far more than they have thus far attempted. The checks and balances in the US system were a way to forestall this as long as possible, but….well, again, humans are baked into the system. But that’s beside the point; I merely include this to prevent the typical “If you attack X you must think Y is perfect” sort of counter-argument so common online.
I will also say that my arguments above can be made about various other forms of government. You could replace “Communism” with “kings” and the argument would hold true, and there are ample historic examples to support such an argument. Any system that doesn’t take into account that you will eventually get a right bastard in power is going to inevitably have purges of some sort.
@Dinwar,
So I’d say a couple thngs in response:
<i>Once you have an authoritarian regime, it’s going to attract people who want that sort of power. These people will inevitably either have enemies they need to destroy to get to where they are, or will have to deal with enemies once they get into power (anyone in power will make unpopular decisions).</i>
I think this is true to an extent, but only to a limited extent. As far as we can tell from outside observation, there are definitely people who join, or lead, governments mostly because they’re interested in power for their own sake, and that’s true of all types of governments. But we can <i>also</i> see lots of people who become officials in, or leaders of, governments because they’re sincerely interested in furthering a particular ideology, and that’s true of authoritarian communist, socialist, nationalist, or conservative etc. governments as much as it is of liberal ones. We can tell that because sometimes we see such leaders, for example, live quite simple personal lifestyles, which isn’t what you would expect of someone who’s interested in government power <i>for its own sake</i>.
<i>And authoritarian regimes tend to attract the worse sort of people, the sort who view murdering a few hundred people as a normal way of handling disagreements.</i>
I think this is true to an extent, but only, again, to a limited extent, and I’d avoid the normative implications that they put on it. It’s not necessarily that purges happen because the people in charge like executing people, it’s often about genuine ideological conviction.
Also, the point I was making above (maybe imprecisely) is that while I think *some* level of purges, repression, executions etc. were baked in, what made Stalin unusual was the scope, intensity and scale. Note your comment, you specify “a few hundred people”. When you start crossing from a few hundred into hundreds of thousands, that’s when I’d say it’s more than ordinary repression going on, and that’s where I think Stalin’s personal nature (and to a certain extent, some factors specfic to Russia and the CPSU) are involved.
Finally, even more so than the scale of the purges, I was thinking about things like the famines. Those I definitely think were *not* baked in, since they were quite unusual, although not unique.
<i>because it treats humans like interchangeable machines. The mere act of planning an economy means you need to view people in a way that inures you to individual suffering,</i>
Planning, treating people as machines/factors of production, etc. takes place in all industrialized economies, it’s inevitable. The difference is that in a capitalist society the decisions are made at the level of individual firms, rather than at the level of the government planning for society as a whole, and of course the things that the planners are seeking to optimize are different too. I don’t think the mode of thinking about individual workers is necessarily that different though, certainly not in a sense that would make the state planners worse.
I generally think the only way to have a functioning system of government that does not end badly when the wrong person gets into power is to split up power such that the power centers have mutual interests they’re willing to cooperate on but will act to avoid any one power center gaining the capacity to purge the others. This is very difficult long term because ideological alignments will inevitably shift and you can get a scenario like we do with Trump where a cross-power-center group is more committed to strengthening the group than maintaining the power structure.
Doesn’t have to be branches, incidentally; a parliamentary system can work fine if the voting rules and distribution of voters are such that any bloc ideologically united enough to begin purges isn’t able to form a government without a coalition with another bloc that doesn’t want to be purged. But that still has a risk of a wave election putting the wrong party in with a majority and not needing to coalition so it’s not safe either.
Hector: Regarding your first few points, I don’t really disagree with what you’re saying. However, in my experience the impacts of a bad actor within an authoritarian regime can so dramatically outweigh the impacts of good people that when you compare them you can pretty much ignore them. The reason is that most good people will try to do good by the standards they are raised in–ie, working within the system. They may stretch the system, but fundamentally they will work with it. Bad actors subvert the system to their ends, making their impacts quite over-sized.
Further, other bad actors tend to exploit those exploits. Look at what’s happening with Trump to see an example. By himself Trump is bad enough. But because of what he’s done, people like the Secretary of Defense can push their agendas, to the detriment of the country. The impacts can be magnified in more authoritarian regimes. This is one reason why the famines hit the USSR–some bad ideas on evolutionary biology got pushed by some powerful people, and did untold damage to farming in the USSR.
“Also, the point I was making above (maybe imprecisely) is that while I think *some* level of purges, repression, executions etc. were baked in, what made Stalin unusual was the scope, intensity and scale.”
And this is where I disagree. If some purges, repressions, and executions are baked in to the philosophy of the government, they will only get bigger. Remember, authoritarian governments attract people who want that sort of power, and bad actors have over-sized impacts by subverting the machinery of the authoritarian government. The combination means that we can assume that at some point someone is going to try to eliminate all opposition via purges and executions. The only real question is when. I would guess it would happen earlier rather than later, both because there would be more willingness to purge in the heat of the movement, and because a logical way for the next dictator to differentiate himself is by saying “I promise to only kill some of my opposition! See? I’m the good guy!” Eventually you’d settle down to a level of oppression the society can live with, with occasional flairs of violence.
As I said before, when something is inevitable it’s rather silly to claim it’s not baked in.
“The difference is that in a capitalist society the decisions are made at the level of individual firms, rather than at the level of the government planning for society as a whole, and of course the things that the planners are seeking to optimize are different too.”
As someone in management I can hardly object to this very much. However, I do think there are key differences. Because it’s the firm treating people like cogs the people inherently have more options. If I don’t like how I’m treated, I can just stop showing up. In socialist countries you have to go through a longer process, but it’s still fairly easy.
In contrast, if the government is treating you like a cog you have far fewer options. You can hardly leave the country, after all!
There’s also the issue of what the purpose is. In an authoritarian country the definition of “better” is in the hands of a very small group–and always ends up meaning “better for the ruling class”. (This is not unique to Communism.) In contrast, because the companies are what treat people as cogs, and companies compete for workers, capitalist countries tend to not have a single idea of how to live one’s life. We try everything all at once–not necessarily as individuals, but as a culture. This is why you found Communist communes in the USA, but you didn’t find open capitalist areas in the USSR.
in this very article he describes how the Stalin-era purges are so mechanically inevitable that they still happen even if you get rid of Stalin
Except that the purges aroused considerable opposition within the Party, and Stalin came close to losing power (see Kirov). From 1935 on the purges were less party policy and more consolidating Stalin’s personal grip on power. In the same vein, Nazism drew a lot of support from the traditional German right, but some policies were specifically Nazi – eg the lengths to which it took anti-Semitism and related racial policies.
I’m not sure what you mean by “Stalin came close to losing power (see Kirov)”. The assassination of Kirov, by a “lone nut”/disposable member of the Right Opposition, did not come close to dislodging Stalin from power, and happened several years before the Great Terror of 1937 – indeed Yezhov became head of the NKVD because he succeeded in persuading most of the Central Committee that Yagoda’s investigation of the murder had been incompetent.
Stelaris player here… I will add that the lengths the slaving empires go to keep their population stable and that the Galactic community will eventually penalize you. Still the sheer willingness of pops to join an egalitarian empire with jobs and housing feels like a cheat code…. So yeah I am all for letting players play what they want and then drowning them in the consequences of their actions.
I think the big difference with Stellaris is that the populations in question are purely and obviously fictional, while the populations in HOI4 represent actual people who were actually killed, in the living people of some who are still around
the most troubling thing about hoi4 treatment of atrocities is that in order to avoid attracting people who want to “do the holocaust” but still wanting to include the historical crimes of the period they have included a number of historical crimes as either events or mechanics but only for the allies. there is an event for the Bengal famine, mechanics for apartheid and Stalins purges, but there is no equivalent for the far greater and more numerous crimes of the axis powers. from the perspective of the game the axis are in fact the good guys!
I wonder how much the “crimes of indifference” here are actually “crimes of malice” it it’s actually investigated deeply. Like I’ve heard some disgusting comments from western leaders during the aforementioned famines that imply that’s it’s not total indifference.
When looking at phenomena where the scale of the thing means individual people are statistics instead of stories, malice versus indifference is meaningless and not even a valid frame. It’s not malice or indifference, it’s an atrocity; that’s an important thing to understand about how atrocities are uniquely bad.
When examining atrocities, you can trace back the events leading up to them and find the last point where an aggregate decision-making body–a council, an electorate, a board of directors–could have made a different decision than the one they did make and thereby prevented the atrocity. Doing that you can divide atrocities into a category where the people who could have prevented it knew that they had that power and a category where the last chance people had to prevent it they didn’t know it was coming, but that just lets you position responsibility on a spectrum.
For a long time the British said the Potato Famine was a crime of indifference. My understanding is the evidence, as known today, shows considerable evidence of malice. Certainly the British landlords repeatedly chose to export the food grown in Ireland, which would have been sufficient to feed the Irish, because they chose profits over the lives of the Irish. The term “crimes of indifference” fails to capture the realities of the Famine. I think there is a difference between the British Famine policies and the Nazi policy of deliberate starvation, but maybe there is not much of a difference between the British and the Soviet famines, except the Soviets were even worse at actually growing food.
…no, that’s indifference. Taking a loss on selling food abroad rather than feeding the Irish would be malice.
This gets to what I was saying about how the malice/indifference or malice/incompetence razor doesn’t scale up. Once magnitude makes something an atrocity, it’s an atrocity no matter how you slice it.
That’s rather like saying that refusing to feed your children isn’t abuse because you are abstaining from an action, rather than acting. It’s a level of hair-splitting that serves no purpose other than to minimize the event. It reminds me of how narcissists use verbal trickery to obfuscate the harm they do to others, even from themselves. (I am not calling you a narcissist, merely pointing out that this is a well-studied phenomenon.)
There are two facts worth noting that also tend to argue against this being a mere accident. First, Ireland’s population still has not recovered. The destruction of a population on that scale is very unlikely to happen without coordinated and deliberate effort, baring natural disasters. Second, England had a long, long, long history of subjugating and abusing Ireland and Scotland. When you see such relationships and you see the abuser inflicting harm on the abused, it’s fair to conclude that the abuser is doing so intentionally even if you don’t have the specifics to support that conclusion in this event. This may not hold up in court, but we are not in court, and such reasoning is common enough in judging human interactions.
Even if the Famine were due to indifference alone (which the scale makes highly unlikely), the indifference itself arose from England’s systematic abuses of those countries. It is the indifference of a man who is accustomed to beating his wife, when he sees his wife in pain–perhaps the pain is caused by some other source, but the very indifference is a form of abuse.
“Now there is an immediate problem with Paradox’s, ‘we do not make war crime simulators’ stance, which is that it isn’t true. Forced labor – slavery – appears mechanically in Victoria III, Europa Universalis V and Imperator, along with older titles.”
On the face of it, for something to be a crime of any kind it has to contravene some pre-existing law or norm. It seems to me that in the societies depicted in those games slavery was perfectly normal and not, therefore, a war crime.
The problem for WW2 simulators is that one side in particular is associated with acts widely considered to be evil, which leaves the developers trying to decide what to do with Team Evil.
He meant “war crimes” as defined today. Paradox doesn’t design its games for the sensibilities of people who died centuries before the invention of the computer. They’re niche, but not that niche.
Quite a number of them brought guns and they erected a gallows and chanted “hang Mike Pence”.
It was a badly-organized coup attempt that lost its nerve but they did overrun police barricades and attempt to breach the room where counting was occurring in an effort to compel Congress to install the losing candidate.
I haven’t played many grand-strategy games, and I’m interested in why “don’t make the Germans playable” is such an unworkable idea. In my gaming days I was quite happy with the idea that there would be some factions that couldn’t be played. I never felt that Halo was flawed because you couldn’t play the Covenant, or that Call of Duty was flawed because I never got to be defending the bunker rather than attacking it.
Is it that there’s a significant block of customers who want to be able to play every faction – or a significant block who want specifically to be able to play the Germans?
I think the major objection would be for those interested in wargaming to see if the Germans could have won. Or what they could have done differently to secure victory. Hypotheticals are fun. What would happen if the Blitzkrieg across France was stopped. What would happen if Stalin didn’t join the allies? What would happen if Germany had knocked the Russians out the war quickly.
Playing these kind of hypotheticals is fun and a game that doesn’t offer them, especially a game that is deliberately such a sandbox as Paradox games tend to be, is less fun that a game that does.
I don’t play HoI4 but I have more hours in EU4 than I am willing to admit and I really enjoy the challenge of getting world conquests. I’ve only managed it a few times as I’m not an expert player, but no nation ever actually came close to conquering the world. But the game would be significantly less interesting if I couldn’t play the Golden Horde, rebuild the Mongol Empire and conquer the planet.
One of the factors is that this “play all countries” thing is something Paradox promotes about itself, to the point that when they do have unplayable factions in other games they are immediately criticized for “deliberately taking base game content out of the base game to sell as a DLC” and of course they do then always eventually sell the ability to play those factions as a DLC.
Germany is basically the most interesting country to play in HOI. And the most interesting part of the game is fighting a blitzkrieg to conquer Soviet Union.
It’s not paradox’s brand, more or less, which is in fact to expand the list of playable nations within a given framework. I don’t actually agree with that premise being the problem, so to speak, though.
That said some of the other commenters are also artlessly approaching a pretty real issue: fundamentally, playing the losers is more interesting than the winners. The winners did, in fact, win. Being able to win with them is what’s expected. In general, with these kinds of games the thing that is most attractive is to take the people who are supposed to lose and win, because it shows you’ve understood the game and gotten good with it. This impulse is so strong that I have, at no point, played the allied majors in vanilla HoI4. I also have not played the nazis, mind. I’m generally looking at the raj, the chinese, and the like. I also mostly don’t play vanilla at all tho. Given this impulse, I do suspect that making it run like their other games is probably doomed as a sensible effort that isn’t offensive.
“Terra Invicta” has a mechanic for atrocities: they happen automatically when you launch a nuclear strike or they can randomly pop up as an event when there is a long ongoing conflict. They have pretty hefty consequences: massive population decline and destruction of infrastructure and prosperity in the territory they happen but they also affect both the “Shadow Government” you run with reduction in faction support and even loss of loyalty from your council members and even big shifts in unrest and support between the involved countries and their allies and neighbours… As a cherry on cake they also grant a nuclear retaliation free of atrocity for your enemies.
Sure the game is a sci-fi simulation of an alien invasion stopped by various Earth shadow governments but the developers are keen in updating the starting position with each update: there is war in Ukraine, conflict in Palestine and the government rating of various countries is continuously lowered following the news.
IIRC even as far back as Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri there was a charter for War Crimes (AFAIK, using planet busters, intentionally obliterating a base, and a couple of other things were considered atrocities, with there being major and minor ones) Interestingly they did have the atrocity system be part of the intenrational law (so to speak) system so you could abolish the prohibitions on genocide f.ex.
IIRC, Minor Atrocities like chemical weapons use or nerve stapling were a ten turn trade sanction that could be crippling or barely noticeable depending on how you structured your economy, while Major Atrocities such as using a Planet Buster (nuke) were an automatic declaration of war.
My go-to lategame strategy was to repeal the UN Charter and use Planet Busters at will to obliterate the main enemy army, then support this with air power and use drop troops to actually capture cities.
I also occasionally melted the polar ice caps in a bid to drown enemy cities after having constructed pressure domes in all of mine, though this competed with the other thing I really miss from Alpha Centauri, using Formers to construct an “assault bridge” where I raised terrain until I’d forged a land bridge between continents and built a road, then a mag-lev, on it. Install some cities along the route for aircraft and missiles to stop in, and who needs sea transports or carriers? When practical I’d intervene on the losing side of a war, dispatching an expeditionary force mostly comprised of aircraft to hold my ally’s cities while the bridge slowly grew closer. Then I’d send my land army and masses of mind worms I’d captured to overwhelm the enemy forces and take my ally’s former cities. When I did need to move troops by sea I used the aquatic mind worms.
Was really sad to discover the GoG version is no longer compatible with my computer; the interface was clunky but man did that game have ideas.
The funniest part of that game is when solar flare happens, all communications go down, which means no one will know what you did. So this means free atrocity for everyone!! Especially with Thinker mod, once the event happens you’ll see AI nerve stapling everywhere.
There’s a much simpler explanation for why Paradox is willing to include atrocities in CK, EU, Victoria, and Stellaris but not in HOI.
It’s too soon. No one is alive who was around for CK and EU, the number of people who were around during Victoria is minuscule (and even then were only around for the last bit depicted), while Stellaris is pure fiction. As a result, there’s a kind of distance to it.
With HOI, on the other hand, it’s much more recent. Yes, we’re starting to run out of people who actually went through WWII, but the vast majority of people have known someone who did, or know that they don’t have certain great-aunts and -uncles, or aunts and uncles, as a result of the war. (I’ll preface any discussion I have about the atomic bombs by saying that I might not be entirely rational on the subject, because both my grandfathers were slated for the invasion of Japan, first day.)
As a result, the wounds are fresher, and it’s a much more sensitive subject.
(As a side note, part of the reason why I suspect Paradox includes Allied misdeeds is because they mostly can be ascribed to “the exigencies/unintended consequences of war” rather than “what is wrong with you people?”)
that explains why Paradox specifically don’t include the Holocaust, but the dearth of it in general don’t make sense. I mean, there’s a handful of Vietnam War games, let alone all the Deus Vult Millenimium Edititon a la Call of Duty or Spec Ops, and they don’t hold back on the atrocities, most acutely the liberal use of Napalm. So “too soon” can’t definitely just be it.
Use of Napalm isn’t *per se* an atrocity, or against the laws of war. Inciendary weapons are, despite how horrifying they are, generally permissible. (if you can blow someone up you’re also allowed to set them on fire). Though using them against civilians is in most cases. (subject to the usual proportionality clauses, IIRC)
Funnily enough using inciendary munitions to burn down trees is illegal according to the convention, *unless* there are enemy soldiers hiding in the trees.
Thing is, in most of those games you’re not ordering the atrocities, you’re just seeing them happen, whereas in a Paradox game, if the country you’re playing commits an atrocity it’s because you ordered it or let it happen.
Also worth noting is that when Spec Ops: The Line had the player character commit an atrocity, it was extremely controversial and turned off a lot of people.
@60guilders Worse: forced to do it with bad mechanic. Basically the enemies are scripted to spawn non-stop until you use the White Phosphorus munitions (and even then the thing is that the main characters don’t know about the civilians there until afterwards. They are not intentionally trying to hurt the civilians…though how good of argument if that absolves/mitigates it is another matter). You can try to kill them conventionally, but it won’t work. The spawn won’t stop.
I have always maintained that Spec Ops criticism isn’t good at all (I hold that works that criticizing the viewers for watching/playing them at all is just bad. After all, why are the viewers/players the only one at fault and not the creators of the work too? And let’s not get into financial argument: if the only good choice we can do is to not watched/played at all, are devs willing to refund us if we already purchased it?). If you want better game than that, Iji, a freeware game by Daniel Remar, is much better. In that game, there are actually finite number of enemies, and the choice to kill or not is entirely up to the player. Scripts that trigger next sections in most cases only depends on you reaching the trigger and not needing to do specific actions. And even then the game doesn’t criticize players directly, as in close or direct fourth wall break, but still frames it in terms of the player character getting that. Which helps blunt things a bit I guess.
Which as the devs said was exactly the point.
Spec Ops: The Line is well-remembered precisely because it was an open deconstruction of the stereotypical Call of Duty type of hero and of the playerbase who do not truly engage with the full scope of what they are doing.
The White Phosphorous bit is the most memorable, but there are several warnings to the player prior to that point about what exactly is going on in Dubai and how complicated the situation actually is, and if the player pays attention to them they would know that Walker and his crew are way over their heads for not turning back before that scene happens.
It’s very specifically about Germany, and the policies set by the BPjS (the German youth protection/censorship agency) against videogames since the 1990s. The way youth protection works in Germany is that media banned for minors is not allowed to be displayed or advertised where minors can see it, so any ban on distribution to minors meant effectively an advertisement ban.
And a lot of WW2-related videogames were banned from being shown to minors in this way, or had to be censored in order to not catch such a ban. Earlier German versions of Hearts of Iron had to be censored so that no images of Nazis were shown in game, and the first Panzer General game just flat out wasn’t available for sale in Germany.
That might explain the lack of a Holocaust, but it doesn’t explain covering up things like Japan’s policies in China or Unit 731.
“As a result, the wounds are fresher, and it’s a much more sensitive subject.”
The TV show “Hogan’s Heroes” tends to argue against this point. Several of the actors were victims of the German atrocities–the actor that played the Frenchman had his serial number tattooed on his arm, the actor that played the general was injured by the SS and bore the scar (ironically fitting, given customs in certain German schools at the time), and the actor that played Klink fled before the Nazis got ahold of him and his family.
If the people who were directly impacted by the atrocities can portray German officers, it seems rather strange that those of us who only experienced the atrocities at third hand are too sensitive to be allowed to discuss them.
This is not necessarily to say that you are incorrect. I’ve noticed that WWII is becoming almost mythical over time. It was always horrific–read the journals of the soldiers who went into the concentration camps!–but we seem less and less able to handle it as time goes by.
A fair point (and I’m glad you brought up Hogan’s Heroes), but that’s not quite what I’m arguing.
First, there is a difference between “let’s talk about the Holocaust” and “You, the player, are going to be enacting The Final Solution.”
Second, Hogan’s Heroes was put in the least atrocity-prone setting that you could get in Nazi-occupied territory outside of North Africa or Denmark–and, IIRC, I think it was Werner Klemperer who specified in his contract that the Germans could never, ever win in the show, and I think he and Burkhalter’s actors enjoyed portraying German officers as bumbling, posturing idiots.
Yeah. It’s interesting that what little discourse I’ve seen about Hogan’s Heroes among millennials/Gen Zers is “How could anyone have found this premise funny,” and people who went through WWII found it hilarious enough that it ran for six seasons.
I think part of it is that a lot of people are very insulated from any kind of hardship whatsoever, and so don’t get that humor is one of the ways that people deal with dark and grim times, if for no other reason than because it can get you out of your own head.
Are you familiar with Why? by Peter Hayes? He argues against the idea that the Holocaust was a major drain on the Nazi war effort. One stat he uses is that the Nazis used more trains to supply the staging area for Operation Barbarossa every day throughout mid-1941 (~2500) than they used for deportations over the entirety of the Holocaust (~2000). Additionally, the murders were largely “self-funding” due to the property plundered from the victims.
I realize that giving atrocities anything other than entirely mechanically negative effects would be a massive third rail, though, so it would probably be safer to keep them as purely text pop-ups.
I was thinking something similar about Jim Crow being a drain on American war efforts (an earlier comment). In theory discrimination of that sort would decrease the number of available soldiers. In practice, though, it really didn’t impact things all that much. That sort of drain was already baked into the military, so treating it as a drain is double-counting it in a way. And the economics of the regions hit hardest by Jim Crow were bad all around; I’m not sure how much discrimination really contributed. That’s not to say it was good! But I think that in this one case, people are over-estimating the impacts.
I think part of the reason for this over-estimation is that these things are so morally repugnant to descent people these days that we think there MUST be some practical consequence. The wages of sin, and all that–even if someone isn’t religious, there’s an underlying view that doing evil things needs to be self-defeating. So we look for evidence of this, and concoct stories to justify the view. Plus, moral philosophy has a bad reputation. There’s an underlying view that saying something is morally wrong isn’t sufficient. So again we concoct stories to show that it’s not just morally but practically bad to do X, Y, and Z.
This is more game-mechanical, but one interesting point is how/what things are represented as bonuses (green numbers) vs. penalties (red numbers) one of the things Paradox has learned is that players *hate* red numbers and will work hard to minimize them/complain about them, even if the penalty really is something you’re supposed to more or less live with. While player behaviour is quite different if you represent it as a declining bonus. Stellaris had a weird example where the devs found people were really overvaluing trying to keep empire sprawl (represented as an angry red number) low (when it was intended more as a tax than an actual constraint, and the maths mathed in suh a way that you were probably best off not worrying *too* much about it so long as you build your economy correctly)
There’s probably something about human psychology there (like people overvaluing free stuff)
I’ve heard similar things about RPGs. If you have a certain value as “neutral” for stats (i.e., anything above it gives bonuses, while anything below it gives penalties), a lit of players will set their “dump” stats exactly to the neutral value, and no lower.
This whole idea of the “Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht”, as featured here, seems to be arguing with a strawman, namely that the Wehrmacht had nothing at all to do with the atrocities. Of course they had some involvement, but that doesn’t mean they were equally culpable; the SS had a far higher degree of culpability than the Wehrmacht.
https://acoup.blog/2026/10/16/teaching-paradox-hearts-of-iron-iv-part-iiib-the-opposite-of-love/#easy-footnote-9-37636
“members of the Wehrmacht [as distinct from the SS] may have constituted a majority of those responsible for mass crimes carried out on the part of the German Reich“
Given that the Heer (Army) consistently outnumbered the Waffen SS to a considerable degree, if we only had the above statement to go on it would be entirely plausible to say that members of the Wehrmacht made up a majority of those who committed war crimes AND that the percentage of Wehrmacht members who committed war crimes was lower than the percentage of those in the SS who did so.
In fact, looking at the disparity in numbers, if soldiers of the Heer made up only half of the people who committed war crimes and the SS made up the other half, the vast majority of the former would not have committed war crimes.
Heer: 1939: 3,737,000; 1940: 4,550,000; 1941: 5,000,000; 1942: 5,800,000; 1943: 6,550,000; 1944: 6,510,000; 1945: 5,300,000
Waffen–SS: 1939: 35,000; 1940: 50,000; 1941: 150,000; 1942: 230,000; 1943: 450,000; 1944: 600,000; 1945: 830,000
Yes, that’s the part I was responding to. I’d really have to take a look at those sources and their methodology, and how exactly they’re defining involvement in war crimes. I’m guessing that they, like many other proponents of this, consider the Wehrmacht equally culpable for simply being enablers, which is shaky logic. If an armed robbery occurs, both the gunman and the getaway driver are involved and can be charged, but the gunman obviously has a much greater share of responsibility. Likewise, it was the SS who were the main architects and perpetrators of genocide and its attendant atrocities, and the lion’s share of blame goes to them, even if they were dependent on the logistics and organization of the Wehrmacht.
So, your analysis on the failings of HoI and its overall approaches to ideology, warfare, politics and the consequences of their overall interaction gave me two solutions to the full picture for a potential Hearts of Iron V, one that’s minor and another that’s major.
The minor solution, which is based on the mechanics of the Soviet DLC taken to another level, would be to incorporate a delusion penalty based on the ideology of the government in charge.
Now, by delusion I don’t mean a flat penalty of percentage to moral hits when things go wrong unlike what the propaganda says, I mean a case in which depending on how authoritarian a government is, the more likely the player will not be able to have access to accurate information from the get-go, reflecting the inability of the government to get the truth when everyone is afraid of getting shot for saying bad news, which can also lead to technological dead-ends as the governments focus on “wonder weapons” instead of properly managing things like logistics.
While this can be a penalty shared by the communists and fascists, should fascists governments would have an even worse case version of this, reflecting how Umberto Eco noted that, due to the continuous shifting of rhetoric of an enemy that’s too strong and too weak, fascists are constituionally incapable of accurately measure their opponents.
The major solution, which can also tie all of this together in a much greater way, is more straightforward but also much more difficult: increase the scope of the game.
Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis and Victoria all share on a common theme, they are set in a given period of time and simulate each era in its own way, picking its focus before branching thanks to DLC. For Hearts of Iron to surpass the funk it’s stuck in, it also has to expand to encompass another era at full, not just World War Two. That would put the politics back at the forefront while giving a picture of how warfare changed during the Cold War, and how states adapted to that.
If I may be so bold, I would suggest to make the overall scope of the game to start from in either 1901 or 1910, one is marked by the death of queen Victoria, therefore ending the Victorian Era proper, while the second is marked by the death of King Edward VII, a date featured in the book “The Guns of August” as the last time the monarchies of Europe would be around together before World War One deposed many of them. The ending of course would be the either the year 1991, which is the year of the Fall of the Soviet Union or the year 2000, which is the end of the millenia.
I think an overall greater refutation of fascism would be to show how effective governments like the Weimar Republic actually were, and how much all of that wealth was squandered by the Nazis after their takeover, or how Mao’s China was a quagmire from start to finish and Deng Xiaoping’s comparatively more liberal approach allowed it to become the global power it is today.
To what extent could Britain have avoided the Bengal famine, even if they had prioritized preventing it over winning the war and been willing to let the home islands starve in order to do so? Not entirely, I think, given Japanese intentions, so it’s wrong to put the full blame on the British.
I need to know, is Bret praising Valkyria Chronicles for its accurate depiction of Nazis?
“It is an absurd and yet true statement that of most of the popular video games which feature the Second World War, precious few are as honest about the nature of the Nazi regime than the anime-alternate-history-World-War-II-with-magical-girls game Valkyria Chronicles.”
Normally you would assume this is a comedic way to say that the other titles in the genre are bad, but you never know… Sometimes there’s some niche title that is just super accurate at one thing.
Anyone know?
It’s a little bit of both. The Eastern Europan Empire (the Nazi equivalent) is very factionalistic, oppressive, tends to favor wunderwaffe over boring but practical methods of fighting, and goes after a particular ethnic group who everyone dislikes because of a bad thing they supposedly did centuries before the events of the game, generally working them to death in slave labor camps.
However, they aren’t expanding for Lebensraum, aren’t outright genocidal, and are a bit better about actually punishing war crimes.
As I was reading this, I followed one of the Wikipedia image links, of the troopers murdering a Ukrainian Jewish family, wondering how such a photo would have come to be taken and preserved. Was struck by the history of the photo itself, that it was taken by a German (presumably military) photographer, given a fairly bland caption, mailed back to Germany, and intercepted by Polish resistance, with later claims of being a fabrication. Which in its way demonstrates how normalized this was, as well as the discomfort and denial of culpability in the aftermath. It being an “action shot” maybe plays into how striking it is and I think also the denial, because you either argue it’s fake or face up to the proof of families with small children being gunned down in an extremely visceral, immediate manner by German forces.
Hearts of Iron even attempting to communicate that would make it a very very different game. Crusader Kings maybe comes closest, but it is of course very removed from modernity. Untapped potential in strategy games that play off the tension of how the abstraction and organizational distance can lead to justifying atrocity with the human impact of them if we are confronted. I don’t know if a game which really leaned into that the way I think would be most interesting would be fun, and it risks being didactic in the way Spec Ops: the Line was a bit, basically putting you on rails to do war crimes because normal shooter mechanics and then trying to guilt you over it, but i think there’s a way you could handle it with care and nuance without railroading and the result would be an absolute gut punch and incredibly compelling.
Smaller scale, but Frostpunk does this well, where you click “Child Labor” to get more manpower, then later you get an event that a child has died doing a dangerous job because they weren’t old enough to follow safety practices correctly. Pattern reoccurs with a lot of ethically dubious choices. But with the Great Storm closing in, or in game 2 tensions exploding into civil war, there’s a lot of pressure to make hard choices, which makes it all the sweeter when you get good enough to keep everyone alive without getting the “We crossed the line” ending slide.