“As a fan of the series,” one anonymous user wrote on 4chan, “this is a departure in that it takes on pro-communist and anti-white themes from Twitter politics instead of continuing the theme of an over the top fight against a brutal regime. We didn’t need to question why they’d ended up on the wrong end of the shotgun in so many games, movies and comics. We’d all gone to school and learned about the war, and we knew that Nazis were bad. In most games, the Nazis were faceless baddies presented without the context of their beliefs. Unlike most other media, video games avoided the tough ideological questions our ancestors actually confronted during World War II. They wore black, committed genocide and plunged the world into one of the worst wars it has ever known. In video games, as in a lot of other popular culture, Nazis are easy villains. In my 30-plus years on the planet, I must have slaughtered thousands of digital stormtroopers, raided hundreds of Teutonic castles and mercilessly murdered dozens of jackbooted bastards. Pop culture, and especially video games, share part of the blame. For years, we’ve taken it as a given that ideas such as racism and ultra-nationalism were poisonous roads to pain, suffering and war.

In certain corners of the Western world, Nazi ideology is making a comeback.

This article contains spoilers for Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Wolfenstein the new order soldier