It's worse than that. Hitler's entire economic plan relied on heavily burrowing money from other countries with the intent to pay it back with money plundered from conquered nations.

As for the people having better lives, well, not really. Earnings increased for workers but mainly from working even longer hours. The actual hourly wage fell on the level of the Great Depression. And due to less imported goods, consumer products like food and clothing also had to be rationed.

Who was better off by a lot however were large cartels and monopolies crushing small businesses thanks to the eridications of unions and, later, forced labor in the concentration camps.

So, while the (war) economy did boom, that didn't really translate to better lives for common people (even before the war started).

Indeed, they made plenty of mistakes, otherwise they would have won the war.

But it's less about whether they could have sustained their empire afterward and more people trying to say that portraying them as such is "glorifying" them or propping them up in some sort of idealistic way.

You're misunderstanding the argument, but that's just the nature of brief forum exchanges.

Think of it as a continuous depiction of the Nazis as hyper-competent or full of geniuses unintentionally playing into the supremacy narrative, even when Joe Everyman is gunning them down. I don't agree that Wolfenstein is pro-Nazi but it is a factor in public perception that creators need to consider when repeated in a hundred different games or movies.

Even just repeating things like "At least Mussolini made the trains run on time" plays into it, especially when it's a lie, just like the Wunderwaffe programs or the Nazi "miraculous economic recovery" which was just making people work longer hours and deficit spending.

But their while point was that they were super-smarties who made shit through communion with God directly, and the devices they made weren't to be used

They're an ancient Jewish group yes, but otherwise nothing at all like Hitler's cabal bullshit and way closer to something like an ancient "secret cult", made Jewish because it's a series about the Nazis and them only winning due to Jewish technology (and also losing eventually because of it) is part of the catharsis of the whole thing

I read them a lot more like a group of ancient nerds. Which describes Jewish people pretty well if the friends ive had in the faith are anything to go by

I guess I kinda get your point but it feels so explicitly cathartic to make what IRL we credit to Nazis usually (in media their magic is usually them diving sadistically into what others won't, for example) that I think it's the opposite of tone deaf

It's worth it for the story alone (both main games since the reboot). Such a wild collection of outrageous twists and turns, but with characters that you actually care about. They managed to write a main protagonist who - in between eviscerating Nazi mechas and blowing up secret bases while using improbable tech - is actually an emotionally vulnerable human being. This is such a stroke of genius that suddenly makes the entire scenario so much more believable and the story so much more impactful, because he and many of the other characters feel like real human beings, despite the almost exuberant embracing of clichés (only to then tear them up). It's still campy as all hell, but it somehow works. I don't think I've ever seen games juggle so many different balls without dropping any of them. Even if you don't care about any of that, the shooting alone is second only to the recent DOOM reboots.

I randomly played the first cause it was on psplus and I got hooked. I really liked this new series and want more

Almost correct, but artistic depictions of Nazi iconography actually are exempt from the ban (falling under "Kunstfreiheit" - artistic freedom).

The reason why Wolfenstein still had to be censored was because video games were not really seen as a form of art for quite a long time. But AFAIK that has fortunately changed in the last years and you can now legally obtain uncensored Wolfenstein versions in Germany.

Wonder if that's harmful in the long run, cause you're not allowed to make the bad guys look like what they were, bad guys.

Justifying the murder of someone by dehumanizing them is exactly what the nazis did. It's what Israel is doing in Gaza, etc., calling everyone Hamas and dehumanizing them. Nazis may be terrible people who need to be fought against and whose ideology needs to be stopped, but it's never good to start dehumanizing groups of people over any criteria. All that said I love playing Wolfenstein and Indiana Jones games and killing hordes of nazis.

"> Murder is a crime. And it’s bad. (crime doesn’t necessarily mean bad, see Adolf Hitler for more details)

Jews don’t count, all you’re doing is cleaning up the trash."

🤔