I saw their naked skeletal bodies standing upright, bones clearly visible through paper-thin flesh, and I saw the horrific piles those bodies made when they were stuffed into mass graves. Of the captive Jews, lined up behind barbed wire in their baggy prison uniforms adorned with Juden stars. I saw photos of the ovens and the showers. For that class, education took the form of direct exposure: We watched documentary after documentary. We didn't have much reading to do, or many lectures to sit through. I was 12 at the time, and one of my classes focused entirely on the Holocaust. This is a subject I became intimately familiar with during my final year of Hebrew school.
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It's such a reductive representation of a moment when an estimated 17 million lives were snuffed out - including roughly two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population, plus members of other groups deemed as "inferior" by the Nazis. On the other hand, Red's dialogue during that cutscene really cuts me to my core.
So on that count, I appreciate Sledgehammer's treatment for not trying to shoehorn something in purely for the shock value. Given the story that was written for WWII, such a creative decision frankly would have been unearned.
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On the one hand, it's very challenging to justify turning a Nazi concentration camp into a video game level, especially in a first-person shooter like Call of Duty.ģ8 words represent the full extent of Call of Duty: WWII's acknowledgment of the Holocaust. There's real dissonance between the tone of the preceding cutscene and the dialogue you hear as they explore the camp.Įven now, it's hard to zero in on where my feelings about this treatment fall. camp, and they react to the horrors - which, to be clear, is brutal living conditions and a handful of corpses, two of them evidently executed by firing squad - as if it's the worst thing they've seen. Worse: The rest of the epilogue sends Red and his squad into a P.O.W. The word, "Holocaust," never comes up, and the people that were the focus of Adolf Hitler's genocidal "Final Solution" gets not even a mention. Those 38 words represent the full extent of Call of Duty: WWII's acknowledgment of the Holocaust.
But one thing is for certain: What I saw stayed with me forever." "I thought I knew what cruelty was I didn't know anything. "After leaving the bridge on our mission east, we searched camps along the way," Red says. It's during this period, as we learn in the cutscene, that they came face to face with the gravest horrors of World War II. After you finish the final mission, the timeline skips ahead to April 1945, one month shy of the Allies declaring victory in Europe.Īs we learn in a voiceover-driven cutscene, Red and his squad have followed Zussman's trail to a P.O.W. It's not until the epilogue that Zussman's story is resolved.
That moment shapes your journey through the final stretch of the campaign: Red wants to rescue his friend, but there's still a war to be fought. The emotional heart of the story isn't evident until much later, when Red's squad is cornered and Zussman ends up in the hands of Nazi captors. For most of the game, a concrete narrative arc is eschewed in favor of developing the main characters and their relationships against the backdrop of different combat engagements while World War II marches on.
The campaign tracks Red, Zussman, and their squad as they fight across Europe during World War II, starting with the D-Day landing at Normandy Beach. Among the men you serve with is Robert Zussman, a scrappy German Jew from Chicago and your wartime bestie. It's basically Saving Private Ryan, in video game form.Ī quick recap: You play as Ronald "Red" Daniels, a member of the "Fighting" 1st Infantry Division. WWII's story mode is mostly focused on the bonds forged between soldiers in the fires of live combat. The campaign mode has its own issues, but at least this is a World War II game that acknowledges the Holocaust as something that happened. Let's be clear: Sledgehammer Games didn't wholly fuck it up. Activision's new patent makes it easy to exploit online gamers for their cash
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