By Dr. Frank G. Bosman

We are in the year 1960. The Third Reich has solidified  its political, cultural, and military dominance over Europe and North America since their 1946 victory over the Allied Forces by means of nuclear technology. All Entarteten are rounded up in concentration camps, racial laws rule the world, and only a few members of the Kreisau Circle – Germany’s resistance group – are able and willing to oppose the Nazi rule. Among the Kreisau is William B.J. Blazkowicz, former member of the American army, who survived both Nazi execution and a mental asylum in Poland since his failed attack on one of the Nazis primary research bases in 1946.

Together with his comrades, B.J. infiltrates a secret research lab in Nazi occupied London. Deep inside the facility, the American finds the source of the Nazis’ decades long technological dominance: some ancient parchments written in Hebrew. “Da’at Yichud,” as Blazkowicz casually is able to read. Back in the Kreisau HQ in Berlin, the resistance deduces that the mysterious Da’at Yichud organization has one surviving member, Set Roth, who is currently held prisoner in Belica Work-cum-Concentration Camp, in occupied Kroatia. B.J. volunteers to infiltrate the camp to extract Roth. The American is arrested, transported, tattooed with a serial number, and put to work to aid the Nazi war machinery.

Set Roth agrees to be freed only when B.J. – whom he calls ‘Samson’ – does the same for the rest of the camp. Before Blazkowicz is able to do so, he and Roth witness an execution of a Jewish prisoner by the camp’s leader, Frau Engel. Set Roth knows her and is reverently talking about the strength of her faith. “I can’t believe with such certainty,” he confides to B.J., who replies with “Maybe [God] is testing us.” To which Roth sarcastically remarks: “If He is testing us, we are failing gloriously.” When Roth is back in Berlin, the resistance’s leader, Caroline Becker, interviews him on the Da’at Yichud. “Do you pray?” Becker asks him. Roth denies, explaining the connection between the Da’at Yichud’s tecnology and the Nazis’ victory in 1946:

No, no, mamuhluh [little mama], we do not pray. We invent things, mamuhluh.

The technology developed by Da’at Yichud is centuries ahead of anything

you have ever seen or imagined and highly dangerous in the wrong hands.

The Nazis found our safekeep. They stole our secrets. They used them to win

the war. Everything they have accomplished. Everything was built upon our

knowledge, but . . . it was not our only safekeep. We have hundreds of them

hidden in the secret places of the world. Hundreds. Some small and tentative

like the one the Nazis found. Others . . . great halls of knowledge stacked high.

Magnificent inventions. Things that to you will seem like magic.

Set Roth is clearly Jewish, even though nobody explicitly acknowledge this as such. And the Da’at Yichud organisation consists of the Hebrew words for ‘knowledge’ and ‘unification’, both having their native context in the realm of Jewish mysticism. And the discussion Roth and Blazkowicz are having in Camp Belica touches upon one of the most complex theological questions in existence, the theodicy: how can one believe in an all-powerful and all-loving God if one is confronted with all the horrors and suffering in the world, among which the Holocaust is probably one of the worst.

Wolfenstein video game series

Even more interesting is the fact that the story I have related above is a summary of the plot of a video game, a video game featuring a level taking place in a Nazi concentration camp. And yet even more interesting is the fact that this game is an installment of the famous Wolfenstein series, a series well-known for its love of Nazi occultism. In earlier installments, especially Wolfenstein 3D (1992), one of the most famous video games ever in the history of gaming, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001), the series dabbled into ‘common’ conspiracies surrounding Hitler’s reign, occult and semi-historical organizations like the Thule Society and the Order of the Golden Dawn, secret SS rituals in Schloss Wevelsburg, and religious objects like the Spear of Destiny (also called the Holy Lance), the lance that, according to the New Testament, was used to pierce Jesus’ side on the cross.

In 2014, however, the series took a decisive and dramatic turn with a brand new reboot under the direction of MachineGames developers. Within three years, they released Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014), its prequel Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (2015), and its sequel Wolfenstein II. The New Colossus (2017). The series takes place in an alternative version of written history in which Germany won the Second World War in 1946, changing the course of Western civilization distinctly. Gone are the references to Nazi occultism (expect for some elements in Old Blood). Welcome to the forgotten victims of the Nazi regime, who take revenge in a manner reminiscent of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009). The Kreisau Circle consists of Jews, people with physical and mental disabilities, and Afro-Americans.

The Wolfenstein series has always been criticized for its source material. ‘Nazi glorification,’ some critics said. The same argument one could make against the classic Second World War films of Hollywood like The Longest Day (1962), The Guns of Navarone (1961), or Where Eagles Dare (1968). More pressing is the criticism that games like Wolfenstein focus heavily on the adventurous, ‘glamorous’ side of the Second World War, neglecting the Holocaust and the millions of victims the Nazis slaughtered. The question is of course: how does one include concentration camps and mass execution of Entarteten in a video game, a medium that is still associated with ‘fun’ (even though there are more than enough games that do not qualify as such, like This War of Mine that shows the moral dilemmas inherent to all armed conflicts or Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice that aims to show the player what it is to live in the mind of a neurodivergent person).

Concentration camp

Wolfenstein: The New Order dared to do a thing virtually no other game has done before: the put the player in a Nazi concentration camp – Camp Belica – to be manhandled by prison guards, to be branded like cattle, to loose all individuality, to witness horrors without the possibility to intervene. The inevitable fate of all prisoners, sooner or later, is hinted upon by two other inmates, While grey “snowflakes” descend upon the courtyard, upon the inmates, and upon B.J., they say:

Prisoner #1. Look at all the smoke coming from the chimneys. What are they burning there?

Prisoner #2. What do you think?

Prisoner #1. Well, I don’t know. I mean. (. . .) The world needs to know.

Prisoner #2. The world knows. It just doesn’t care.

It is quite a shocking scene, truth be told. The flakes descending in the courtyard are almost certainly the mortal remains of murdered and incinerated Nazi prisoners. The dialogue between the prisoners also points out the perhaps even more disturbing historical fact that the Holocaust was certainly not at the top of the Allied Forces’ list in their strategic maneuvers against Hitler, to say the least. The Holocaust could proceed virtually unchecked, even though ‘the world’ more or less knew what was happening in the camps, or at least the Allied leadership did.

Of course, a game being a game, the player knows he/she will be able to escape and being in a concentration camp virtually is no match whatsoever to a real-life one. But the game takes Jews seriously as the prime victims of historical Nazism. Set Roth is clearly a Jewish character and the Da’at Yichud – even though it is described as religious but non-denominational organisation – is also clearly a reference to Jewish mysticism, especially the ten Sephirot, the ten emanations between God-in-itself and the created world. The game Wolfenstein II explicitly mentions the Sefer Yetzirah (‘The book of creation’), one of the core works of kabbalist lore, even though it was only identified as such later in history, when self-identifying kabbalists – both Jewish and Christian – started to write commentaries.

Fascinated by both the Wolfenstein series – I am a video game player since childhood – and by the theological themes especially the reboot games incorporate, I have published a dedicated monograph, titled Nazi Occultism, Jewish Mysticism, and Christian Theology in the Video Game Series Wolfenstein. I discuss Nazi glorification, Nazi esoterism (Ariosphy) and Nazi occultism, but also Jewish mysticism and Kabbala. I analyse all games from the franchise looking for traces of Jewish and Christian traditions. And I argue that since the player’s avatar – Blazkowicz – is Jewish, it makes the player, who is entangled with the avatar – also a bit Jewish. And this alters the reboot’s narrative considerably.

Dr. Frank G. Bosman is assistant professor cultural theology at the Tilburg School of Catholic Theology. His earlier works include: Video games as art. A communication-oriented perspective on the relationship between gaming and art, together with Archibald van Wieringen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022) and Gaming and the Divine. A New Systematic Theology of Video Games (London: Routledge, 2019).