First, when we talk about the strategy game- the discussion of the morality of a game like Panzer General doesn’t hinge on judging the players. It hinges on the game itself. Does the game do right by, or wrong by, the memory and the reality of what happened during this era or this war? It’s far too common in this sort of discussion for people to wind up deflecting discussion of the game into “well, this doesn’t make people who play the game into bad people!” And they’re right; it does not. The heart of the discussion is precisely about the effect of the game and how it potentially shapes the thought processes of a person who is not somehow intrinsically bad when they start playing and likely won’t be intrinsically bad when they stop.

Second, when we talk about the historical Nazis- remember that we are not discussing foot soldiers drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1942 after a stint in the Hitler Youth as teenagers. We are discussing generals, administrators, diplomats. Men mostly born before 1900. Men who had grown up in the constitutional monarchy of the Kaiser’s Germany. Men whose first exposure to the concepts of warfare as schoolboys would be history stretching back to Napoleon, with norms of not willfully massacring civilian populations, not indoctrination crafted by Goebbels to turn them into Nazi doom-troopers. Men with educations, in their maturity and their old age, with time to form confident beliefs of their own. Men who had experienced the First World War and the sheer appalling scale of industrialized death and conflict.

These are men who should have known better, by any reasonable standard, than to think that turning a continent and a half into a charnel-house was in any way an acceptable prize to pay for the aggrandizement of the ‘German race.’

Furthermore, these are not men who simply served passively. We are, again, talking about leaders, administrators, generals. Men who were not just following orders, but also giving them, whose explicit job within the Third Reich was to use their full ingenuity and all their waking hours to maximize the extent to which Hitler’s orders and designs could be carried out.