'Call of Duty: WWII' takes one step forward, many steps back in its handling of the Holocaust
SPOILER ALERT: This post contains plot details from the ending and epilogue in Call of Duty: WWII.
Maybe there are places that certain games should never really go.
I've been struggling to gather my thoughts on Call of Duty: WWII and its handling of the Holocaust since I completed the campaign last week. It's a tough topic, and one that Call of Duty -- for all its past trips to the World War II setting -- has never tackled until this game.
Maybe that's for the best.
Let's be clear: Sledgehammer Games didn't wholly fuck it up. 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.
The bar here is wretchedly low.
WWII's story mode is mostly focused on the bonds forged between soldiers in the fires of live combat. It's basically Saving Private Ryan, in video game form.
The bar here is wretchedly low.
A quick recap: You play as Ronald "Red" Daniels, a member of the "Fighting" 1st Infantry Division. Among the men you serve with is Robert Zussman, a scrappy German Jew from Chicago and your wartime bestie.
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. 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 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. 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.
It's not until the epilogue that Zussman's story is resolved. After you finish the final mission, the timeline skips ahead to April 1945, one month shy of the Allies declaring victory in Europe.
As we learn in a voiceover-driven cutscene, Red and his squad have followed Zussman's trail to a P.O.W. camp. 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.
See for yourself:
"After leaving the bridge on our mission east, we searched camps along the way," Red says. "I thought I knew what cruelty was; I didn't know anything. But one thing is for certain: What I saw stayed with me forever."
That's it. Those 38 words represent the full extent of Call of Duty: WWII's acknowledgment of the Holocaust. 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.
Worse: The rest of the epilogue sends Red and his squad into a P.O.W. 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. There's real dissonance between the tone of the preceding cutscene and the dialogue you hear as they explore the camp.
Even now, it's hard to zero in on where my feelings about this treatment fall. 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.
38 words represent the full extent of Call of Duty: WWII's acknowledgment of the Holocaust.
Given the story that was written for WWII, such a creative decision frankly would have been unearned. So on that count, I appreciate Sledgehammer's treatment for not trying to shoehorn something in purely for the shock value.
On the other hand, Red's dialogue during that cutscene really cuts me to my core. 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.
This is a subject I became intimately familiar with during my final year of Hebrew school. I was 12 at the time, and one of my classes focused entirely on the Holocaust. We didn't have much reading to do, or many lectures to sit through. For that class, education took the form of direct exposure: We watched documentary after documentary.
I saw photos of the ovens and the showers. Of the captive Jews, lined up behind barbed wire in their baggy prison uniforms adorned with Juden stars. 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.
I saw so much more than that, too.
It was powerful, and it's stuck with me ever since. I'm fortunate to have never known such horrors firsthand, but seeing this living record of what happened drove home the reality of something that, I think for a lot of people today, is an indistinct horror story from the distant past.
For me, though, it's an impossible thing to forget.
That's why I can relate to Red's line: "What I saw stayed with me forever." But a single sentence and an artist-drawn "photo" fails to convey anything of value to someone who doesn't haul around the same personal baggage that I do.
I had a different take when I started writing all of this out. Call of Duty: WWII felt like a win to me in that the developers had at least acknowledged the Holocaust without trying to exploit it for unearned thrills. But re-watching the end of the game and meditating on that cutscene and the events that occur thereafter, I no longer feel that way.
As difficult as it might be to engage with something like the Holocaust, and as much as an epilogue cutscene isn't the right place for an in-depth history lesson, nothing about Sledgehammer's treatment feels respectful or genuine. It glosses over this terrible real-life event with not even the barest mention of the victims or what they went through.
Call of Duty: WWII had the easiest job in the world -- portray Nazis as the ghoulish, racist villains they were -- and it came up mind-bogglingly short.
The game's gutless acknowledgment of the Holocaust may be a step forward for Call of Duty games, but oh, what a sorry, shallow, short step it is.
Topics Gaming
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
