Kratenser said:
I dont think its for any of us to say whether its right or wrong to use the holocaust as a basis for a game. Maybe it would make things clearer, and give a better understanding of the holocaust to many people. BUT, considering how many people died in the holocaust, going near the subject is bound to bring up emotion in people. You can't win either way here.
Well, it's a touchy subject due to the simple fact that the facts of the Holocaust are in such doubt. While there is no doubt that a lot of people died, it's one of those situations where the very accusation entails a serious lack of proof as to the extent of the actual fatalities.
Before you scream, look at it this way:
The accusation is that The Concentration Camps were hugely efficient murder factories, where Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals were taken from cattle cars, stripped naked, sent in for a "shower" which was actually a gas chamber. The gassed bodies were then removed from the chamber, had intristic valuables like teeth fillings removed from them, and then were cremated in mass ovens.
The problem with this story is that there are people who survived this, and what's more were permanantly marked with Tattoos. This begs the question of how there are any people who survived these camps, or why there would be any kind of permanant marking system employed if they were murder factories and nobody was expected to survive long enough for it to be a factor.
The idea of a concentration camp is terrifying, and the details of the efficiency with which this thing was carried out enhance that terror, but the very existance of survivors to remember this kind of thing puts reasonable doubt on the stories. What's more one has to understand that this was a REAL war which means the USA propaganda factory was in full swing. A lot of outlandish stories were told about the Nazis, ranging from them making lampshades out of human skin, to having mobile bone grinding devices. A goodly portion of those stories were disproven (the lampshades being displayed were revealed to be goat skin if I remember). Did our own propaganda department lie about, or exagerrate the situation? It becomes a valid question to ask.
I'm not a holocaust denier, but I am someone with a lot of questions about these events, and those questions have never seen a satisfactory answer (and I've done some checking). As pro-Isreal as I am, it seems to me that there is a lot of effort made to prevent people from looking too closely at this situation, and that certainly doesn't help matters. I'm of the opinion that it's been long enough since the war ended, and any propaganda is no longer serving a useful purpose, where it's perfectly fine to address the subject in the media, in fiction, and of course look into the facts a bit more closely.
Ironically, my motivation that lead to thinking this way comes from being a militant. As I say in other threads, I don't believe there is such a thing as a moral war. World War II is used as an example of one, but when you look into it and what happened with The Volkssturm, Hitler Youth, and the information presented by our own War Department, it's pretty obvious we were a bigger group of bastards in the end than our enemy, which is why we won. I point to these methods as examples of what needs to be done to win wars, and as examples of why while the USA's military has never been defeated, we have also failed to actually win any wars (barring things like Grenada) since. Our lack of propaganda, information control, and general ruthlessness being a big part of what handicaps us during "The War On Terror". For me the big issue with The Holocaust being exagerrated is not one of Jewish people exploiting it, but the point in the lengths we have gone (and should go to) to demonize an enemy in a time of war.
At any rate, the issue is of course with so many vested interests in these events, any facts being truely nailed down is going to affect someone's interests. I don't think emotions over the deeds themselves are an issue, because by now we've all heard what happened millions of times, seen graphic dramatizations of it, and I remember there was even a website running that showed "actual surveillance footage" of people being herded through the gates of a concentration camp (which may or may not still be running). There isn't much more to be said about the purpoted atrocities, because there are only so many ways you can talk about how evil it is to gas people in massive numbers, everyone has gotten the point by now. I'm more interested in the survivors and questions like "how are you alive, if all of this was true" combined with "why were you tattooed if you were to be rapidly disposed of?", some skeptical fact checking of differant stories is also somewhat warrented nowadays as well. Apparently there were plenty of survivors, and that means "one in a billion" luck based survival stories raise questions if *all* of them got away that way, etc...
