While a Nazi military armed with advanced technology is certainly scary, the world that they have created is much more disturbing. While exploring the sewers near the resistance HQ, you can overhear a woman reporting her neighbor's son to the police for "deviant behavior"... since she saw him trying on his mother's lipstick!
And while all the various vinyl albums of covered pop songs are certainly amusing, almost all of them have some kind of political message. Tapferer Kleiner Liebling by Karl & Karla, a seemingly harmless love song, ends with the male narrator going of to war. Berlin Boys and Stuttgart Girls by Viktor & Die Vokalisten have lyrics that promotes German nationalism. While Toe The Line by The Bunkers is the only exception to the rule, containing a subtle anti-authoritarian message of the terror living under the regime and how everyone has to "toe the line". As BJ himself put it, this might very well be a world in which nothing left is worth saving.
In one scene, B.J. is forced to take a "purity" test by Frau Engel and her consort, who determine him to be perfectly Aryan at a glance. Of course, since B.J is an American of Polish descent (and Jewish on his mother's side, according to Word of God), he doesn't live up to the Nazi idea of the Master Race. There is a sense of dread throughout the sequence, deliberately invoked by Frau Engel - her intention is to cause people to lose their nerve, go for her gold-plated Luger, and promptly get shot in the face by her guard robot. Theoretically, only non-Aryans would have cause to lose their cool. Theoretically.
The day that B.J. well and truly wakes up and regains control of his body, the Nazis come in to close the place down after years and years of taking patients to apparently be experimented on. While they don't harm the staff (at first) they take care of the inmates by shooting them. The subsequent level as B.J. escapes is littered with the bodies of mental patients butchered in their rooms, and dead staff that may have tried to fight back. What makes it even worse is that it takes place during the day and the interior of the building is bright and warm and friendly, making the bloodshed all the more nightmarish.
Before that, the player is treated to the sight of mental patients being hauled off in shackles to be used as guinea pigs in Deathshead's vile experiments. This would be horrifying enough, but after the Nazis leave, one of the remaining patients lets out an utterly blood-curdling scream of pain and sorrow.
The scene in the "Nowhere to Run" trailer showing that fouls in football are now punished by summary execution (for non-Aryans, at least - the ref and the injured player are both German, while the executed player is a dark-skinned Brazilian) is a pretty horrific example of Nazi cruelty.
The entire concentration camp level. Subtract the Diesel Punk elements, and it's a fairly accurate portrayal of how these camps functioned (except there are no capos, and they keep men and women together in the same barracks). Special mention goes to the intro, where B.J. is herded out of a train with other prisoners, cattle-style, while Frau Engel looks on - before snatching a baby out of the hands of one prisoner, and dangling it by the ankles, presumably killing it off-screen. This does make freeing all the prisoners and killing nearly every Nazi in the camp with a hijacked Mini-Mecha very, VERY satisfying, however.
During one of the scenes, Blazkowicz mumbles about other similar concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Yes, places such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald, notorious for being some of the most extreme examples of all Nazis' concentration camps, where allegedly more than 1 million people were killed in Auschwitz and also the place where Anne Frank (in our real world) met her demise alone. And judging from how the Nazis still operate such camps until 1960, you'd be more than terrified of how effective these camps are and if there are any survivors left from such places.
That Mini-Mecha looks like it has a winch attached to a mobile furnace.
Prisoner: Nobody knows his name. Everybody knows his knife.
From the same level, Frau Engel getting her jaw crushed by her own robot. Karmic? Absolutely. Doesn't mean we needed to see it close up, thanks. She also says some very creepy things right in your face when she gets back up.
Frau Engel: For your crime, you will die like vermin. I will hunt you down. At the end of the earth, I will find you. Your skin charred and your fats rendered. Your kind exterminated. In the end, I will feed your flesh to the furnace!
Then, the hijacked robot flings her off a cliff, and It's tempting to think that the fall killed her. That we've finally gotten rid of this sick, abominable monster of a woman. but the fun is not over yet. For some reason Frau Engel survived the fall, apparently none the worse for wear, except from the absolutely horrifyingjaw wounds, of course, which completed the perfect Nightmare Face she gave Bombate when she stood in front of the car he drove, saying "No one leaves my camp!" and started shooting at him and the two other escapees from a point blank range with two assault rifles, one in each hand. Bombate somehow survives this]], but it still manages to be one of the most terrifying moments in the game.
Despite its extreme over-the-topness, dieselpunk flair, and old school shooter hijinks, the game as a whole is a disturbingly realistic glimpse of life under Nazi rule. Whereas other World War II games like to focus on frontline combat and really just use the Nazis as something to shoot at, Wolfenstein actually has the guts to focus on how horrifying the Nazi ideology truly was, including such things as social Darwinism, genocide, eugenics, and human experimentation, all of which are showcased in game.
The machinations of the Nazis, particularly the Ubersoldaten and Panzerhunds, are nigh-unstoppable forces for almost every human being that isn't B.J., and even he has to avoid the latter due to usually not being armed or ready to fight one directly early on. Not to mention the implications of just how many of these things were created to subjugate the world. Then you encounter an underground chamber filled with dormant Ubersoldaten practically a stone's throw away from the resistance base. Left behind in an abandoned hall. Just waiting for the unwary explorer to awaken them from their long slumber.
The now notorious incinerator room sequence.
Oberstgruppenführer Wilhelm "Deathshead" StrasseHIMSELF! For his third and final appearance in the series, MachineGames went and turned him into a truly terrifying villain. Dwight Schultz gives possibly one of the most chilling voice performances of his career.
On that note, Strasse's ghoulish experiments. The flashback to the aforementioned incinerator room where you watch Fergus/Wyatt having his skull drilled open and his brain literally sucked into a jar while still conscious the whole time can be... difficult to watch. The fact that Deathshead has an automated machine specifically for this procedure implies a nauseating level of human suffering required to test and perfect it.
The game even tricks you several times before this by never showing the actual removal until this moment. The machine they strap Wyatt or Fergus to makes in incision on the victim's back to free up the spinal column, then it carves out a chunk of the back of their head to get at the skull and once the hole is made... It's arguable which timeline is worse since you can tell Fergus is barely keeping it together and Wyatt is screaming in fear all the way until his brain comes out.
His first appearance in the game. Hearing a knocking on the other side of a locked door, Wyatt and B.J. go to investigate. The window is opened from the other side to reveal Deathshead, inches from the glass, with an unblinking stare and a smile a little bit too broad to be normal. He continues to hold this expression even as the walls begin to close in...
Deathshead: "What are you people doing in there?"
The man was already an Evil Genius and the prior games showed up the former. It's just that in this series, his monstrosity is on display front and center.
Hell, his theme in the soundtrack is a musical version of this, as it's almost entirely made of Hell Is That Noise sounds. It sounds like screaming. Electronic, distorted screaming.
Going to the moon is impressive. Setting up a moon base is a powerful statement of mankind's capabilities, and real-life space missions have been rooted in the desire to learn more about our universe and avoid nuclear war. Hearing about the Nazi moon-base can almost give you the feeling that maybe - just maybe - the Nazis actually did something good, or at least respectable. Before you get off the shuttle, you see a newspaper article about how they're already planning to start a labor camp on the moon, complete with robotic guards, from which escape would be totally impossible - and given how all the loyal personnel on the base end up asphyxiated in an attempt to catch you, you can assume they'd be even more trigger-happy with the prisoners if one actually managed to cause any trouble. And then there's the little fact that it's the nucleus of their space conquest plans, complete with an army of Space Marines, next-gen Super Soldiers, and storehouse nuclear weapon control codes. That's right, they managed to pervert a moon base from a symbol of peace, hope and discovery into one of militarism, hopelessness and oppression.
The trend of perverting symbols of unity and peace into engines of oppression continues with their construction of a bridge across the Strait of Gibraltar. It sounds like an amazing achievement, connecting Europe and Africa, opening up even more possibilities for trade, travel, and communication between the two sides. Here though, it's the main artery to the African front, where the Nazis are slowly but surely bulldozing their way across the continent, slaughtering everyone and everything in their path. And the bridge itself? Built at the cost of thousands of slave laborers.
Towards the end of the game as you are rampaging through Deathshead's fortress as you go to climb up a ladder only to have Bubi leap out at you like a tiger and pump you full of some unidentified sedative. As the poison kicks in and B.J finds himself unable to walk or even move, Bubi taunts you by going into great detail about the sedative slowly stripping him of all his motor faculties, eventually leaving B.J just a non-responsive sack of flesh and bone. When Frau Engel appears on a computer screen, Bubi then disproves any thoughts you might have had about him and B.J when he pulls out a meat hook and impales you through the shoulder, dragging you along the floor and propping you up on the table as he begins to gut you alive for him and Engel's mutual pleasure! And he doesn't just stab you; you can actually hear and see him begin pulling the knife downwards before the sedative wears of, due to the shrapnel lodged in B.J's head. And after that B.J bites his ear off, slowly pulls the knife out of his chest as he towers above Bubi and then proceeds to Double Tap him in the head as Frau Engel hopelessly looks on and screams in dismay as her boyfriend is murdered by B.J. or bleeds out from the wound in his neck.
When you finally catch up to Wilhem "Deathshead" Strasse, there's just one thing standing between you and him...a prototype of his next generation of cyborg soldiers, which is, in the mad scientist's own words:
More specifically, it's a literalBrain in a Jar that's been plugged into a heavily-armored robot chassis, its numerous processes serving as an efficient CPU for the war machine's attack protocols. What's worse, the brain of the subject is still alive, and aware of the whole thing. It's almost exactly like what happened to the villainous drug dealer Cain in RoboCop 2, but unlike Cain, they've got no control over their actions, and there's no hope for them to return to a normal life. The only thing that can be done is put them out of their misery.
And the worst part? The brain in question belongs to whomever of your old squad you were forced to select when Strasse forced you into a Sadistic Choice, and they've been trapped in this horrible existence for at least 14 years!
And if that weren't enough, look closely and you'll see your comrade's brain was just one of at least dozens more that Strasse had kept in his possession, ready to subject them to similar horrors at his own leisure. It makes the destruction of both him and his death lair all the more complete, ensuring that no others would be subjected to such a fate.
Even after you've finished off Strasse, there's still one little detail: the scientist-turned-warlord manages to grab Blazkowicz by the wrist, wheezing out his last words in a chilling laugh as he pops the pin on a live grenade!
Anya reads entries from her cousin Ramona's who is implied to be Anya herself diary, some of which deal with her becoming pregnant by a Nazi and having to figure out an abortion method on her own. She tries pills but "They did not work. All they did was make me sick," and eventually Pennyroyal oil which a friend had used before. It works, but her diary entry the day after taking it simply reads "Pain unbearable. Won't stop bleeding." and it takes her 6 days to recover.
After B.J. is brought to the asylum, we get to see the Nazis hauling off mental patients in shackles to be used as Deathshead's personal human experimentation subjects. It is horrendous upon realizing that the Nazis can easily haul any mental patients they need without much hitch even from the asylum's own staffs, so much that B.J. comments the whole thing as "Deathshead's personal candy store".
Despite being a Nazi who takes mental patients away to be experimented on, Commander Keller gets one of these. After liquidating the mental hospital, Keller is discovered and captured by what he thought was a mentally deficient subhuman and tied to a chair. After a brief Hope Spot where he escapes and stabs B.J. he is brutally beaten and tied up again. B.J. now has what would ordinarily be a comically oversized chainsaw, starts it up and gets within seconds of decapitating him before he breaks and answers his questions. The look on Keller's face shows just how terrified he is and that he's probably just wet himself with fear. After giving B.J. what he wants, Keller starts screaming about how the Nazis know about B.J. and Anya and when they are recaptured they will be on their knees. B.J. just snarls and fires up the chainsaw with a fade to black. Later in the game you can find a newspaper clipping saying his headless body was found in a river.
, a seemingly harmless love song, ends with the male narrator going of to war. Berlin Boys and Stuttgart Girls by Viktor & Die Vokalisten
