"Co-pilot dead! Shrapnel in the leg and I'm bleeding out. 71 souls in the hold. I don't know what to do! I don't know what to do..."
The entire prologue mission counts as this. Being sent on the last desperate attempt from the Allied Forces to mount an aerial assault on Deathshead's compound, suffering immense casualties from left and right as they are being curb-stomped by the superior enemy, and ultimately losing...
The chatter between Fergus and the OSA Command on Wyatt's plane is no better. Upon realizing the murderous weight of the situation, Fergus all but demands Allied Command abort the operation given that the operation's forces have been easily slaughtered down by the Nazi army. The response? The OSA Command refuses, telling them that they must continue their attack despite the obvious losses, stating that this was Allied Forces' last chance to take down Deathshead. If they lose now, they lose the war, pure and simple. The situation was desperate enough that even the Allied high command had to order their forces to stay the very much futile course.
Some of B.J.'s inner monologues, particularly as he spends 14 years in an insane asylum...
Strange sensation, trapped in my body. I black out, I'm losing time. Sometimes seasons change in the blink of an eye. I'm...having trouble with my thoughts. They dissipate like a scent on the wind...
As he stands above the corpses of Anya's parents and the dead patients nearby after he kills the Nazi that murdered them and the patients that happened to be in the room.
"No one should be made to die like this."
Before this, he watched Anya's father get forced into the same Sadistic Choice repeatedly over the course of 14 years - either sign over patients to Deathshead, or he and his family would personally suffer the consequences. In the end the asylum gets shut down anyway and in a fit of rage, Doctor Oliwa attacks the Nazi officers on site...he and his wife pay the price for it.
His reaction to how the Nazis changed the world.
"Is there anything in this world worth saving?"
Even the otherwise hilarious Nightmare level becomes this with BJ's intro line:
"Dreaming. Strange dreams. The killing never stops. 'Til I die."
When B.J. and Anya first arrive at her grandparents house, B.J. drags Keller out of the trunk to receive a slap-down from Anya's grandma. While funny, this scene manages to be at the same time heartbreaking as you hear Olenka break down into some truly horrific sobs whilst awkwardly but ragingly slapping Keller about. You can really feel her despair and anger coming through due to some triple-A voice-acting.
This is followed up by B.J. learning that not only has he been in a coma for fourteen long years passing in the blink of an eye from his perspective, but the Nazis won - and the United States of America surrendered to an "atom bomb", which he likely doesn't even comprehend the sheer power of at that point in time. All the while B.J. just stares at Anya's grandparents in bewilderment, sadness and horror at the fact that all of his efforts up to this point were for naught, his face having what little idealistic naivete he had left falling away.
B.J's heartbreaking Thousand-Yard Stare as he's Forced to Watch either Fergus or Wyatt being vivisected by Deathshead after being forced to choose which one for him. Much later (fourteen years later) after B.J's rescues the survivor, they suffer a breakdown, agonizes over mistakes made over fourteen years still fighting, including the death of Prendergast, and angrily tells B.J. he should have saved the other one. Wyatt feels Fergus could have led them better, and Fergus feels like Wyatt could have given the Circle a future that he can't due to his growing age.
B.J.: I made the wrong choice?
Wyatt: You made a stupid choice, yes you did! You put a boy in charge of a man's work!!! I should have died that day on that slab, Captain, and Fergus Reid should have lived!
Fergus: Well, that's fucking obvious, isn't it? I was ready to die, I'd have done it gladly! I worked my ass off to save that boy, Blazkowicz, and you fucking pissed it away on a whim.
This is followed by them telling B.J. to Get Out!!
Going back to the hideout in Chapter 7 following Bobby's Heroic Sacrifice has a letter he'd written to his (long-dead) wife and daughter tucked under his pillow. The next time you're at the hideout, you find the last letter he'd received from his wife.
The entirety of Chapter 15. HQ is in flames, Anya, Set, and Bombate have been captured by Frau Engel. The music doesn't help much matters either. Let's talk about what else happens, shall we?
If Fergus was saved at the start: Tekla's death. Thanks to her smarts, she's been able to calculate the exact time, date and how many Nazis she will take with her before her death. After B.J. meets up with her, he attempts to Tekla to come along but she declines because she feels that You Can't Fight Fate. But her last words are what really hurts.
Tekla: I am glad. To have found a friend.
If Wyatt was saved at the start: J's death is a mix of this and awesome. He knows he's never to escape the horrors of the world and for all his life, he had to be quiet. But in his final moments, he decides to say "Screw it" and blare the Star Spangled Banner for all of Berlin to hear. It even makes the very concrete shake!
J: This moment. Right now. It's gonna be LOUD...
The final letter you're able to find in the base because it's being sacked is a weird cross between this and Funny - it's in Max's room, and simply has "MAX" repeated all over the page.
The immense amount of art collected and saved from the Nazi's that you see all over the HQ is lost. Burned to ashes.
Klaus meeting his end. Despite his less than picture perfect past and standoffish attitude towards B.J., his parting words to his adoptive son Max are heartbreaking.
Klaus: I wish ...you could see. The strength within you.
Made only worse when you listen to his last words, they are about how he is alone in the world, about how everyone is alone, and Max must fight now, use the strength he has to help change things, it gives the impression that Klaus never figured he would be going towards a world free from the Nazis.
In chapter 7, you find out that Klaus' family fell afoul of the Nazi eugenics program, as their son (a "miracle" in and of himself) was born with a club foot - when the Secret Police arrived, Klaus and his wife tried to fight back, earning his wife a bullet to the head.
Remember Milo, the man who you reunited with his wife after they escaped the Belica labor camp? You can find their corpses on a mattress on the second floor of HQ, with a pistol by their side suggesting they both took the easy way out.
B.J. and Anya's final moment together. Even though they love each other, there's no way either of them can live normal, peaceful lives as long as there are Nazis to kill, and B.J. has all but accepted that he will likely die in the upcoming battle against Deathshead, and Anya will be taking up his knives in the war to come.
Anya: I believe there are still places on this earth where people can go. And live happy.
The whole fight against Deathshead's prototype robot, which is piloted by the brain of whomever you sacrificed at the very beginning of the game, either Wyatt or Fergus.
You also get to hear a final line of dialogue from Fergus/Wyatt, directly before BJ's parting words.
BJ: Fergus/Wyatt...you in there?
Fergus: Blazkowicz. A nightmare, this. Trapped in this damned machine. Got no control of my actions. End this. Please. Let me die.
Wyatt: Captain. I tried. So sorry I shot at you. I have no control over my actions. Cannot live like this. You have to put an end to it.
The ending of the game. B.J. has finally trapped Deathshead, dragged him out of the wreckage of the Mech suit the villain was piloting and is stabbing the man when suddenly Deathshead detonates a hand grenade, ripping a chunk of B.J's leg off. Alone and with a rainstorm pouring down, B.J. drags himself to the edge of the roof to make sure that his friends have reached the escape helicopters.
B.J.: (Watching as Anya escorts the prisoners onto the helicopter) A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name - Mother of Exiles. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me." Fergus/Wyatt: Blazko? Do you read?/Can you hear me Captain? Am I clear to fire? B.J.: You're clear.
The song itself states that the singer believes in all the good and pure things that make life worth it, but she can't have any of it. Not even God listening to her prayers or so much as a beautiful day. Blazkowitz feels much the same way. The lyrics even echo exactly what he tells Anya just before the final battle.
The diary entries read to us by Anya from the chapters in the Sewer/Weapons Depot onward increasingly become this as it becomes more and more clear that these are actually Anya's entries and not those of a relative, as she claims. Some are awesome as Anya details varying methods of killing Nazis, but others are utterly sad as she details the fall of her country to the Nazis and how people accept it. She even starts to loathe her parents and how they are powerless to do anything other than what the Nazis want, and feels desperately alone in her resistance, until B.J. comes along.
It's a sobering thought to imagine that the Nazis have conquered 75% of the world. They aren't just slaughtering people and destroying buildings, but erasing entire cultures as well, replacing all of them with their industrialized, Aryan-dominated, militaristic empire. Britain, France, Poland, Ireland, the Soviet Union, China, America, Canada, and even Italy and Japan. All of their identities as nations are gone. Maybe forever. The Nazis are slowly tightening an iron grip across the entire world and squeezing out any resistance and anything deemed unsuitable to their new order. At one point, BJ wonders if there's anything left worth saving now.
It's a small example, but worth mentioning. When Set Roth brought BJ and several Kreisau Circle members to retrieve various Da'at Yichud artifacts in the Atlantic Ocean, he mentioned on how during the last years of the war, Da'at Yichud seemed to decide to forsake their own secrecy to help the Allied governments to tilt the odds of war to their own... Only to end with them being exposed, exiled, and executed by the Nazi government after the Allied nations were squashed seamlessly. He even mentioned how vivacious and lively his organization was, only a slew of people who were trying to commune with God by creating inventions, and nothing else. Despite Set mentioned that there are hundreds of Da'at Yichud vaults around the world that hasn't been exposed and discovered by the Nazis, given that many members of said organization have either been executed or perished by other means, he might as well be its last living member who can open these vaults...
Think that just because the Nazis have conquered the world, everything's fine and dandy for them? One secret area in the prologue has a commander talking with Deathshead over the radio, assuring him that BJ and the other infiltrators will be found and killed. He starts out confident, but eventually slips into nervousness and starts saying things like, "Yes, she's pregnant. ... With all my heart. ... Yes, I have two: a boy and a girl. ... It would kill me if anything happened to them." Made worse because you can only hear his side of the conversation and have to fill in the blanks yourself.
It's a small but significant moment in the campaign but while sneaking around the apartments in Berlin you can hear a mother talking to the local police. She caught her son trying on her makeup and fears he might be gay or otherwise. She fears what will happen to her and the rest of her family so much she wants to turn her own son into the authorities even if it will most likely lead to his torture and/or execution.
The woman in Belica who asks you to get medicine for her husband. No matter how quickly you get it and come back, it will always be too late. You come back to the barracks to see her crying beside his corpse. This is the only time in the game when you really are helpless to stop or fix something. The correlation to real people dying just before they could be saved just makes it hurt even more.
Slightly helped by the fact that he'd have died anyways if he were that far gone, even if you had given him the medicine.
Deathshead trying to convince BJ that his experiments are all for the good, since he's trying to cure mental disabilities. He then immediately drops that down the stairs by letting slip that he finds disabled people repulsive and he has no compassion towards them; his desire to cure their conditions is for the utterly selfish reason of not having to look at them. Such conditions can't be cured without-surprise!-invasive medical experimentation that we as a species have decided aren't worth performing exactly because of monstrous sociopaths just like Doctor Wilhelm "Deathshead/Totenkoph" Strausse using them as an excuse to torment society's most vulnerable members.
One of the Letters the player can find tells the story of Father Erdmann, a German Christian Missionary sent to Peru to convert the locals, there he befriends the locals and learns the legend of Pishtaku, a white skinned murderer inspired by the Conquistadors, after a squad of Nazi Soldiers arrives and purges the tribe the priest has a Heroic B So D due to the similarity between the legend and realitymaking him realize the Germans are the villains here and decides to venture into the jungle in the hope of finding possible survivors from the tribe, this despite the fact that by this point both the Nazis and the natives alike consider him a traitor and will both probably kill him on sight.
doesn't help much matters either. Let's talk about what else happens, shall we?