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On Victory in Europe Day, let’s talk Remembrance in video games.
World War II ended 80 years ago today. However, the ideology behind it persists. Learning from past mistakes requires education and a robust culture of remembrance is essential for this. Video games can help reach a new audience and there are numerous games dedicated to this topic. A good starting point is the Digital Games Culture Foundation‘s database which is currently only available in German. We’ve selected ten games that stood out.
Through the Darkest of Times
(developed by Paintbucket Games, English language version: yes, available for PC/Mac on Steam, on the Apple App Store for Mac/iOS, Google Play Store for Android, for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch from €7.99)
Through the Darkest of Times is a critically acclaimed real-time tactics game in which you organize a resistance group fighting against the Nazi regime spanning from 1933 to 1945. In the roundabout ten-hour long campaign, you acquire members, fulfill their needs, develop a bond with your fellow fighters, gather clues and equipment, send members on sabotage missions and repeatedly react to difficult situations challenging your sense of morality. Pretty much all the time there is no good solution, only the lesser evil. This beautifully presented game is already part of history lessons in some classrooms and we can recommend it without hesitation.
The Darkest Files
(developed by Paintbucket Games, English language version: yes, available for PC/Mac on Steam and for PC on GOG for €19.99)
The spiritual successor to Through the Darkest of Times is the legal drama The Darkest Files. In postwar Germany, the local population has little interest in solving Nazi crimes, but a small group of prosecutors led by Fritz Bauer attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice and put them on trial. Learn more about this decent first-person investigation and courtroom adventure game in our review.
The Light in the Darkness
(developed by Voices of the Forgotten, English language version: yes, available for free for PC on Steam and on Epic Games Store, for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4)
The Light in the Darkness is a hand-drawn point-and-click adventure telling the story of a Jewish working-class family in Nazi-occupied France. Historically, The Light in the Darkness takes place between the Évian Conference of 1938 and the Vel d’Hiv raids of 1942. While son Moses is teased by his classmates because of his origins, mother Bluma worries about her Polish parents Safta and Sabba, who are fleeing their home to escape the Nazis. Father Samuel runs a charming little boutique and is quickly arrested and put in a camp, while his business is taken over by a Frenchman who previously presented himself to the family as a friend. Vichy France is increasingly collaborating with the Nazis and participating in the extermination of the Jews. As the name of the game suggests, there are also occasional rays of light, such as the hopeless romantic Bernard. Some puzzles, such as assembling the anthropomorphic fox Reynard, allow us to interactively participate in the harrowing story. 77,000 French Jews were murdered in concentration camps and France’s role in the Holocaust was only officially acknowledged in 1995.
Attentat 1942
(developed by Charles Games, English language version: yes, available for PC/Mac on Steam, on the App Store for Mac/iOS, Google Play Store for Android and for Nintendo Switch from €8.99)
While we’re helping our grandmother move place, we stumble upon evidence of a turbulent family history. Like its sequel, Svoboda 1945: Liberation, Attentat 1942 is a full-motion video adventure with fictional characters based on eyewitness accounts. On May 27th, 1942, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich was mortally wounded by resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. The Nazis burned several villages to the ground subsequently and intensified their oppression of the local population. In FMV sequences, we converse with contemporary witnesses, played by actors, while crucial events are depicted in graphic novel style. As in Svoboda 1945: Liberation, many terms and events are explained in a comprehensive encyclopedia. Attentat 1942 is dedicated to the Czechoslovak resistance against the Nazi regime, a topic that is not often portrayed in video games or films and over its two to three hour runtime, it proves to be a valuable history lesson told in modern fashion.
Svoboda 1945: Liberation
(developed by Charles Games, English language version: yes, available on Steam for PC/Mac, on the App Store for Mac/iOS, Nintendo Switch from €13.99)
The year is 2001 and we return to the small, unassuming Czech village of Svoboda as a heritage conservationist. In the attic of an old school, we discover a photo of our grandfather dressed in military uniform. Svoboda 1945: Liberation is a two- to three-hour long FMV adventure filmed, just like Attentat 1942, in its original language with Czech actors and subtitled in Czech, English and German. We can freely explore the village via an overworld map and speak with its residents. The graphic novel style sequences return and restored original footage in high-resolution is interspersed throughout. Over the course of the game, we unlock encyclopedia entries that inform us about historical events such as the Munich Conference on September 29th, 1938, in which the border region of Czechoslovakia was awarded to the Nazi regime with the consent of France, Great Britain and Italy. The game also addresses the “wild” expulsions of 700,000 to 820,000 people in the Bohemian Lands from mid-May to the end of 1945, which claimed 20,000 to 30,000 lives. Svoboda 1945: Liberation vividly portrays the resistance against the occupation from the perspective of the local population.
Train to Sachsenhausen
(developed by Charles Games, English language version: yes, available for free on itch.io, on the Google Play Store for Android and on the App Store for Mac/iOS)
In 1938, high school graduate Antonín Nedêla travels from South Moravia to Prague to study medicine. Meanwhile, Hitler is stirring up the Sudeten Germans. The Munich Agreement orders Czechoslovakia to cede the border region to Nazi Germany. On March 15th, 1939, the rest of Czechoslovakia is occupied by the Nazi regime. Your decisions influence the course of the story of the fictional protagonist, which was inspired by testimonies from contemporary witnesses. On October 28th, 1939, the largest protests against the occupiers took place on Prague’s Wenceslas Square. You can join the resistance and escape, or concentrate on your studies and end up in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Contemporary witnesses such as Lubor Zink, Vojimír Srdecny and Ladislav Bém describe in vivid detail their escape via Gibraltar to England and the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp – from the initial hope to the merciless forced labor, draconian punishments and rampant diseases like scarlet fever, which gave pause to the omnipresent terror of the guards. Train to Sachsenhausen is a good example of how the culture of Remembrance can be preserved in an age of having less and less contemporary witnesses and it shows how political disenchantment can play into the hands of autocratic forces.
Hidden Codes
(developed by the Anne Frank Educational Centre, English language version: no, available for free on the Google Play Store for Android and on the App Store for Mac/iOS)
Hidden Codes addresses radicalization in the internet. The game is divided into five episodes. In episode 1 “Emilia”, we visit the Hausen Comprehensive School and snatch an editorial position at the local school paper called “Hauspost”. Using a social media app, we scroll through pictures of our classmates and we can use the app to chat with them. Our new best friend is invited to a protest that appears to be about much more than empowering women’s rights. In hidden object puzzles, we learn more about right-wing extremist codes and our decisions influence how others interact with us. At the end of the 45-minute episode, the effects of right-wing extremist violence are discussed, such as the racist murder series by the NSU (National Socialist Underground) from 2000 to 2007, whose victims the episode is dedicated to, and the NSU 2.0, which used death threats to intimidate people with an immigrant background and members of the security apparatus. Hidden Codes is an accessible, entertaining serious game and a modern way to educate yourself about right-wing extremist codes.
Erinnern. Bullenhuser Damm.
(developed by Paintbucket Games, English language version: yes, available for free on the Google Play Store for Android and on the App Store for Mac/iOS)
The year is 1979 and a group of pupils at Bullenhuser Damm in Hamburg-Rothenburgsort want to learn more about the history of their school, which was built on the site of a former children’s Concentration Camp. As Kati, we experience how her grandmother and mother remember the ghetto in Radom, Poland, from which children were deported to Hamburg-Rothenburgsort and subsequently murdered. Akın wants to become a doctor and takes an internship in a practice run by the son of a former camp doctor. Little by little, the pupils learn more about the events at their school and the surrounding area during and after the World War II. In the Concentration Camps, doctors conducted forced experiments on humans. They were infected with tuberculosis and their health usually deteriorated progressively afterwards. After the war, many of the doctors were able to continue practicing their profession without worry of persecution, sometimes for decades, while survivors often fought in vain for any kind of compensation. Each individual episode is entertaining, mostly with a high-quality German dub, locations are detailed and text is also available in English, which is quite unusual for an educational game of this scope. Erinnern. Bullenhuser Damm. (Remembering. Bullenhuser Damm.) should be an essential component of teaching history, as it depicts numerous aspects of the crimes of the Third Reich and makes these stories accessible to a young audience in a contemporary format.
#LastSeen
(developed by pupils of the Wittelsbacher-Gymnasium, a senior secondary school, Public History Munich, a department of The Cultural Department of the City of Munich, JFF – Institute for Media Research and Media Education, the agency & Why, English language version: no, playable for free in your browser)
#LastSeen is a digital image atlas. A photo discovery game covering the deportations of tens of thousands of people from Eisenach and Munich between 1938 and 1945 is part of this project. As a blogger we research deportations in this attic. There, we find numerous photos, which we compile into image series and tag with keywords, similar to Her Story. By typing in words that the game has assigned to each photo, we unlock new blog content. By connecting sources scattered around the room with clues, we learn more about the grim fates affected by the deportations through photos and documents.
Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love
(developed by Artifex Mundi, English language version: yes, available for PC/Mac on Steam and GOG, on the Apple App Store für Mac, for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One from €3.90)
Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love is a satirical point-and-click adventure starring aspiring American journalist Evan Kovolsky, who defies an independent workers’ newspaper in the fictional Stalinist country of Matryoshka behind the Iron Curtain. The adventure game features charming characters, a beautiful visual design, detailed settings and witty dialogue. Since it does not have a direct link to the Holocaust, it stands out from this selection of games. We discovered it through the aforementioned database and deem Irony Curtain not only to be a decent adventure game, but it also offers a unique take on post-Soviet states, something that games don’t very often manage to do.
The tireless and important work of the Memorials
The preservation of the culture of Remembrance is not only maintained digitally, but also by the Memorials at the sites where countless people who opposed the Nazi regime—including Jews, Sinti and Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, opposition members, homosexuals and prisoners of war—were imprisoned, tortured and killed. The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial has gratefully allowed us to participate in the central commemoration ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau Concentration Camp. There, liberator Bud Gahs and Holocaust survivors Mario Candotto, Jean Lafaurie, Abba Naor and Leslie Rosenthal addressed commemorative messages with moving accounts of their lives and words of warning to the politicians present, including Ilse Aigner (CSU), President of the Bavarian State Parliament; Julia Klöckner (CDU), President of the German Bundestag; Ulrike Scharf (CSU), Bavarian State Minister for Family, Labor and Social Affairs and Deputy Minister-President; and Florian Hartmann (SPD), Mayor of the City of Dachau. Wreaths and white roses were laid in front of the International Monument in memory of the approximately 41,500 victims who lost their lives in the Dachau Concentration Camp.
from left to right: Liberator Bud Gahs and Holocaust survivors Abba Naor and Jean Lafaurie and Ilse Aigner, President of the Bavarian State Parliament
Bud Gahs, a member of the U.S. Army’s 42nd “Rainbow” Division, which liberated the Dachau Concentration Camp on April 29th, 1945, was caught by surprise as the whole tent greeted him with standing ovations. Abba Naor recounted his escape from Kaunas to Vilnius, the Kaunas ghetto, the murder of his mother and brother by the Nazis, his stay in the Dachau subcamps, the liberation by U.S. soldiers in Waakirchen, Upper Bavaria, in April 1945 and his emigration to and escape from the USSR back to Munich to avoid military service, as well as his subsequent role in establishing the Jewish state of Israel. Leslie Rosenthal was born on February 28th, 1945, in the Kaufering subcamp, although his birth certificate would simply state “Kaufering, DE.” He recalled the tribute to the camp’s mothers and their first gathering in 2010. They cared for their children under unimaginable conditions in the camps and all of these kids miraculously survived. Ilse Aigner thanked the witnesses and stated that it is up to each individual to stand up for the preservation of democracy and human dignity, issuing a steep warning against authoritarian forces in times of incitement. The entire commemoration was broadcast by Bavaria’s Public Broadcasting Service Bayerischer Rundfunk and a recording is available on the ARD Mediathek.
Visiting a memorial site defies description and can’t be compared to watching a film (like The Zone of Interest, which was also screened at the Bavarian Parliament), playing a game or reading a book, especially the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. The volunteers’ commitment in preserving these sites is nothing short of admirable. The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial alone welcomes nearly a million visitors annually from all over the world. The reconstructed prisoner barracks on the site are to be comprehensively redesigned and the “Kräutergarten” (“herb gardens”), where forced labor was carried out under inhumane conditions, is to be more closely integrated into the memorial work. In addition, in Bavaria, secondary schools, just like Gymnasiums and middle schools, are to be required to visit these Concentration Camp Memorials. Initiatives such as Jüdisches.Bayern (Jewish.Bavaria) can also play a key part in combating antisemitism and xenophobia.
Photos of the central commemoration ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau Concentration Camp were provided by the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. The Darkest Files was provided by Paintbucket Games and Attentat 1942 and Svoboda 1945: Liberation were provided by Charles Games.
