Mike replied to me: > RPG thread here, so how to role play someone like Hitler? or like threat? > And those who support them?
Hello Mike, that is a difficult question, simply because Hitler and the Nazi genocide carry so much emotional weight. A purely fictional evil of similar magnitude might be easier to describe, if the audience does not make the connection. * Blame Hitler alone, blame the Nazis[1], blame the entire German people[2]? Whatever the answer, Hitler will get a major portion of the blame. * Was he clinically insane? It is hard to imagine a sane person doing what he did, after all. But he was functional, in a way, and that reasoning would apply to most murderers who did not kill just for profit. * If he was insane, when did it really show? If Hitler gets the "insanity defense," that would put more of the blame on his sane followers[3]. Watch Downfall (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363163/) for the portrayal of a less and less stable Führer. * A single madman, no matter how charismatic, cannot sway an entire people unless they're somehow predisposed to believe in him. So was it something wrong with the Germans (and the Russians, and the Khmer, and the Hutu, and ...), or is it something in all of us that would let us act that way with the right trigger? Consider The Siege (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133952/), and compare it to what happened three years later when the US government gave the order to torture suspects in the real world. * It is always more comfortable to blame "them" rather than the impersonal market forces or your own shortcomings. Who are "they"? They're different, they're not hard-working like you, they're different, so how come they're rich, oh, did I mention that they're different? * Hitler appealed to the greed of the Germans. Here, buy looted stuff. That turned witnesses into accomplices. * It is easy to claim in hindsight that one would have resisted. It wasn't just the slow propaganda preparation that made the Germans join the genocide, it was also knowledge of the price of resistance[4]. But does this internal view of the motivation to turn into a jackbooted stormtrooper really matter? * It might, for a game set within the heart of darkness, be it an espionage/special ops game or a tale of survival against impossible odds[5]. But for grunts on the frontline, this matters mostly when it comes to the morale of the enemy. Do they fight to the last bullet or will they just offer token resistance? * Even among the victims, the realization that they had nothing to loose by fighting back came slowly. Part of that was the way the Nazis categorized people -- there was always a worse category for troublemakers, if only a slow and painful death instead of quick and painful[6]. So, let us assume that the Aliens invade Earth. * They must be similar to us for this scenario -- they want the same fields, the same forests, the same houses and factories. They want to turn most of mankind into slaves, not into fertilizer[7]. * Obviously they had the tech for interstellar flight at a large scale -- tens of millions of occupation troops -- but it seems their AI is deficient, why else would they want slaves? * Having occupied Earth, they want to get work out of their slaves, but they also want to decapitate the occupied people. Anybody with an university degree, all former officers, all community leaders are turned into ash. * They see the tech level difference as a sign of superiority, and they expect their slaves to accept this, too. Failure to understand this will be met with anger, regret and genuine bafflement[8], especially by those who are not in the extermination units themselves. - - - - - - - [1] But who are they? Just a few thousand inner circle henchmen, everyone who voted for them, or somewhere in between? [2] Conveniently letting the Austrians off the hook ... [3] But wouldn't this reasoning apply to them, too? [4] What that price would have been is hotly debated. Couldn't they resist, or were they just too timid? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenstrasse_protest [5] Is the Wehrmacht trooper just going to hold the PC until orders arrive, or is he starting a brutal interrogation right now? Could make all the difference if the other characters plan a rescue. [6] At the other end of the scale, this might explain the excuses by many Germans that they didn't know what was going on. There were worlds between the fate of Dutch "forced labor" on a farm in northern Germany and Russian "forced labor" in a factory in the east. The former might have been nothing worse than hard work for low pay, while the latter was a lingering death. [7] Except for certain groups which make them upset, of course. Perhaps the PCs belong to one of these groups. [8] Back to the example of Dutch farm workers in Germany -- there were cases when some went AWOL and later came back, and got a stern reprimand. A Russian would have been killed for much lesser infractions, but the Nazis were prepared to cut an "almost-Aryan" more slack. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
