#he wasn't nazi-affiliated either during the war or after

[cantsayidont]

January 1985. Oh dear. This miniseries … where even to begin. First, an important clarification: The Batman in question is the Golden Age Batman, who lived on Earth-2 and died in ADVENTURE COMICS #462; this isn't an Imaginary Story, although it does take place on a different parallel world than most other Bronze Age DC comics. As for the premise, it's spelled out in more detail on the splash page:

While obviously shocking, this premise may seem a bit less outlandish if you understand that it's riffing on a topical reference. About a year before this series was written, there was a much-publicized scandal involving the West German magazine STERN purchasing a series of purported diaries of Adolf Hitler (for a huge amount of money — 9.3 million marks), which turned out to be forgeries. This was international headline news, and so that whole mess was still in recent memory when this series was developed.

In this story, Roy and Dann Thomas take that inspiration in a rather different direction: The Batman diary is freely presented to the Daily Star, Clark Kent's paper, by an unimpeachable source, and Clark himself recognizes that the handwriting is Bruce Wayne's. So, the central question is not whether the diary is genuine, but why Batman would seek to posthumously slander his old comrades, and whether the JSA can prove their innocence. To add spice to the mix, the situation drives a wedge between Batman's daughter, Helena Wayne, and Bruce's former ward, Earth-2's Dick Grayson.

Unfortunately, this provocative premise becomes little more than a framing device for one of Roy Thomas's continuity-recapping exercises, giving the JSA a pretense to recount all of their adventures up to that point. In the pre-Internet age, this had some value (particularly thanks to the comprehensive annotations, which the 2015 trade paperback inexplicably omits), but most of it is not especially germane to the actual charges, and even moments like the Spectre threatening to cast the Earth into the sun don't spare it from feeling like a sitcom clip show. Worse, the whole plot hinges on Thomas having either misread or misremembered pivotal details of Bruce Wayne's appearances in the revived ALL-STAR COMICS in the '70s, so his eventual explanation contradicts what's actually in the stories he's referencing.

The finale (whose cover references ALL-STAR COMICS #35) has Dick Grayson discovering that the diary was Bruce's extremely convoluted attempt to alert the JSA to the return of one of their old enemies, the time-traveling would-be world conqueror Per Degaton. This makes no sense at all (there's no connection between the accusations in the diary and Per Degaton), so it's left to Helena Wayne to paper over the plot holes by explaining that her father had terminal cancer (implicitly some kind of brain tumor, though it's not specified) that made him irrational and paranoid in his final months. Ouch! The JSA doesn't exactly prove their innocence, although everyone claps and cheers about their testimony about all the cool things they've done, which is apparently good enough for Congress. Degaton's fate is cleverly handled and unexpectedly final, but it doesn't entirely make up for the plodding history lectures.

If you don't know anything about the JSA's pre-Crisis history, this is still a decent place to start, although it would be much more useful in that respect if the compilation had included the annotations. (The original versions had some errors, many of which Thomas subsequently corrected elsewhere, but I assume Thomas could have been persuaded to do a corrected list for the compilation.) However, don't expect it to be a good or even very coherent story.

[rallamajoop]

Hi!!! okay so i love your theory crafting abt re8 & the free cam pics and analyzing everything so i thought maybe you would find this interesting (and maybe a little reassuring)

i dont think heisenberg has nazi affiliation, despite some of the nazi military equipment we see him with. and i dont think its mentioned anywhere in the game, but rather implied, that karl scavenged that stuff from a battlefield? for example, the tank used in his boss fight is a combination of a nazi gun tractor, combined with an american tank. the two guns mounted on it are also a german recoilless rifle and an american machine gun.

personally, i think his dogtag is probably his dads, but thats just a headcanon based on what little we know of the early concept designs and stuff (originally the giant metal and meat monster was heisenbergs dad. and to me heisenberg probably wouldve outright mentioned being a soldier or something in at least a diary entry or note if he was old enough during ww2 to remember it) it could also just be more stuff he scavenged. which is what i think is the deal

Hoo boy, you're really going to make me do a deep dive into all the evidence that Heisenberg might've been a Nazi, aren't you? (For context for anyone coming in cold, this is a response to my post on the fact Heisenberg's costume includes a very distinctive Nazi signal lamp, and why that bothers me.) Goddamnit. Fine.

So, first up, for a character we get as little background on as Heisenberg, there's no point framing this one "was he a Nazi?" Of course he wasn't, he's not anything, because he's not real. What we can ask is whether what made it into the game suggests that he was maybe going to be a Nazi at some point in development (or at least, that someone on the design team was uncomfortably into Nazi paraphernalia). And the answer to that one is, unfortunately, that it seems very plausible.

To be clear, there's nothing here you can't easily find other explanations for, at least for your own headcanons. "Heisenberg was a Nazi" is no more valid an interpretation than any other, based on what made it into the text. What annoys me is that it's arguably no less valid than any other take either. I do not like Schrodinger's Nazis popping up unexpectedly in my escapist fiction. And I hate to say it, but the more I've thought about the points you make here, the more Nazi shit I keep finding ‒ well beyond what I covered in that last post.

Let's start by going back to the dog tag. The inevitable problem is that the act of wearing one after the war ‒ regardless of whose it was or what country they fought for ‒ is that it kind of loudly signals pride in your military service. The tag may not be from WWII. It may not even be German. But Heisenberg is a character with a German name, who names his creations in German, and who's lived in the village under Miranda's thumb for decades. Statistically, most Germans who ever carried a dog tag that looked like that probably fought in WWII. And he carries that fecking Wehrmacht signal light to go with it. At that point, trying to argue that "maybe he just scavenged the signal light" or "maybe it was his Dad who was so proud of his Nazi service that he passed his dog tag on to his son to remember him by" starts to feel a lot like someone's protesting too much. You don't have to interpret Heisenberg as a proud Nazi soldier, but the costuming clues don't look great.

i dont think its mentioned anywhere in the game, but rather implied, that karl scavenged that stuff from a battlefield? for example, the tank used in his boss fight is a combination of a nazi gun tractor, combined with an american tank. the two guns mounted on it are also a german recoilless rifle and an american machine gun.

Uh, look, do you have a source for any of this beyond "someone wrote it in the wiki"? Because anyone can add anything to the wiki, that doesn't mean it's more than some military nerd's headcanon. Even if part of the vehicle looks like an actual American tank, all that means is that someone working on the game used one as a reference, maybe.

Meanwhile, the one genuinely plot-critical thing we're told about that tank is that it's made of metal-polymer composites, strongly implying that all the components were custom-made in the same place. The idea it's tacked together from salvaged components just doesn't hold water.

So how would Heisenberg have made those parts? Simple: his factory used to make tanks.

I'm sure it's possible to miss the half-dozen partially-wrecked tanks in the front yard outside the building ‒ there's a bunch of other scrap metal out there too, they kind of blend in. But when you've spent as much time as I have digging through the game files, it's much harder to miss how many files relating to the factory are explicitly labeled 'tankfactory' (...at least when they're not labeled 'geek'). There's even an asset for a pile of tank cannons. I don't know if or where that particular asset actually appears in the game, but no-one has that many tank parts lying in a pile unless they're building the things. Heisenberg's obviously re-purposed the factory for soldats now, but it plainly used to make tanks.

i think he scavenged that stuff bc of germany invading romania during ww2

I really hate to keep jumping on you here, but you can easily google this stuff. I am no-one's expert on the history of Romania in WWII, but even a cursory read up on the subject tells me that a fascist political party took power in Romania in 1940, and voluntarily allied with the Germans. Romania was itself an Axis power. How they were actually treated by their new 'allies' looks like it might be a thornier subject, but goddamn it I do not have time to fall down yet another research rabbit hole right now (my apologies on that front to any actual Romanians, god knows there is a lot of WWII history that us Westerners do not get taught about in school).

But now that I've had to look that up, I can pretty confidently state that if Heisenberg's factory was functioning during the war, it would have been manufacturing tanks for the Nazis. And if Germany did set up a tank factory in Romania, it's not implausible they'd have assigned a German to take charge (say, a former soldier who excelled on the battlefield, and is proud enough to keep wearing his dog tag?), so that all adds up uncomfortably well.

If anything, the more ambiguous part is whether the game is even set in Romania. Most people assume that was the intent, but the only location we're ever given is 'a county in Eastern Europe'. God knows if anyone at Capcom ever bothered to google Romania's involvement in WWII either, so I can't speak to their intent. But "maybe the German wearing the WWII era dog tag and the Nazi signal lamp wasn't personally responsible for manufacturing tanks for the Nazis with the tank factory in Nazi territory that he apparently lived in" is not an argument I'm prepared to build my house on. Let's at least allow that it does not look good. It'd hardly be the first time a piece of Japanese media has stuck its foot in its mouth over Nazi shit either.

to me heisenberg probably wouldve outright mentioned being a soldier or something in at least a diary entry or note if he was old enough during ww2 to remember it

Earnestly, why? Heisenberg's diary tells us nothing about his background whatsoever. We don't know what country he was born, how long he's lived in the village, how he became one of Miranda's experiments, how many decades he's been part of her family ‒ anything. Why would military service rank a special mention, when even clarifying whether he's a village native doesn't?

And again, it isn't hard to come up with theories where Heisenberg isn't a Nazi. Maybe he was a deserter, who still carries that dog tag because 'Karl Heisenberg' is really just a sham name Miranda gave him to match one of those four founding houses, and that tag is the only proof he's got left of his real name. Or maybe it's the only thing he's got left with his Dad's name on it, even though his Dad always said the war was bullshit, sure. Maybe the factory really was run by Nazis who left shit like that signal lamp lying around (to be repurposed into a handy electronics case like I suggested in that last post), and Heisenberg only moved into it more recently, because at least he speaks enough German to read all the shit they left around the place. Or maybe he only moved in because he found out someone was using it to build that polymer composite tank to kill him (why remains a much bigger dangling question than how), after which he figured he should probably stick around to make sure no-one else tried the same thing. These are all perfectly valid interpretations, and no-one is wrong for preferring them to having to deal with all that Nazi bullshit (though most still depend on some awkward German-nationality-coincidences). The fact that Heisenberg runs a tank factory and carries Nazi paraphernalia is really easy to miss, and no-one's less of a fan for not spotting it.

What little we do know is that Heisenberg's family got rewritten repeatedly during development. He was a twin at one point, his mother may have been used for experiments, his father was variously Sturm, Heisenberg's monster form, the village mayor, and maybe even Urias ‒ it's all over the place (all this comes from notes on the concept art that comes with the game, if anyone wants to fact-check me on it). Heisenberg probably wasn't originally meant to be Ethan's pseudo-ally either ‒ it's Ada rather than Heisenberg who gives him the chance to escape his trial in that early storyboard. Fuck, maybe at some point he (or his dad) really was going to be a goddamn Nazi mad scientist who fled to Romania and hid up a mountain somewhere, or whatever (though I can't easily imagine any Nazi scientist would be wearing that dog tag ‒ that's an accessory for the expendable rank-and-file of the military machine).

But possibly (and I'm really just speculating here), as Heisenberg became a more likable, ambiguously-grey character during development, Capcom may have decided it would be a good idea to tone down the Nazi stuff. They just accidentally left in the dog tag, the signal lamp, and the goddamn tank factory in presumably-Nazi territory, and had to quickly deny all Nazi associations when people made the obvious connections. If the official word from Capcom is that Heisenberg isn't a Nazi (or at least, that we aren't intended to read Heisenberg-the-fictional-character as having any Nazi sympathies or affiliations), I should be pretty happy to take that as official.

If you really want textual "evidence" that Heisenberg wasn't a Nazi, the best I can offer is the fact Dimitrescu dismisses him as 'a child', which suggests to me that he's much younger than her, and possibly even younger than her daughters (though I still can't buy he was a child when he first met Dimitrescu or Miranda). We don't actually know how old she or her daughters are, of course (they were in already the castle in 1952, but whether they'd just moved in or whether they'd been there for decades we don't know), but dismissing someone who was old enough to have served in WWII as 'a child' strikes me as a bit of a stretch even for Lady D. But that's not much more than interpretation, and one can easily be a Nazi sympathiser without personally having taken part in the war.

I still love Heisenberg as a character, flaws and all. I'm definitely not going to stop writing about him being his terrible, ridiculous self. I'll gladly go on ignoring all this nazi shit as much as I can get away with. I'm absolutely not here to tell you that RE8 is now #problematic and can only be addressed after adequate hand-wringing. That shit helps no-one.

But back in the real world, where fascism is on the rise again across the globe, and where the internet would have me believe that coded references to shit as vague as the date of Hitler's birthday is apparently a popular cryptofascist dogwhistle or some shit, do I have to waste mental energy on whether it means something serious that there are surprise Nazis popping up in my innocent little zombie-horror-game? Like, if a character isn't a Nazi, is it so damn hard not to include two different bits of Nazi memorabilia directly on their character model? The horrors of capitalism I signed up for; the horrors of People You Never Realised Were Secretly A Nazi is one I could have done without here, kthx.

And the sad fact is, it's really not that easy to just explain away.