Is ‘Call Of Duty’ Recreating World War II Without Swastikas?
Instead of swastikas, Nazi flags display black crosses in the new “Call of Duty: World War II” video game. Image by YouTube
Promotions for the video game “Call of Duty: World War II,” scheduled for release in November, have stressed the game’s historical accuracy. But something is missing from the trailer -– swastikas.
A new trailer for the game, unveiled at the the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, showed Nazi paraphernalia replaced with the Schwarzes Kreuz, a black cross, according to Heat Street.
The replacement of the swastika with the black cross left some wondering if history was being rewritten.
“For all of Activision’s sound and fury about accurately depicting World War II, they’ve missed the point,” Heat Street writer Ian Miles Cheong wrote.
German law prohibited Nazi symbols and slogans after the end of World War II as part of denazification efforts. German posters for the 2009 World War II movie “Inglourious Basterds” also omitted swastikas.
However, a trailer for the video game “Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus,” scheduled for release in October, does display swastikas in the game, with Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members as the antagonists, according to Heat Street.
Contact Erica Snow at [email protected] or on Twitter @ericasnoww.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
