Battlefield 1, the big-budget video game reskin of the historic military conflict World War I, is not about Nazis. This makes sense, because Nazis didn’t appear until World War I’s poorly reviewed sequel, World War II. But if you think that’s going to stop teenage edgelords from putting custom Nazi insignia on their characters, well …
Yep, Battlefield 1 is apparently teeming with Nazis, thanks to the game’s emblem-maker feature. Any edgy, trollish bro—or any actual neo-Nazi or white supremacist—can slap a swastika onto his soldier.
They may think they’re being provocative, but the end result is that even redditors are making fun of them. “For fuck sakes, WRONG WAR!” writes blueshyguy8000, who posted a collection of Battlefield 1 Nazis on reddit.
“Sieg fail,” adds a commenter.
“I think they’re fucking with you and being edgetards,” writes another.
Is it possible that these would-be provocateurs love to invoke Nazi Germany but don’t actually know history? Sure. People are dumb.
“You’d be surprised how often people talk about fighting for Hitler in the Chat,” writes one player on Reddit.
There may be a more plausible, but still embarrassing, explanation, though. It seems that custom emblems players made in Battlefield 4 also carried over to Battlefield 1, so the trolls started the new game with their swastikas all ready to go.
It’s not like there were Nazis in Battlefield 4‘s “War of 2020,” either, but at least that was a fictional conflict, which makes the fake Nazis seem marginally less stupid.
After all these years, Godwin’s Law and its variations still hold true.