In Battlefield 5 the developers accidentally named a Nazi character after a known resistance fighter against the Third Reich. This caused outrage. The developers have since responded.
What’s the story behind the character? In Battlefield 5, you can buy elite soldier skins in the shop. There are four of them, two Allies and two from the Axis powers.
Among the Axis powers, you have the choice between a cool sniper named Ernst Schubert and a disfigured officer named Wilhelm Franke. He costs about 10 Euros in in-game currency.
Franke comes across particularly brutally in his trailer, as he coldly mows down British soldiers with a Luger pistol in a church and at the end watches a severely injured opponent die in agony.
Even though there are no clear Nazi symbols on his uniform, the overall appearance and staging of the scene clearly resemble that of a cruel Nazi officer who revels in the suffering of his defeated opponents. In the background, masked Wehrmacht soldiers storm the church wearing gas masks and steel helmets, and Franke’s uniform bears iron crosses.
Embarrassing mistake – Franke was a resistance fighter
This was the real Wilhelm Franke: The main issue with Franke’s character is that there was a historical figure with this name. Interestingly, he was not a Nazi or a Wehrmacht soldier, but a Social Democrat and a committed anti-fascist.
As a courageous teacher in Dresden, he taught children democratic values and was eventually banned from his profession. He then opened a cigar shop and actively resisted the regime.
In the end, he and his family fell into the hands of the Gestapo. A few months before the end of the war, Franke and his family perished in air raids on Dresden. To this day, the city celebrates Wilhelm Franke as a hero in the fight against fascism.
This is how the developers responded: After the German site Archeogames alerted the developers to the unfortunate name choice, a statement from DICE quickly followed:
“We have come to realize that the name of one of our elite soldiers, Wilhelm Franke, shares the name of a real German resistance fighter in World War II. We want to apologize for this, as we certainly did not intend any disrespect towards this person. We are currently in the process of changing the name in the game.”
Apparently, DICE was not particularly thorough in choosing the elite soldier’s name and simply picked an arbitrary German name without checking. Or they randomly pulled the name from a list of known Germans from the World War era without ensuring who it actually is.
This is the other problem with the character: The staging of a supposed Nazi as a skin, portrayed in a sinisterly cool way to sell him successfully, is problematic for Battlefield 5 even without the additional scandal surrounding the name.
So far, Battlefield has always strived to exclude National Socialism and it has been emphasized multiple times that the soldiers in the war story about the German tank crew are not Nazis but merely fought on the side of the Wehrmacht and did their duty.
Such Nazi references, like in the case of the Franke character, do not help this matter, according to the site Vice.
However, DICE is countering this and states that the in-game Franke is by no means a Nazi, but just a normal German soldier:
“The Wilhelm Franke in the game, whose name we are changing, is not a Nazi, but a German soldier, similar to those we already have in the game. In Battlefield 5, we make no political statements regarding events in World War II and we do not have a swastika in the game.”
What do you think of the matter? Is it really not a big deal or did DICE clearly go too far?
