Last time we took a look into Rammstein’s notoriety within Germany and we examined the text of their Deutschland. As mentioned there, the text is only a part of the work of art on offer in the song. I really do implore you to watch the video from start to finish, but unless you already know a goodly amount of German culture and history, you may need a bit of guidance to understand what the scenes are telling you.
Here I humbly present myself as that guide, though I provide no copper-bottom guarantees about the fidelity of my directions. I will present what I feel are the most evocative and important stills from the video — those which require a special familiarity with German history or culture to properly appreciate, along with a few which are simply ripe for further exposition.
The video opens with a dark shot in the woods whose centrepiece is a red laser shooting into the sky:
Red lasers show up in nearly every shot of the video, but this one appears to be special, the source of all of those to follow. These lasers almost certainly symbolise the roter Faden, literally the “read thread”1 — a metaphor Germans use to identify an overarching or recurring theme, be it in a piece of literature or a political campaign or, in this case, a song and the very video in which the laser symbolising the thread itself appears.
Here we see the birthplace of the Germanic red thread, the fleece from which the common themes that run through Germanic and later German history was first harvested. It looks to be a wild and cold and remote place, where the story of Deutschland begins.
As the video moves on past the opening credits, we see some of the band members dressed up as Romans, eking their way through these dank woods. The soldiers come across a figure hunched over a corpse that also appears to be Roman, cutting off its head. When this figure turns, this is what those soldiers see:
They see Germania holding the severed head, making sure they see her face. Germania is Germany’s answer to Britannia; it is the personification of the German national spirit. The band’s decision to incarnate Germania as a black woman was a matter of some controversy, both among the sorts of people who insisted that the actress should have looked like this painting as well as those who insisted it was a suspicious comment about modern Germany’s changing ethnic composition.
This scene alludes to what Germans call the Varusschlacht, or the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. It was this battle where the Roman Empire met the limit of their expansion into Central Europe, and it was here the Germans got their first national hero, whom we remember as Arminius. The story of the battle and the world leading up to it is capably told in Netflix’s Barbarians, which I may review in detail later.
It is notable for the video under discussion, however, that Arminius does not appear, at least not alive; I suspect that his is the head that Germania severed, and which she wields often throughout the rest of the video. He would thus serve as the first human sacrifice to the spirit of Germany.2
The chronology of the video then jumps forward just a tad:
Here we see the band as a space crew, carrying what will turn out to be a coffin containing Germania. They are preparing to load the coffin onto a U-Boat, which the Germans relied heavily upon in both World Wars and which have consequently become iconic in the world’s understanding of Germany.
That this U-Boat appears docked inside a space station orbiting the Earth is…very cool, a kind of mad-scientist Nazi-on-the-moon fever dream. It also might imply that Germany may never live that part of its history down.
The next major scene shows us an underground boxing club set after the First World War:
Germania looks on, smiling in her glamorous flapper dress, as the two fighters are brutalised by the lust of the crowd. Note that the fighters are wearing brass knuckles, ensuring that they will draw blood as red as the lasers shining through the room. And while the events depicted in this scene doubtless happened in cellars across Berlin and Hamburg and Köln during the time period, there is naturally a deeper reason for its presence in the video.
The Roaring Twenties was a time of great uncertainty, general poverty, extreme inequality, and political violence for Germany. Burdened with war debts it could not repay and a fragile, putative democracy whose policymakers lacked the skill and intuition to navigate the tensions within Germany itself and between European nations still recovering from the war, the German people turned on one another during this period — as though they were still barbarian tribes skirmishing in the woods. It did not reach open civil war, but the organised street fights between the police, the Communists, and the right-wing paramilitary organisations helped to set the stage for the rise of Nazism.
Next, we have Germania resplendent in golden armour, surveying a battlefield:
There also appears to be a zeppelin in the background, casting both a spotlight on the action and a few scattered lasers. The rest of the scene depicts a battle in progress; other shots from the same scene imply that these fighters were dead and that Germania resurrected them to battle again.3
This shows how deeply wedded to battle was the medieval Germanic ideal; over and above France with its courtly love, or England with its dynastic intrigue, the ancient Kingdom of Germany seems to have lionised battle for the glory it might bring. The Nibelungenlied itself tells of roving armies comprising tens of thousands of soldiers from Denmark and Saxony and the Rhineland meeting for glorious contest. At least this is how Germans of the Early Modern Period romanticised the dark ages; we will see a slightly more-nuanced picture presently.
For now, we move on to another time jump, with another (or perhaps the same) zeppelin:
This scene depicts the band4 walking away from the Hindenburg as it is engulfed in flames, a disaster so infamous that it became the go-to analogy for civilian catastrophes in the United States until the terrorist attack of 9/11. This American cultural capital arose because the Hindenburg tragedy occurred in New Jersey and was caught by a camera crew in the pioneering days of film5 — in 1937, to be exact.
What is often lost in the American reception of the disaster is the understanding that it was also a German tragedy; the Hindenburg was a German airship built to ferry upper-class passengers between Germany and the United States. It was in fact part of the National Socialist project to make Germany a world power, a nation accepted and respected among the other major powers of the day.
It is perhaps a cruel irony, then, that this competition among nations led the United States — which had a virtual monopoly on the world’s supply of helium at the time — to embargo the export of helium to Germany, ostensibly to restrict its use for military purposes. The Germans responded by using hydrogen to float their balloon in the air, and this worked for a number of trips.
But hydrogen is a much more volatile gas than helium, and its presence pretty much guaranteed that the endeavour would fail in tragic fashion, as we see above.
That the Hindenburg ended in a deadly fireball was a foreboding augur of the Nazi regime’s other efforts at legitimacy; indeed, they would soon abandon diplomatic and cultural means to take their place in the sun. Germany would embark upon a surprisingly-successful agenda of negotiated territorial expansion in 1938, and then cast the die of military adventure in 1939. I have already discussed the toll of that adventurism at some length.
The next notable scene skips over World War Two and into the German Democratic Republic:
Here we see the band portraying functionaries of the East German government, with Till Lindemann playing the role of Erich Honecker. Honecker served as the General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany from 1971 until shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the regime’s collapse in 1989.
This was the Germany that Rammstein grew up with — a one-party state modelled on Communist principles. Note Germania here, wearing a smart Soviet-style hat, with a few golden glimmers reminiscent of her medieval armour adorning her neck, offering a steadying hand to Honecker’s back.
We also see busts of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the two German philosophers responsible for publishing Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, and who had served as Lenin’s great inspiration in Russia’s revolution. And indeed, Communism in East Germany was not simply a vehicle for the Soviet Union to exercise control over a puppet government; Honecker and his compatriots gave it an honest go as a model for building a state, complete with a surveillance apparatus and tools of political repression which would even put Twitter social justice activists to shame.
When next we see Germania, the setting appears to be the modern day:
Here we have a bunch of particularly wolfish-looking German Shepherds on leashes, with Germania herself clad in lavish but skimpy gold, and backed by policemen in riot gear. Of particular note is the bandolier across her body; she is wearing imperial laurels as well, a reference to the Holy Roman Empire and the actual Roman Empire that it never quite managed to replicate.
The bullets are actually an interesting touch, and may admit a few interpretations. Any German will tell you that the current German military is shambolic, which the rest of the world has suddenly noticed and several European and American powers have begun strongly disapproving of since the Russian escalation of the war in Ukraine earlier this year. What many Germans also know, but non-Germans largely don’t, is that Germany has one of the largest and most diverse armaments industries in the world; much of Germany’s wealth has come from selling arms of all sizes to regimes of all stripes.6
Thus the gilded bullets may symbolise that the Germania of today is a paper tiger, not really dangerous in her own right, but happy to profit off of the aggression of others; her bestial nature has been tamed and leashed, and she has the organised violence of the police to fall back upon if she is ever threatened.
After this, the video turns the clock back to the Dark Ages, where we see something of the reality which the earlier vision of battlefield glory obscured:
Namely, the band portray a group of torch-wielding monks underway in an abbey, where they have to pass under an arch decorated with inverted human corpses. It turns out that they are on their way to a feast, where the noblemen of the Holy Roman Empire are drinking themselves to distraction:
While those very same monks gorge themselves:
This scene did not receive much attention from the commentators who reviewed the song as it came out, but it is perhaps the most biting scene7 of the entire video; it is a withering indictment of the late feudal system. We see the supposedly-ascetic clergy — a clergy which has arrogated to itself the right to decide life and death and afterlife for the whole of the human race — devouring the very flesh of Germania herself, while the supposedly-secular aristocrats sup at the monks’ guest table, studiously ignoring the cannibal greed of their hosts.
A closer look at the table above reveals that it covers a cage, wherein hooded figures are kept; these prisoners would not look out of place at a BDSM club in the modern day, though their attire could have also been period-appropriate for the Church’s torture victims. In any case, their placement beneath Germania as she is being eaten alive suggests a stagnation and a retardation of German identity, caught beneath the ravenous gluttony of medieval Christianity.
I have also written extensively about Christianity’s foundational influence on the West, and the consequences that the Church’s power had for Germany during the Middle Ages; I will not repeat those arguments here, but it is worth noting that Rammstein’s view as shown by the video seems fairly close to my own, at least as it pertains to the role the clergy played in the identity of Germany during the Holy Roman Empire.
The video next turns back to a more modern scene, likely another look at Germany in the interwar years:
We see money raining down as prisoners shuffle through a cell block; the prison’s style and its occupants’ manner of dress would fit into the Roaring Twenties or early Great Depression. All of that cash is likely a reference to Germany’s hyperinflation crisis of the 1920’s, which at its height saw prices increasing manifold over the course of a given hour; many Germans took to simply burning the paper notes, rather than exchange them for wood or coal.
Along with this economic uncertainty came a great deal of political and civil unrest, which not only expressed itself in street fights and the violent gambling explored in a previous scene set in this era, but also by an increasing rate of crime and a corresponding increase in prison populations. Inmates ranged from workaday thieves to organised criminals to political persecutees. It is difficult to discern which sort of prisoners Rammstein are depicting here, but it doesn’t really matter; an increasing number of Germans found themselves cast down and cast out of their society in this era.
And now the video starts getting to what an American might term the good stuff:
This image depicts V2 rockets, built by Jewish slave labour and designed by the engineer who would eventually put Americans on the Moon. They’re called “V2” because they are the second iteration of the Vergeltungswaffen, the vengeance weapons.
At this point in the war, the Allies had virtual control of the skies over Western Europe, which American and British bomber commands took advantage of to prosecute a campaign of terror bombing8 across Germany. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians were killed and millions more were made homeless by this campaign — it paid back the Blitz back several times over. It was these attacks which the vengeance weapons were designed to avenge.
This of course does not justify the construction and the deployment of the V2 rockets, nor does it expiate the Germans of guilt for the lives they sacrificed to build those weapons. It certainly does not retroactively justify the Blitz and the terrible cost several British cities incurred in the opening stages of the war. But we should be extremely wary of allowing the magnitude of Nazi crimes to blind us to the crimes of the victorious powers; those crimes were committed in our name, and we forget that at our peril.
The scene transitions to a concentration camp, where Germania stands in full deaths-head military regalia while an execution is prepared behind her:
Note the eye patch covering the half of her face where the gallows stand, as though even in the depths of comic-book villainy she cannot bear to witness the real consequences of what her people have become.
The scene shifts to show Rammstein, portraying Nazis and victims in turn:
Of particular interest are the varying stars sewn over the victims’ hearts. Non-Germans typically only remember the simple yellow star denoting a Jewish prisoner…but, of course — being Germans — the Nazis developed an intricate system of classification for their internees to precisely categorise them according to their perceived level of offence against the National Socialist state. Here is an example of the ranking system used in Dachau before the implementation of the Final Solution.
In particular, the victims here appear to represent homosexual, Jewish, Jewish-political, and Communist ranks of prisoners kept in “protective custody” by the National Socialists. Though the industrial slaughter of the Holocaust did not really begin until after the Wannsee Conference in 1942, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people had already been murdered by then in mass shootings in the so-called Holocaust by bullets that took place before and then alongside the death camps; by being worked to death in camps like those that built the V2 rockets; by starvation in ghettoes; and by simple hanging, as depicted above.
Note the placard reading Fotografieren verboten!, literally “Photography forbidden!”. This sort of placard was not uncommon everywhere in Germany throughout the war, as the regime was paranoid that even innocuous-looking photographs could be weapons in the espionage or propaganda aspects of the conflict, and so forbade public photography. One can imagine such restrictions being observed especially harshly for executions such as we see here.
Finally, a group of normal soldiers — not SS, but “normal” Wehrmacht men — are looking on, bearing witness to the atrocity in progress. This puts lie to the “clean Wehrmacht” myth which held that the German military was innocent of the gruesome crimes of the Nazi regime; that regular German soldiers were blind to the depredations of the SS and the politicians in Berlin. It goes without saying that this was not the case; the Wehrmacht was deeply complicit in many crimes against humanity in Eastern Europe, and they were a willing instrument of the genocidal war to the bitter end.
After the war was over, the process of facing what they had done took the German people decades; the next scene shows the band depicting one of the terrorist groups that emerged in West Germany during this process:
Here Germania stands practically naked, wearing little more than chains and a bomb vest, having been taken hostage. The group in question is presumably the Red Army Faction, one of the most notorious of such organisations.
You may recall my brief and somewhat-flippant mention of the group in my review of the Die Prinzen song; despite the snark I employed, the RAF in particular and other less-well-known terrorist cells in general were no joke during this period. Hundreds of bombings racked West Germany from the 1970’s through the 1990’s, along with dozens of kidnappings, assassinations, and bank robberies. These terrorists were explicitly left-wing, sometimes aided and always encouraged by the Soviet Union, and they generally considered the West German government an illegitimate fascist regime no better than (or even no different from) the National Socialists.
The video now returns to the prison, showcasing Germania amidst the decaying cells:
There is no eyepatch this time, and we get the sense that Germania sees the dishevelled state of her underclasses, but she is forcing a grin anyway. The uniform is also not nearly so ominous as the one from the concentration camp, with its stark white and silvery epaulettes; even the helmet is barely militaristic, with the traditional spike of the Pickelhaube covered in white tassels. There is a rapier’s handle, but it is barely noticeable, and Germania doesn’t look prepared to draw it.
This could be seen to represent Germany’s attempt to reinvent itself after the defeat of the First World War. Its military was severely limited by the Treaty of Versailles; namely, the country could wield only 100,000 men in its standing army, while its navy was left as a skeletal remnant, and an air force was explicitly forbidden. Even before the Nazis came to power, the German military and civilian government quietly circumvented these restrictions in various ways, from tacitly allowing demobilised soldiers to form underground paramilitary groups to developing chemical weapons and a secret air force in the Soviet Union.
So, despite the tassels and the crisp uniform and the pained grin, this version of Germania cannot quite plead ignorance to the corruption and decay going on around her.
The next scene of note is a blend of several themes already depicted individually:
The symbolism is fairly obvious — we have monks, SA functionaries, and a medieval warrior all milling about a vigorous pyre. The embrace of the monk and the SA man behind the cross could well be a reference to the very first international agreement the Nazis made upon their assumption of power, in which a concordat with the Vatican saw the Pope’s minions support National Socialist legitimacy in return for Catholic domination of primary education within Germany.9
Further shots within the same general scene show the SA burning books and the monks setting a veiled figure — possibly Germania herself — alight, and the image above shows the figure still burning. Both of these are clear references to well-documented events in Nazi and medieval German history. The whole scene takes place in an abandoned factory or warehouse, which could just as easily been a relic of the Great Depression or of the period of collapse after the end of the Second World War.
The video and the song become hectic at this point, nearing a climax that builds upon scenes already discussed, as well as sketching out a possible future of Germania:
Here we glimpse a pregnant Germania being assisted in labour by doctors in bubble suits, along with a cybernetic-looking cardinal of Rome. It appears that even in this presumptive future, Germania cannot rid herself of meddlesome priests.
She is here a long way from her medieval glory, which we see in another jump:
Flanked by modern instruments of state power, this Germania rides out with her retinue to glorious battle, her hall illuminated with the threads of her fate.
She is nowhere to be seen in the next notable jump, but it is worth seeing nevertheless:
This is the other side of Honecker’s Germany as he and his confederates celebrated in their offices — an earnest application of Marxism at the barrel of a gun. The fabled Iron Curtain ran right through Germany, made real by the “inner German” border, which turned East Germany into a prison that hundreds of people gave their lives attempting to escape.
Back in the birthing ward, we see that Germania’s labour is bearing strange fruit:
She seems to have given birth to what will turn out to be a litter of puppies, under the scrutinous and possibly-mechanical eye of the cardinal.
From here we flash back to the concentration camp, to see that the tables have turned:
Germania and the Nazis are being executed by the very prisoners we saw them persecuting and executing a few minutes ago. Note the soldiers in the background looking on; these could be the same witnesses from the previous scene, or they could be Allied liberators observing this act of revenge. Over and above the symbolism of SS officers and Germania herself getting gunned down by their former victims, there are many documented cases of Allied soldiers either facilitating or carrying out summary executions of Germans.10
Nazi Germania at the business end of a pair of rifles is a far cry from her medieval war glory, which we see one more time:
It is difficult to tell where the lasers end and the blood spatter begins, but there is enough fire and blood here to make a Targaryan spontaneously orgasm. There is nothing much else to add, other than to take in the contrast of such mythic bloodshed with the ashen catastrophe of the Holocaust.
A new scene pops up, of a more modern Germany in the throes of a riot:
The man throwing the Molotov Cocktail appears contemporary, but it is possible this scene is referencing the East German uprising of 1953, which — like the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring that happened later — was violently suppressed by the Soviet Union and its East German counterparts.
Nearing the end, we get another self-referential frame by Rammstein:
The band frequently use angelic imagery, with Till especially fond of wearing the same flaming wing rig during their concerts as Germania sports here. Their video for Mein Teil also has them crawling along a public street in a fashion quite similar to that depicted above.
Back in the extraterrestrial maternity ward, the procedure appears to be over:
Germania has given birth to a whole litter of puppies, which is both adorable and a bit grotesque — especially when one recalls the German Shepherds in the scene where Germania wears little more than a gilded bandolier, which occurs both earlier in the video’s runtime and earlier in its narrative.
The effort of birthing this litter has not come without some cost to Germania, however, and we next see her as stone-dead as the original Sleeping Beauty:
The camera pulls out to reveal her sarcophagus floating in orbit around Earth:
I propose that the coffin has been shot out of the U-Boat we saw toward the beginning of the video, as a sort of futuristic burial at sea.11
Coupled with the previous scene, we can take this as a sort of surrender on Rammstein’s part, or at least a prophecy.
The Germania who first appeared in those primeval forests, the spirit who bathed in the blood of medieval knights and who somehow survived being devoured and burnt by the Church, the figure who reinvented herself time and time again over the last two thousand years, will never outlive the legacy of the U-Boat and the death camp.
She must give birth to something new, something unrecognisable and unpredictable — still bestial, still primal, but less burdened with the weight of so much tragedy both given and received. Something with the hope of a future unstained by her own sins.
And then she must die.
For all intents and purposes, this is the end of the video; the closing credits play over a haunting piano rendition of the chords to Sonne, one of Rammstein’s best songs, itself rich in allusion (and with a great video to boot). There are some arresting visuals in this denouement, and it is well worth experiencing, though I do not feel most of them require the sort of analysis I have given the rest of the video. Nevertheless, I found two images worth showing and commenting on.
First, here is one more look at the medieval Germania in glorious widescreen:
The battle rages behind her, but she is calm now, holding an eagle aloft, soaking in the chaos. The bird is very likely a representation of the Reichsadler, the Imperial Eagle, which formed the basis of much heraldic imagery of Germany during the Holy Roman Empire. Such heraldry lives on to this very day, in fact — the Bundesadler (Federal Eagle) is an active symbol in common use for public business, with various eagle symbols showing up at all levels of government.
There is but one still remaining which deserves context; fittingly, it is the very last shot:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ende means “end”, and this end card was used in classic German cinema similarly to fin for snooty French films. What is worthy of note here, beyond that association, is the script.
The font family these letters come from is called Fraktur,12 stylised from the Roman alphabet; its letters were “fractured” to achieve their sharp look. The font arose in medieval Germany during the adoption of the printing press, and for hundreds of years formed the standard typesetting within all German-speaking areas, even reaching into the Baltic States (which had an influential German-speaking merchant class) and Scandinavia (whose languages are close cousins of German). Even into the 1900’s, when the standard font in the rest of the Latin-lettered world had become some form of Antiqua, Fraktur remained quite common within Germany and its Germanic-speaking neighbours.
The National Socialists initially lauded Fraktur as “German script”, and strongly encouraged its use above that of the “Roman characters” of Antiqua, which they insisted the rest of the world used under “Jewish influence”. Yet use of Antiqua continued to rise over the course of the Nazi regime, along with other increasingly-Antiqua-like forms of Fraktur (with the “pure” original often being relegated to the titles of documents and placards, such as we saw in the gallows sign forbidding photography). On top of this domestic controversy, use of Fraktur in occupied Europe likely caused more than a few headaches through misunderstandings by local collaborators. The Nazis solved these problems in 1941 by about-facing and declaring Fraktur to be Judenlettern, literally Jewish letters, and they forbade its further use in preference to Antiqua.
Thus the use of the end card here is not simply a reference to early German films, but can be seen as a sort of statement by the band — despite its association with National Socialism (first in sponsorship and later in denunciation), Fraktur lives on, however liminally. It is an undeniable part of German literary and cinematic heritage, and it remains worthy of German cinema.
Which the video, taken as a whole, undoubtedly is.
Originally the concept of the red thread was taken from a remark that Goethe made about the English navy of his day; he noted that “…there exists a read thread that runs through the lot of it, which one cannot pull out without the whole thing disintegrating, and of which the most miniscule pieces are aware: that they belong to the Crown.”
The metaphor often comes into play with the phrase es zieht sich wie ein roter Faden durch [etwas], loosely translated to “it runs through [something] like a red thread”. German schoolchildren are tasked with identifying the “red thread” of an excerpt or short work during their literary education, and Rammstein are hardly the first artists to incorporate it into their works.
Arminius, whose original name survives as Hermann, was taken into Roman custody as a child hostage in order to secure the loyalty of his tribe. Thus Arminius spent roughly half his life as a Roman by the time of the battle, and he had fought in the auxiliaries as a young man, so it isn’t as implausible as it would seem to represent him in Roman dress. The real Arminius incidentally survived the slaughter of Varus, but he did not survive the fractious politics of the Germany he had freed by means of that slaughter; he was eventually assassinated by rivals vying for his power. Thus my proposed interpretation, that the video represents him as Germania’s first victim, isn’t completely unreasonable.
This could make Germania an Odin-like figure, collecting the fallen from earthly battles and gathering them in an afterlife where they will fight one another until the end of time. That may be a bit of a reach, however, given that the belief in Valhalla as a destination for slain warriors was recorded quite late in Scandinavia — well after the original Germanic culture had split into its Northern, Western, and Eastern branches; while the North Germanic peoples who believed in Valhalla would have known of and traded with their West Germanic cousins south of Denmark, most of those West Germanic peoples were Christians by the time we see Valhalla being presented as an afterlife in Old Norse literature.
This image also heavily evokes the end of the video for Du Hast, which has the band walking away from an exploding car.
The Hindenburg disaster produced this footage, which eventually spawned the pre-Internet meme of someone saying “Oh, the humanity!” in exaggerated reaction to a minor inconvenience; see this Seinfeld clip for an example.
This dichotomy is at least somewhat intentional. Indeed, whenever the German military requires armaments, it must open a public bidding process, and when a potential vendor does not win a bid, they have the right to sue the military into either reconsidering the vendor’s tender or providing a legally-acceptable justification for having denied it. This means that every single acquisition can take years, if not decades, to complete; hence, despite — or perhaps even because of — the robustness of Germany’s armaments industry, its military has become something of a joke since its reunification. There is more I could say on this topic, but that would go beyond the scope of the song. Here is an interesting video on the current state of Germany’s military readiness, and the steps the government has begun to take to redress the situation.
It is also another reference to Rammstein themselves, as they had a similar motif in one of the covers for their sixth studio album, Liebe ist für alle da. And no, the pun in “biting scene” was not intentional, but it also isn’t unwelcome.
Many people (such as the normally-reliable and always-interesting Kraut) argue passionately that the Allied bombing campaigns over Germany and Japan were not war crimes — often arguing that the rapaciousness and boundless criminality of those countries’ fascist regimes outweighed any concern for the Allied forces’ conduct. These people, despite their good intentions, are simply wrong. The reasonably well-known Breadtuber Shaun (whom it will surprise nobody to learn I disagree with along several axes) makes a convincing case that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes; along the way he argues persuasively that the non-nuclear bombings of Tokyo and various German cities were also war crimes, architected deliberately to punish the civilian populations of the countries in question, with negligible military value to justify their execution.
The relationship between the Nazi government and the Vatican was complicated, but it is difficult to accept the lazy accusation that the Nazis were atheists and avowed enemies of the Church. Over and above the existence of this pact, which also saw Catholic chantries praying to Hitler’s good health and fortune on his birthday every year until the end of the war, there were the infamous “rat lines” through which Church functionaries helped to shuttle Nazi fugitives through Italy and Iberia to South America and points beyond. Christopher Hitchens was also fond of pointing out that Wehrmacht soldiers’ belt buckles were inscribed with the phrase Gott mit uns, literally “God with us”; this was not itself dispositive of the regime’s theological commitments, but it is a damning rhetorical comeback to the idea that Wehrmacht soldiers were just a bunch of godless brutes.
The liberation of Dachau entailed but one lurid example of the reprisals that occurred across Germany over the course of its conquest by the Allies, who were often appalled by the conditions that they found as they advanced through Poland and Germany proper.
Note also the red laser either coming from or landing on the Earth, probably exactly on the spot where Germany is now, to borrow a phrase from Die Prinzen.
Specifically, it looks like the font here is a version of Gebrochene Grotesk (note: this source is in German), which is still in use in many street signs all over the country, especially in Berlin and its satellite villages.