How to write an unbiased WW2 story

A while back, i started writing a story about a dog who served in WW 2. He was an American canine and the antagonists are Dobermans serving the Nazi party, I also included two British dogs, a French farm dog and a French cat. But the problem isn't with the American, British or French characters, it's with the way i portray the German characters.

I'm worried that i might end up offending my German audience by making the villains members of the Nazi party, as it could imply that i think that all Germans are evil and cruel, or worse, that i think that America is superior to Germany in every way.

I think you're worrying too much. And if you're really afraid of offending Germans, then maybe a WW 2 story isn't for you.

What are Nazis if not villains?

Relax, the Germans hate the Nazis too.

And note that most people who believed in Nazism were not evil and were in fact regular people; see The Book Thief and Avatar: The Last Airbender's portrayal of normal Fire Nation citizens.

Pretty much this.

You have to remember that despite their politics, the Nazis were basically people. People who made choices for a variety of reasons. Some were afraid of the consequences of what could happen if they didn't go along with the regime. Some used the regime in order to gain opportunities, some to justify their darker impulses and some genuinely believed what they were doing were right.

Remember that your characters have individual drives and goals. Remember that and the bias will be gone.

There is a long-standing footnote in a lot of WWII fiction of "Nazis are bad, but NOT ALL GERMANS ARE."

Plus, you can humanize the Nazis by bringing in the fact that Even Evil Has Loved Ones.

Even then only the higher ups in the party and the Wafen SS are truly evil. Your average Nazi party member probably just joined for the benefits. Same with the soldiers.

I just had a thought:

The main antagonist of this story was trained hard to play a role in the war, but was disappointed that victory was still not achieved. He believed that the Nazi army was strong, but needed a different leader if the war was to be won. It's just a thought

Most of the German population were members of the Nazi party because the way the Third Reich was set up meant that you had to be a member to get anywhere important in life. That's usually the case with totalitarian dictatorships (see also, the Communist Parties behind the Iron Curtain, Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, et cetera), and why rooting out a malevolent party once the dictatorship has fallen can get so damned complicated.

I wouldn't white-wash things entirely, though, or you might run into the opposite problem. This was, after all, World War II, where many of the most infamous atrocities of the twentieth century took place.

Yeah. Bluntly put, World War 2 is the closest thing to a black-and-white moral conflict in human history. You can't softpedal that entirely.

WW 2 is more black-and-slightly-less-black, really.

A happy thought. Sadly, when you have one side engaged in the Holocaust, and one side that is not...even the various misdeeds of the Soviets, manifold as they were, really do not compare either in practical terms of scale or in moral terms of intent.

The argument about the area bombing campaign is one I'll gleefully have because it's dumb; it's not that both sides didn't want to (or attempt it, c.f. the Blitz and Coventry) after all, both sides genuinely thought it could shorten the war and save lives in the long run. It wasn't even necessarily wrong, in the end: Nagasaki and Hiroshima proved that. It was simply lacking the proper tools to produce the desired result.

Well, there was the Holodomor, if you want to talk scale. It killed half the amount (roughly speaking - casualty figures for both are a bit wobbly) and wasn't ongoing during World War II, but it's at least in broadly the same ballpark. Factor in that, the million or so casualties from the Russian purges, and other stuff like the two or three million killed in the Bengal famine, and you get a lot of corpses. Certainly, many of those incidents had mitigating factors regarding intent and directness of responsibility (criminal neglect and irresponsibility aren't quite the same as active murder, and it's hard to prove that the mass famines crossed the line between the two in the way the Holocaust so obviously did, no matter how much Stalin and Churchill were behaving like cartoon supervillains during them), but the numbers are a bit too big to go for straight-out Black-and-White Morality.

edited 17th Nov '14 2:38:26 PM by Iaculus