Useful Notes on controversial figures

Reposting from here.

I recently began working on sandboxes for useful notes pages for some controversial historical domain characters.

Mengele's sandbox is here, Himmler sandbox is here, and Nitti sandbox is here.

Firstly, in hindsight, I want to assess whether it is worth the risk to create useful notes pages for such notorious figures as Josef Mengele, Heinrich Himmler, and Frank Nitti, if only because of their fictional appearances (AKA, Historical Domain Character status).

Secondly, if it is worth the risk, I want help developing said useful notes pages using the aforementioned sandboxes.

Thirdly, while I cannot say for sure about Nitti, I guarantee that the other two pages will need to be locked if they are ever created.

I will say, initially I set out to write a useful notes page for Nitti alone, but someone in the CM thread suggested I make a useful notes page for Himmler, and I contemplated a Mengele page as well, since Mengele has made a fair number of fictional appearances, but I am not sure how many.

Edited by SkyCat32 on Jul 12th 2020 at 11:03:18 AM

I know of one Josef Mengele fictional appearance. He is the subject of "Angel of Death" by Slayer.

He is the antagonist of The Boys from Brazil, where he tries to impregnate women with hitler's DNA in an attempt to clone the tyrant, and orchestrates a number of assassinations.

He is also a mentor of Arnim Zola in X-Men: Chaos Engine Trilogy.

There are 9 versions of him who have been approved as a complete monster, including the one who tries to clone the tyrant.

Edited by SkyCat32 on Jul 16th 2020 at 8:54:56 AM

Don't forget, we've already got a page for Nazi Germany. If there's not enough content for all of these people to warrant their own pages, maybe they can be mentioned on that page instead?

Maybe we could use them to redirect to that page then, I guess, if we cannot find enough fictional portrayals.

Frank Nitti was a secondary antagonist in The Untouchables, and a boss in Road to Perdition. He had nothing to do with the Nazis, btw. He was Al Capone's underboss.

I will admit that part of the reason I started this thread was to see how often these figures were portrayed in fiction, to see if it was a worthwhile endeavour. I think I really jumped the gun.

Edited by SkyCat32 on Jul 13th 2020 at 6:46:04 AM

We are not Wikipedia. We are under no obligation to document every important person in history.

The purpose of the Useful Notes namespace is to document events, places, and people that frequently appear in fiction in order to provide authors with information to help portray them accurately. We don't need to be biographical, and it's probably going to be a teeny bit tricky to portray these topics in our typical breezy, light tone.

So should we make the attempt, or is it not worth the trouble?

How often does he appear in fiction, though? Also, a Nazi Germany character page was not in the wiki's best interest, I assume because of ROCEJ.

Edited by SkyCat32 on Jul 13th 2020 at 10:33:17 AM

I don't know if Nitti's worth it, but I think Mengele might be, especially because if Reinhard Heydrich has one...

We used to have Characters.Nazi Germany.

EDIT: Yeah, I'd DEFINITELY support one for Mengele at least. There's this, and he has 9 CM incarnations. And hell, Mad Doctor was originally The Mengele.

Edited by ACW on Jul 13th 2020 at 10:36:31 AM

I'd say Mengele's definitely worth a shot, he's been in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream as well. Heinrich Himmler may also be plausible, he's been in Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Escape From Hell!. Unsure on Frank Nitti, though admittedly I don't know much about him or his work appearances (there are the works mentioned above, but I haven't heard of them until now).

Edited by Piterpicher on Jul 13th 2020 at 4:43:42 PM

Mengele and Himmler are quite prevalent in media, so I think a devoted page would be beneficial as was done with Heydrich. Nitti I'm agnostic towards.

Would one single UsefulNotes.Notable Nazis page be better? That way you don't have to find enough examples of each to make a page.

That is an option, but I think it may be worth a shot to see how often all of the HDCs are portrayed in popular culture regardless, and if there is enough content to warrant a page for each, then we create pages for them, and index the Nazis on that page. Perhaps we can use their names as a redirect if there is not enough content for their own pages.

I say go ahead and create lists of portrayals in the sandboxes and see how many can be found, and then you can better judge whether they warrant their own pages or whether the umbrella page idea would work better.

I'll work on that as soon as I can.

Edited by SkyCat32 on Jul 13th 2020 at 11:26:36 AM

Throwing in a Mengele example:

• Doctor Von Reichter from Cybersix is the Big Bad of the series and heavily implied to be Josef Mengele himself. For one, his name is blatantly fake. For two, he's active in South America just like Mengele was after the war. For three, he has the same birth date as Mengele. And for four, his clone-son's first name is José. Doctor Von Reichter is the creator of many lines of artificial humans, whom he considers his property to kill off, mindwipe, and toy with as he pleases. He has no particular purpose for his creations, simply making them because he can.

Edited by Pfff133 on Jul 18th 2020 at 3:34:57 AM

Thanks, added to the sandbox.

Heinrich Himmler was a prominent Nazi figure in pop culture, and honestly more so than Reinhard Heydrich in my opinion. Heydrich died early in the war while Himmler was there from the beginning to the end. The "Why We Fight" propaganda documentaries feature Himmler as the face of the concentration camps and the execution squad and he's universally regarded as the chief architect behind the Holocaust.

In popular media, it is not uncommon to see Himmler standing besides Hitler as The Dragon. And many Alternate-History Nazi Victory stories often feature Himmler succeeding Hitler as the new Führer, often pulling an Eviler than Thou on Hitler himself (which is quite an achievement, though not as surprising if Hitler is in delusional state).

Himmler has appeared in The Eagle Has Landed (played by Donald Pleasence no less), Downfall, The Man in the High Castle, The Exception, The Castle in the Forest, The Ministry of Time S01 E03: "How Time Is Rewritten", The Aryan Couple ^note which is about a Jewish Hungarian industrialist who, in order to ensure his large family's safe passage out of the Third Reich, is forced to hand over his business and his enormously valuable possessions to the Nazis, and The Round Up film to name a few. And that's not counting any small cameos like in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or tie-in comics for films like Captain America: The First Avenger.

In fact, if there's a series or a film focusing on the Holocaust, Himmler is very likely to show up in some form or another. Even films about Heydrich will often feature his boss at some point. And I wouldn't be surprised if Himmler inspired the look on certain Nazi characters like Arnold Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark, especially with those glasses.

Come to think of it, how many times has Himmler been counted as Complete Monster?

Edited by Shadao on Jul 25th 2020 at 3:29:59 AM

Regarding the Himmler as Complete Monster question, this has some answers

Hmmm, so far I've counted 3 entries.

Manga:

• Josef Mengele is a member of the Fourth Reich in The Legend of Koizumi. As a Mahjong player, his hands include "Where Are the Twins?!" (seven pairs) and "Designer Children" (single suit seven pairs). As a Mad Scientist, his accomplishments include reviving Richard Wagner to join the team and bio-engineering Mariel, his assistant. She has Super-Hearing and Super-Speed, but mostly is a backup body for Mengele's brain.

Live-Action Movie

• In Werewolves of the Third Reich, Mengele is responsible for creating an army of Nazi werewolves.

I'm going to point out there is a semi-useful Wikipedia category that has some examples not yet mentioned.

Himmler has also appeared in the War and Remembrance mini-series, an adaptation of The Winds of War/War and Remembrance, where he oversees the gassing of a trainload of Dutch Jews during a tour of Auschwitz, and later orders the destruction of the evidence regarding his Final Solution.

He also appeared in Valkyrie and Colonel von Stauffenberg makes it clear that assassinating Hitler alone isn't enough to take Germany back from the Nazis as Himmler would take over and he's regarded as a lunatic to Hitler's madman.

He appears in The New Order Last Days Of Europe mod where he's pretty the Big Bad of the story and uses Reinhard Heydrich as a puppet, pretty much being Eviler than Thou to everyone. I'm surprised there's no Complete Monster entry for this incarnation of the character since he intends to start a nuclear holocaust.

I've also read that the Der Spegiel had frequently labeled Himmler as the biggest mass murderer of all time. And WatchMojo.com placed him as the number one worst human being in their Top 10 worst humans video. Suffice to say, Himmler is almost always depicted as the one high-ranking Nazi no one really makes fun of, not even when portraying Hitler as a joke.

Edited by Shadao on Jul 25th 2020 at 3:21:05 AM

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BloodRayne:_The_Third_Reich, (never saw it, despite I'm interested in bad movies. Even Evil Has Standards ) Mad Scientist Mangler is a play on Mengele.

So, I feel like Mengele's sandbox is nearly ready to swap and replace with the real thing. I may need a little help forming a body for his paragraph.

Also, how many works would you say we need to wick to in order to make these pages worth it?

Edited by SkyCat32 on Nov 15th 2020 at 10:00:58 AM

The "three examples" rule laid out on Three Rules of Three refers to tropes, but I think it would make sense to also apply it to Useful Notes pages.

The real problem with Sandbox.Mengele Useful Notes is that the "Useful Notes" part is still a stub.