On The “Glorification” of Nazis
An Analysis of the Writing and Impact of “The Liberator”
Note: This article will contain spoilers for the short 2020 Omegaverse story The Liberator.
Mid September of 2020, a bunch of folks in fandom spaces on Twitter went a little haywire. A few “fandom scholars” began talking about a particular short story hosted on Archive of Our Own which they thought embodied their reasoning for why the archive’s ideology was a safe harbor for open racism. The situation got so heated and so out-of-control that even a semi-prominent author and anti-censorship activist chimed in that they would make an “exception” to their anti-censorship stance just for this story. These “scholars” tried to shy away from actually naming the author or the story under the guise that it was to “protect” people who might be harmed by it. In reality, this was merely to prevent people from reading it themselves and knowing exactly what it was about. So…what was it about? Was it really what they said it was? A disturbing piece of literature that enabled fascism? That glorified Nazis and Nazism? Was it going to convert hundreds of sensitive readers into believing that white supremacists were “very fine people” or convince them that maybe the ultra-nationalists have the right idea, actually?
Let’s explore that. After all—I think we can do a fairly good job of analysis here considering I wrote it.
The very first things I’ll look at when it comes to an analysis of a story and its impact on Ao3 are the tags and the synopsis. The tags which caused the most issue were, in order of apparent controversy: “Holocaust,” “Nazis,” “Counterfactual,” and “Rukmini Pande Lied About This Fic,” (which was, within 48 hours altered to “That ‘Fandom Scholar’ Lied About This Fic”). The most obvious issue here is the usage of the Holocaust alongside a trope considered to be “unserious” or innately pornographic, that is: Omegaverse. In recent years, the Holocaust has been almost considered an “untouchable” concept and so the assumption here would state that, similarly to fictions on Ao3 set on 9/11, Holocaust fics face a huge amount of scrutiny from those who balk at the idea of having to look at the terror of reality in what they think should be mindless fiction. It’s been floated, even, that no one can write about the Holocaust who wasn’t directly affected by it, which would leave roughly a few hundred thousand people on earth with an average age of 85+. That conflict aside, the presence of “Nazis” in a story set during the Holocaust was only natural, but even simply the presence of Nazis in any story whatsoever seemed to irk the Twittersphere, their affront at Nazis coming anywhere near fiction a sign that the author might sympathize with the ideology. “Counterfactual” is a statement making certain that everyone knows that the story’s premise did not happen and that certain elements of the story were invented to drive the plot forward. Usually this is often assumed within certain genres (action films being the greatest of these) but a tag seemed appropriate just in case. Films such as the Indiana Jones series would be tagged with “Counterfactual.” As for the last tag, we can circle around to that later, as the affront to it should be fairly obvious.
Our next step in determining if this story is a glorification of Nazis should be the synopsis. It’s easiest to simply share the whole thing here.
It is a chilly moonless night in April of 1945 and the commanding officer of the SS overseeing a small death camp in Poland waits for the Americans who would come to liberate it while searching for valuable intelligence.
Rolf Ziegler has two secrets. The first is that he is a traitor. The second is that he is an Omega. He hopes the tragically handsome American Captain who's pointing a rifle at him will find out neither before he pulls the trigger.
There are a few things we can pull from here: “The commanding officer of the SS” — I think we’ve found our Nazi! “overseeing a small death camp in Poland” — Ah! Our Holocaust setting. “waits for the Americans who would come to liberate it” — Here’s our “counterfactual” tag since no death camp in Poland was ever liberated by any Americans. Now that we have our tags, we can move to the plot: “Rolf Ziegler has two secrets. The first is that he is a traitor.” — The meat of the story. Already in the synopsis it is revealed to the reader that the “twist” to our Nazi is that he’s anti-Nazi. That’s not to say that he’s not really a Nazi. He wears the uniform, doesn’t he? He’s the commandant of a death camp! Of course he’s a Nazi, right? That’s up to you, reader. Rolf can be either, but he calls himself a “Nazi” and that is functionally important to the story (in more ways than one).
The introduction to Rolf’s character is the first we have and we are given a man who believes himself to be on the brink of death. It’s immediately revealed that he thinks himself somehow wanting due to his inability to be a soulless deathhound—he is dishonorable for having become a traitor to the Fatherland by showing compassion and a willingness to go to extreme lengths to save the prisoners of his camp by setting them aboard a train which meets then with a guide to a Soviet liberation contingency. Rolf, for the purpose of the story, is a complete character. His arc is focused on moving him from the Point A of wishing for his own death so that he might not have to worry about his future anymore to the Point B of having some kind of hope that there might be more to his life past the atrocities against which he’s been fighting. His literary purpose is mainly to serve as a vessel for the story’s depths, most of which are quite literally surface-level and revealed primarily in his dialogue.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of Rolf’s character is that he was born, raised, and socially conditioned by his status in society. It is stated in the text that his great great grandparents were of Aryan blood and that “Rolf Ziegler had been conditioned to believe that he was honorable.” What “honor” means in the context of Nazi Germany and the Schutzstaffel (SS) is not at all what “honor” means to us today. The etchings on their daggers and their prominent motto, “Meine Ehre heißt Treue,” is literally “My Honor is Loyalty,” meaning that an officer’s honor was not doing what was right or good or morally upstanding but obeying orders without question. When one has been conditioned down to every fiber that this is what honor means, no wonder Rolf finds himself lacking. But even Rolf knows what honor means to Nazis as he states it himself later in the text: “It is the honor of men who know nothing more than the vacant compliance of trained dogs.” It would be this along with the knowledge that he was not able to save every prisoner under his control that would lead him to his insistence that he not be forgiven, that he still hold responsibility and accountability for all life lost under his command even if it were unavoidable. Ironically, this sentiment alone would, by our standards, make him honorable, leading to the American Captain Winecott’s insistence on saving him.
The other most important aspect of Rolf’s character is his ability to handle and parse complex concepts, placing him at odds with the Captain who, through the entirety of the story, holds a more simplistic view which stems from his own background and social conditioning—his ignorance of the type of society Rolf was raised within and the shame Rolf feels because of it. This contrast is meant to highlight Rolf’s position and press it forward as the prevailing ideology that the text is attempting to convey. It is this point that is most plainly stated in his dialogue.
“Is it all Americans who believe in heroes? You have asked me,” he tried, taking in another difficult breath, “what made a man into a monster? There are no monsters. There are only men and their limitless capacity for all evils. I do not believe in monsters...and I do not believe in the heroes who slay them. We are only men. Only human. Neither good nor evil complete. Helpless to the tides we fight against.”
“I am not a hero. There are no heroes in man. Heroes who are larger than life? No. True good and true evil...it happens softly. It happens quietly. It happens in the heart of things when no one is watching.”
Here we can find where a person might come up with the accusation: “You sympathize with a Nazi.” Well of course you do, that’s what the story was designed to do! Moreso: you sympathize with a human being. It is here that Rolf tells us in no uncertain terms that Nazis are not separate from humanity but very much part of us, that they are not some strange foreign thing that was planted on Earth simply to serve as cardboard cut-out villains in movies but they are us. That you are labeled one thing or another thing by virtue of birth or social conditioning is meaningless to your ability to work against those things in order to actively do good or be kind. Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. […] Life in a concentration camp tore open the the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil?”
It is fairly easy to note here that these concepts might lead to frustration among readers. That their entire categorization system for people may be inherently flawed might be a hurdle over which they are not willing to leap. Going further: being presented with a text that is explicitly stating that though good and evil may be easy to spot objectively, the subjectivity of the human eye prevents us from recognizing it through our previous categorizations may lead readers to erroneously assume that they are being tricked into sympathy toward the corrupted ideology that, to them, Rolf symbolizes. This is a misreading of Rolf’s character: he is not and never was a symbol of Nazism. Going back to how Rolf’s character calling himself a “Nazi” within the text is functionally important: the term “Nazi” was, in actuality, not what a member of the Party would have called themselves, being a derogatory term, coinciding with Rolf’s hatred of this part of himself that is grafted onto him by circumstance.
The most simplistic moral Rolf’s character is meant to impart is the concept that it matters not what you are, who you are, or what your circumstance is: if you are good in your heart, it can shine through everything that has made you a villain in the eyes of the world. Sometimes being thought the villain will make it that much easier to be kind and to do good, as there is little expectation and recognition can become burdensome and prevent further action. This has made Rolf one of the most popular of my characters, as there are a great number of readers who find his story heartening—that they might subvert their own upbringings or personal circumstance to do good in a world that expects them to be evil. It is one of the reasons I have more fan art of him than I have of any other character from my entire portfolio and he has been almost universally adored by those who actually read the story. But what about those who do not believe themselves to possibly ever be in a position where the world believes them a villain? Well, perhaps they’re the people sending me messages to cut my throat or get run over by a car. All stories aren’t for all people, after all.
Impact
The very first inkling I got that some folks weren’t “getting it” were comments on the story before it was even finished, one notable comment telling me that they were going to turn my guts into soup. Another was a long and involved nothing-burger complaining about one of the tags for the most part. Most of the reasons people became angry with me about this story were based not around the story itself but the nature of my personality: flippant and incendiary in turns.
Dr. Rukmini Pande (an associate of Stichomancery and self-proclaimed “fandom scholar”) posted on Twitter lamenting that the Archive was now a place where the glorification of Nazis was openly flaunted, studiously refusing to allow anyone to see for themselves the offending material to prevent them from coming to their own conclusions. Misinformation spread quickly, truth followed very slowly after. Reactionaries became up in arms, and I was…well I was flippant and incendiary in turns. The tag “Rukmini Pande Lied About This Fic” was added to it as a response to her downright falsehoods, prompting her to whine about “targeted harassment” with the utilization of her name (which was freely in use in not only her handle on Twitter but in her display name as well). 48 hours later I altered it to remove her name but learned later it wasn’t necessary as the result of her complaint to the archive was, in politer terms: “Don’t start shit, won’t be shit.”
Beyond the complete lies, most folks are usually merely upset at the very serious and very sacred event of the Holocaust having been cheapened by its use as the setting of what they consider to be very unserious Omegaverse erotica. Is it tasteless? Probably. But the setting is an integral part of demystifying the concept of genocide, Nazis, and the human capacity for cruelty. Was it jarring? Of course it was. Probably not as jarring as pure Nazisploitation, but for those who’ve been conditioned into the idea that the Holocaust was an almost fantastical outlier of the human capacity for evil, it must have been quite the shock to see it casually plopped down in the middle of their recreational reading space. Even this, nevertheless, is by design. So many of us might studiously avoid the “historical” section of the library because the discomfort of history trumps our want of knowledge of the past, so history, and discomfort has been baked and served right smack where you’re going to see it and in a genre that might actually make you click into it just to see what it’s about.
“Glorification” of Nazis? Really? This story, and most importantly Rolf’s character, were designed to challenge the concept of who you think you are versus what the world believes you to be; demystifying the concept of human evil and driving home that all of us (yes, you) are capable of unendingly complex acts both heinous and honorable despite and as part of our social conditioning and status in society. If that is uncomfortable: that’s the point. Absolutely nothing here is “glorified.” In fact, it should be the exact opposite: stripped down to its basest parts for examination, brought down to a level that is manageable and within reach. Are you afraid to touch it? Now you might recognize why I am flippant or incendiary: because I have already aimed to make you uncomfortable—what’s a little more on top of that? Whatever it is that frightens you: reach out your hand, and pick it apart.
