And so they'll go on wrongly assuming that Rommel was a 'noble warrior' and that sure, the SS was bad, but the Wehrmacht were mostly just 'serving their country' That matters for how they understand both the WWII period but also how they understand their role and its moral implications *today.*

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I don't want to put this specific person on blast - this is a common sentiment but also a wrong one in important ways. Is one game, specifically, going to condition how people think about WWII? No. Is the totality of the culture they consume around it going to? Yeah, obviously.

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Sure, that same person *if pressed* may say that the Wehrmacht was involved in the Holocaust (but they often won't, by the by - to many people the sum of Nazi crimes were the Holocaust and the Holocaust exists only as camps run by the SS and they'll argue those points!) but most *won't* be pressed.

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And so it matters if the first-order popular culture understanding of the Wehrmacht is 'super-capable war-fighters who defied the odds' vs. 'guys shooting unarmed mothers and children in front of a ditch in a tiny village in Eastern Europe.' The first 'what do you think of when I say...' matters.

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Most people do not read history books and frankly probably mostly didn't even read their history books when they were in school. They absorb their sense of history, its imports and its lessons broadly from popular culture. So that popular culture matters and shaping and influencing it matters.

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