cadmus
Posts: 62
Joined: 3/13/2002
From: Columbia, MD
Status: offline
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The responses to Wild Bill's original question have tended to fall into two categories ... (1) "Stuff, and (2) intangibles, mystique, the underdog, etc. I can understand the allure of the "stuff", but I wonder if perhaps, even for those that think that stuff is the attraction, the real, underlying reason is the second category, the intangibles having to do with the underdog, the ability to do so much by virtue of imagination, esprit, etc. rather than sheer overwhelming material might. And I think there may be some connection between the allure of the Germans in WWII and that held by the Confedrates in the Civil War. Again, the matter of the underdog, the romance of the lost cause, doing so much against overwhelming odds and so on. (I visited Antietam some years back and I think I recall seeing a photograph of Rommel and some other officers touring the battlefield, studying the tactics and strategy of Bobby Lee. Does that tie it together?)
Now, of course, we're generalizing here. Not everyone is enamoured of the German side, or the Confederate side, but there does seem to be, as Wild Bill pointed out, an unusually high percentage of wargamers who are. And we always have explain to others that by being so we are not endorsing the politics and policies of the Nazi regime or sayng that slavery was good idea. (And, of course, those to whom we have to explain such things never quite seem to understand ... the eternal curse of the wargamer.) No, it's something quite different, something we can't quite explain and maybe something that many of us aren't quite clear about ourselves. So we explain it away in terms of "stuff", or even uniforms and so on.
And, many of us drawn to the German side, are not monmaniacs about it. I myself frequently take the Soviet side in East Front scenarios. But even then, I suspect it's all tied together... looking at the German situation from another point of view ... examining again, the ability to do so much against such great odds, etc.
Has anybody counted the number of East Front memoirs published compared to West Front memoirs? Of those East Front memoirs, how many are by German authors? The market is there for those German East Front memoirs more than there is for any others. So, it's not just wargamers.
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Why the Fascination? - 
RE: Why the Fascination? - 
My grandpa was a "Landesschutze" (overaged reservist) in the german 96th Infantry division and seriously wounded near Leningrad late in the war. ...but that´s not the reason I´m so much interested in wargaming and in the german army of the 30/40ies in particular. The truth is that I don´t really know. 
Maybe cause I´m german, maybe cause the germans had much to offer with regard to modern military doctrine and technology!? 
Yes, the AI is dumb as a nail , but to say it models the allied tactics better does only partly apply and roles are even reversed for late war, when german tactics suffered and the allied ones improved! But that´s more scenario design topic... 
... I'm neither saying that any of you nor that all the players who like playing Germans are Nazi sympathizers... but we all know that there's a good bunch of war-gamers with an secret love for the Dark Side. I don't know if that's because Nazi militarism seduces them, or because of those stories about the SS having sexual slaves in the occupied territories... you know what I'm talking about 
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