In 1946, the world teetered on the brink of total domination by the Nazi Empire. Stolen Da'at Yichud technology, ancient and mysterious and vastly superior to anything seen in contemporary times, had allowed the Nazis to turn the tide against the Allied forces. The Allies, in their desperation, decided to make one last bid for victory.
OSA Agent William Joseph “B.J.” Blazkowicz was dispatched to infiltrate the Third Reich’s paranormal division at Castle Wolfenstein. He was tasked with obtaining top-secret documents detailing the location of General Wilhelm “Deathshead” Strasse, the mastermind behind the Nazis’ advanced Da'at Yichud weaponry. During the mission, Blazkowicz was captured and tortured, but managed to escape to confront the castle’s commander, Helga von Schabbs. After her demise, he successfully collected the documents, enabling the Allied forces to embark on an air raid against Deathshead’s fortress. Blazkowicz, along with his friends Fergus Reid and Probst Wyatt, were on the team.
In the midst of the ensuing fight, all three were apprehended and brought before Deathshead himself. Deathshead, a cruel and sadistic genius who conducted human experiments and enjoyed the suffering of his victims, gave Blazkowicz a choice: pick which of his friends would live, or watch them both die. Deathshead left the survivors to the mercy of the lab’s incinerator. Though they escaped, Blazkowicz suffered a critical head wound that rendered him comatose.
He awoke 14 years later, in 1960, to a changed world. The Nazis’ overwhelming power had forced the United States to surrender. The Nazis had won.
Blazkowicz, unwilling to give up the fight, soon learned that key members of the Kreisau Circle Resistance were imprisoned in Berlin. It was while traveling there by train that he first encountered Frau Irene Engel, Kommandant of a forced-labor camp in Belica. Frau Engel subjected Blazkowicz to a racial-purity test, which he appeared to fail, until she revealed it was a joke and let him go.
In Berlin, Blazkowicz broke into the prison and rescued the friend he’d spared 14 years earlier. The Resistance, inspired by Blazkowicz’s return, carried out an attack on a Nazi research center and stole documents that revealed not only details surrounding the technology that helped the Nazis win the war, but also the existence of someone who’d managed to sabotage that technology. Further digging turned up the name Set Roth, a watchmaker imprisoned in Frau Engel’s forced-labor camp.
Blazkowicz infiltrated the camp and found Set, who offered to aid the Resistance in return for the camp’s destruction. Blazkowicz agreed, but before he could act, the two were captured by Frau Engel, who’d recognized him from the train. After escaping execution, they succeeded in destroying the camp and liberating its prisoners. Frau Engel survived the upheaval, but suffered injuries that left her face horribly disfigured.
With Set’s technology in hand, Blazkowicz and the other Resistance fighters launched a desperate assault on Deathshead’s fortress. There, Blazkowicz and Deathshead once again came face-to-face. Deathshead revealed that he’d kept the brain taken from Blazkowicz’s friend all those years ago, and implanted it inside a robot. After a harrowing battle, Blazkowicz eventually defeated it and put his old friend to rest, but he wasn’t done yet. Commandeering another, bigger robot, Deathshead attacked. No sooner did Blazkowicz gain the upper hand and drag his foe from the machine, than Deathshead pulled out a grenade. If he was going down, he would take Blazkowicz with him.
Blazkowicz survived the explosion, but was gravely wounded. Still, he found the strength to issue one final command. Earlier, the Resistance had hijacked the U-boat Evas Hammer and obtained codes for its nuclear cannon. Blazkowicz ordered the Resistance to fire the cannon on Deathshead’s fortress.
In what he believed were his last moments, the famous lines of the poem The New Colossus filled his thoughts:
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning. And her name,Mother of Exiles.
“Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me.”
This is where the story picks up…
