Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVb: Iron Ends This is the back half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb, IVa) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the most popular strategy games on the market today. In the front half of this part, we looked at how Hearts of Iron IV understands industry and production, the game’s economic model. On the one hand, the military production model is interestingly nuanced and complex and the decision to simplify the civilian half of the model, in light of the game’s focus, makes a fair bit of sense. On the other hand, the game stumbles quite badly in that it – mostly for reasons of balance (a desire to make Nazi Germany more likely to win than it was historically – constructs an economic world where discredited Nazi theories of economics which were quite decisively humiliated during the war itself are instead represented as right and true. HoI4‘s economic system (unintentionally) employs the tremendous persuasive power of simulation to create the appearance that the Nazis and fascists did make the trains run on time. Industry is going to remain relevant in this part, where we’re going to talk about HoI4‘s conception of strategy and in particular strategic ends. Paradox games are deservedly famous for not featuring many explicit ‘win states’ and allowing the player to define victory. At the same time, different game systems still push players to think about ‘winning’ in different terms. To take an extreme example, few players are going to define a ‘victory condition’ to be something the game doesn’t even track or simulate. Here again, HoI4 is a victim of its streamlining: it is mostly interesting in having World War II and profoundly uninterested in the implications of World War II. It exists, in many ways, in a world without strategic ends and the strategic ends it does track – military size and map painting, primarily – are, like so many of its other design choices, fundamentally the ‘victory markers’ that mattered most to the Axis powers and least to the Allies, especially the western allies. Hearts of Iron IV thus, in its careless streamlining adopts in its strategic ends – as with so many of its other systems – an unintentionally fascistic vision of history, one in which what really matters is purely military strength and the ability to dominate. Finally, this being the conclusion, we’re going to ask what the implications for all of these choices across all four parts are. Hearts of Iron IV has a lot to recommend it – the operational simulator is very impressive – but also quite a few flaws. Most of all, viewing these flaws together, one cannot be surprised that this is a game with a serious Nazi problem. Of course any World War II game is going to attract that sort to some degree, but we can hardly be surprised if a game whose systems repeatedly, if unintentionally, adopt a fascist ideological position is going to have a particularly intense Nazi problem. Hearts of Iron IV shows World War II as modern neo-Nazis like to pretend it was and so it is unsurprising that they are drawn to the game – albeit, we must note, alongside a great many players who are not ideological Nazis. But first, if you like what you are reading here, please share it, as I rely on word of mouth to replenish my manpower pool after poorly considered post topics. If you really like it, you can support me, my academic work and my public writing, including this project on Patreon! I can’t promise to use your support to buy a division worth of tanks, but I also will not promise not to do that. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux). Email Address Subscribe! We stopped in our United Kingdom run last time right at the formation of the Commonwealth of Nations. This is the resulting mega-Britain that forms, with Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India all absorbed into a single state with the United Kingdom. In practice the game is basically over at this point. Massively expanding my core territory (although India is counted as non-core), gives me access to a lot more manpower and – as you can see – a huge number of effective factories, pushing me past even the United States in economic production. In terms of the war against the Axis, the outcome is, at this point, effectively decided – the question is not ‘if’ but ‘when.’ What Is It Good For? We should begin by discussing strategic ends. Countries in the real world do not wage wars (usually) simply because they like bashing their tanks and airplanes together the way a small child plays with toys (or a large child plays with Hearts of Iron), countries typically have aims they hope to achieve in war. In particular, leaders typically have a desired end state, an image in their mind of what the world is supposed to look like if they achieve all of their objectives in war. Now, war is a tricky thing that tends to get out of hand, so countries often struggle to achieve these sorts of clear end-states, often ending up with something rather different than what they had planned, even when they win. But these end-states sit at the heart of strategy because all strategic planning is meaningless if you have no conception of what you are even trying to do and so one would expect any strategy game to pay fairly close attention to strategic ends. So it is worth discussing the strategic aims of the major powers in World War II – what were they trying to achieve – and the degree to which Hearts of Iron IV is able to model those outcomes and the factors which led to them. But first we should acknowledge that Hearts of Iron IV actually has explicit scoring. When a game ends, a ‘playthrough overview’ screen pops up, presenting a ranked list of countries, with an overall score which is a product of the size of their armies, their navies and air forces. In practice, the calculation is very odd as this is effectively another dead mechanic – the air score generally overwhelms every other component of the calculation and relative scoring often makes little sense. In the screenshot below, Imperial Japan – on the verge of surrender, with the home islands having been invaded – ranks above the United States, actively in the process of invading the home islands. While factory counts are listed on this screen, from the tooltip information, they don’t seem to have any impact on actual score. As far as I can tell, the end-game score system has been like this essentially since the game launched and it is such an infrequently used feature that it has never really been updated. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning here. The other explicit system are the achievements and Hearts of Iron IV, like many Paradox games, has a lot of achievements (293 at current count) the player can earn. That said, achievements can only be obtained playing on ‘ironman’ mode (a single save file, so the player cannot go back and undo bad choices) and it is pretty clear from the achievement stats that very few players ever play ‘vanilla’ Hearts of Iron IV on ironman. The most common achievements are joining a faction (19% of players), researching Construction V (17%) and having 1000 convoys (17%) all of which are practically guaranteed to happen in most playthroughs, suggesting the total percentage of players to ever meaningfully engage with ironman and the achievement system is sub-20%. The existing roster of achievements splits into basically two categories: a number of achievements for utilizing basic game mechanics and then the bulk of achievements which are about achieving specific things (in most cases, alternate-history things) as specific countries. Notably, very few of these achievements resemble the actual historical strategic end-states that the major powers were trying to achieve. Instead, most of the country specific achievements are, frankly, memes: a funny title to go with an unlikely outcome that is interesting either because of how absurd it is (‘Thai Fighters: as Siam have 10 aces’) or because achieving it is a demonstration of skill in the system because of how difficult or unlikely it is (‘I Didn’t Hear No Bell: As democratic Czechoslovakia, lose the Sudetenland, then grant autonomy to Slovakia, then defeat Germany’). There is a subset of players that pursue these, but very few of them are related to the historic strategic ends of the major players in WWII. Finally, of course, there is map-painting. After all, like all of Paradox’s grand strategy games, Hearts of Iron IV is played on a gigantic world map, so it makes sense for players, looking to demonstrate or compare their success at the game, look to see who has painted as much of the map their country’s color. It is the most immediately perceptible outcome of effective gameplay and so one many players focus on. But, as we’ll see, while seizing or holding territory was obviously an important aim of many countries during WWII, it wasn’t the ultimate aim – no one was simply running armies around to engage in ‘map painting,’ they had goals that went beyond lines on a map. So what were they? And can HoI4‘s systems model them? By October, 1943, I have pushed south from my initial penetration into Germany, mostly aiming to move along rail lines in good offensive territory. Carving out the heart of Germany means their armies begin to run short on equipment, making it easier to push through the harder territory. The delaying factor here is that even with logistics companies (which reduce supply weight), my armored fist (now an army made of an even mix of 13 mechanized divisions and 13 armored divisions) needs a lot of supplies to operate, which means that after each ‘push,’ I need to make sure the logistics are untangled before I can set up for the next one, at least if I want to proceed with minimal losses. Aims of the Axis Broadly speaking, the Axis powers went to war with variations on the same basic strategic principle: they wanted to seize territory in order to access sufficient resources to enable a kind of ‘national greatness’ but also – as we’ve discussed – economic self-sufficiency (‘autarky’). The goal was thus not just map-painting for map-painting’s sake, but specific programs of conquest designed to secure specific resources in order to create a specific kind of state – a fully internally self-sufficient empire, based on racial hierarchies in all three cases. The Nazi version of this approach is often encapsulated into the Nazi slogan Lebensraum (‘living space’), but it is important to be clear here that Lebensraum was about resources as much as territory. Had Hitler been offered the entirety of Antarctica or the Sahara Desert, this would not have qualified as Lebensraum. Instead, Hitler’s aim was about securing not just physical space but resources – critically, farmland – for an expanding (racially defined) German Volk. To some modern ears, the idea that the emphasis here was often on farmland of all things may seem strange, but recall that the Allied blockade of Germany during the First World War had inflicted significant suffering and demonstrated Germany’s lack of agricultural self-sufficiency. Moreover, the Nazi ideal – remember, this is a reactionary ideology – placed a fair bit of stock in the ideal of the (‘racially pure’) German farming family as the bedrock of the Volk. Consequently, Nazi designs were directed towards seizing huge swaths of Eastern European territory – mostly for farmland (but also other resources) – and mass murdering or enslaving the existing inhabitants in order to replace them with German settler-colonists. The basic ideological foundations of these plans reach back into the pre-WWI period, but find clear expression in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), so they are very early components of Nazi ideology. Perhaps the clearest (and most horrifying) vision of this end is in Generalplan Ost (‘General Plan East’), crafted in 1940 and 1941 in preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union but building on earlier thinking. This plan – of which the Hunger Plan already mentioned was a component – proposed murdering tens of millions of Eastern Europeans in order to facilitate a mass program of German colonial settlement. Italian fascists had their own vision of ‘living space’ – Spazio vitale in Italian. It envisaged both a campaign of settler colonization over the ‘small space’ (piccolo spazio) at the core of this new empire and then resource extraction from the ‘large space’ (grande spazio) of imperial dependencies. Once again, resources – viable agricultural land, raw materials and so on – were of core importance in defining the extent of this ‘living space.’ As with the German conception of Lebensraum, fascist Italy sought to conquer a region large enough to sustain an imperial state without trade, by creating a system of ethnic subjugation and resource extraction. Japan’s conception of its war aims were only modestly different, albeit complicated by the fact that whereas Germany and Italy had singular leaders with singular ideologies, Japan’s belligerence was driven by competing factions within its government. Thus, for instance, the ignition of major war with China in 1937 was not the product of the central Japanese government but the actions of elements of the Kwantung Army. That said, the Japanese government backed these sorts of actions so I am going to take a view here, as it were, that ‘the purpose of a system is what it does.’ Thus, even if Japanese actions ‘bubbled up’ from junior officers or resulted from competition between the IJN and the IJA, the fact that Imperial Japan backed and justified those actions make them state polity. Viewed in that light, combined with the (sometimes retroactive) justifications, Imperial Japanese state policy is quite clear and, again, only modestly different from the other Axis powers. Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” – the euphemistic label Japan applied to its empire – was primarily focused on resource extraction rather than colonial settlement. The Japanese home islands were densely populated and – by the standards of the time – highly developed, but relatively resource poor. Rather than trade for these resources or resettle the Japanese population en masse outside of Japan itself, the Japanese aim was to construct an empire (composed substantially out of puppet occupation governments) where the conquered populace would serve as an expendable labor force for the extraction of raw materials for Japan’s industry and a captive market for the finished goods Japan produced. The main difference here is that whereas the Nazis imagined an empire almost entirely of colonial settlement with very little resource-extraction-overlordship and the Italian fascists imagined an empire split between the two, Imperial Japan’s aims were almost entirely for resource-extraction-overlordship, with very little colonial settlement. In all three cases, these aims were fundamentally economic more than territorial. The end goal was not ‘buffer states’ or a return to some past territory (even Italian aims included territory never ruled even by the Romans, such as Ethiopia), but rather an empire whose brutal extraction could sustain a certain standard of living for the ruling racial class through the subjugation or murder of other racial classes. Which then leads us to… In order to clear up my logistics situation and to complete the effective destruction of the Wehrmacht, I spend the fall of 1943 cutting southward out of my massive salient, eventually connecting to the Maginot line by taking Baden. This creates an enormous pocket with roughly 200 Axis divisions trapped in it. The pocket is out of supply basically instantly, with the result that attrition will weaken these forces as the perimeter closes and they’ll all end up total losses. Of course with so much of the Axis forces trap https://acoup.blog/2026/10/30/teaching-paradox-hearts-of-iron-iv-part-ivb-iron-ends/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=teaching-paradox-hearts-of-iron-iv-part-ivb-iron-ends #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVa: The Fires of Industry This is the first half of the last part (I, II IIIa, IIIb) of our series looking at the vision of history advanced by Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and one of the most popular strategy games on the market today. In the last part (split over two posts), we discussed how HoI4 models domestic politics and ideology. In both cases, game design considers – in particular the desire to streamline domestic politics to highlight the military aspects of the game and the desire to simply avoid the topic of crimes against humanity altogether – congealed to create a game that fails to accurately represent the history of the period and worse yet errs in a consistent direction. On the one hand, the simplified political model, combined by a game design ‘need’ to make the Axis powers ahistorically strong, leads to a political system that values state power, is unconcerned with the role of regular people and in which authoritarian government forms offer the player more freedom of decision without any drawbacks. Meanwhile the game actively avoids discussion of any of the real human costs of those ideologies, unintentionally producing a game that functions as a ‘clean Wehrmacht myth’ simulator. In both cases then, the game – unintentionally, but forcefully – reproduces World War II as authoritarians would like to imagine it, rather than as it actually was, doing some violence to the historical record in a way that is also frankly irresponsible in the present moment as well. To be clear, in these sorts of questions, I believe the truth is an absolute defense – history is often unpleasant to modern eyes (and past ones too) – but this depiction is not accurate. Now, as the series comes to a close we turn to Hearts of Iron IV‘s industrial model and strategic ends, the former this week and the latter next week. It may seem strange to group these two topics together, but the strategic ends of the aggressor nations were fundamentally rooted in economic objectives. To put it in the classic formulation, World War II was a war for resources. And while the Allies fought to preserve the status quo, rather than obtain new resources, the nautre of their post-war competition, between the western Allies (soon to be NATO) and the Soviet Union, was also fundamentally economic with one of the core ideological bones of contention being whose economic system could better provide prosperity in a post-war world. Unfortunately, in this realm as well, Hearts of Iron IV stumbles in much the same way it did in the last part: the effort to streamline everything that isn’t the operational simulation means that HoI4 ends up accepting as true many of the fundamental premises of the Axis powers, despite the fact that the rather resounding verdict of the war (and the subsequent Cold War period) was that these assumptions – that centralized state direction was efficient, that autarky was a viable economic strategy, that it was better to dominate than to trade, that highly militarized economies could durably sustain national power – were false. In an effort to give the Axis a real chance to win the war, HoI4 is forced to assume that Nazi, fascist and militarist theories about the economy were correct – the very thing the war itself so decisively disproved. But first, if you like what you are reading here, please share it, as I rely on word of mouth to replenish my manpower pool after poorly considered post topics. If you really like it, you can support me, my academic work and my public writing, including this project on Patreon! I can’t promise to use your support to buy a division worth of tanks, but I also will not promise not to do that. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux). Email Address Subscribe! It’s striking that one of Hearts of Iron IV’s load screens – the only really ‘industry’ themed one is this one, evoking Rosie the Riveter. Which is a bit ironic because one of the things Hearts of Iron IV does not in any way simulate is the very different approach the Allies and the Axis had towards women’s role in the war. Ideologically, the Nazis, Italian fascists and Japanese militarists were all strongly committed to traditional gender roles and so resisted putting women into factories, much less into the military until relatively late in the war. The Allies were far quicker to do so, with women working in factories in the USA, UK and USSR very early in their involvement in the war and women serving in non-combat roles in the UK and US militaries and even in some combat roles in the Red Army. As far as I can tell, Hearts of Iron IV doesn’t simulate this at all, despite the very clear impact it had on production during the war. But it gets a neat picture! Industrial War Industry We should start by laying out the basics of the game’s economic model. Unlike previous Hearts of Iron games, which represented a country’s industrial might with a single ‘industrial capacity’ number, HoI4 splits industry into civilian factories and military factories.1 Civilian factories build other buildings – infrastructure, railways, ports and other factories (both civilian and military) – and a portion of them are reserved for ‘consumer goods.’ Meanwhile military factories build military equipment: rifles, tanks, aircraft, etc. There is a third category, dockyards, which build ships, but we’ll leave them aside for now except to note that they function more or less exactly like military factories save for what they build. It is possible to convert factories from one type to another (meant to represent the sort of plowshares-into-swords crash mobilization of the US, UK and USSR’s economy) but almost never worthwhile, to the point that this conversion is almost a dead mechanic. Unsurprisingly, given the game’s focus, there is quite a lot of granularity in military production. Players set up ‘lines’ of production for specific equipment and then assign a certain number of factories to that equipment. Military factory efficiency (‘production efficiency’) scales up over time as long as they are producing the same thing, to represent process streamlining and impose a penalty for the kind of rapid design switching that, for instance, Germany engaged in. Produced equipment goes into a national stockpile (which exists on a balance sheet, not anywhere in the world). The player then trains division templates which demand the equipment being produced and it is automatically shifted to those divisions (generally during the training process or when they take losses; it is rarely worthwhile to deploy a half-trained, half-equipped division) as needed. The military production tab. Note how much granularity and data there is here: each individual equipment piece has its own set of lines, with how many factories are used (the green factory icons; not some of them are 5x), how much raw materials are used, the number of items produced per day and the production efficiency (the green and red bars). The small logos next to the image of the equipment being produced indicate if a specific company is producing them, which can provide bonuses. This is a very detailed system the game cares a lot about. In addition to factories, military production also demands raw materials (aluminum, rubber, tungston, steel and chromium), with sharp speed penalties for missing ingredients. All factories also require coal to operate at full speed (and oil is converted into fuel in a system that we needn’t get into here, though it does matter a lot for operational planning). Finally, it is worth noting there are two mutually exclusive pathways for industrial technology, which apply significant bonuses; in practice researching these technologies as they become available is effectively mandatory for nearly all countries. Concentrated Industry, representing the approach of the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union, offers 5% more raw factory output per level, while Dispersed Industry, representing the approach of Germany and Japan, offers better production efficiency and strategic bombing resistance. For quite a while now, dispersed industry has been the ‘meta’ choice, which as discussed below is a bit baffling as it was very clearly the less effective approach during the war itself. The industrial research screen, with the mutually exclusive concentrated and dispersed industry branches. Each equipment type is thus its own individual line which needs unique management. A minimally capable army is likely to need at least production lines for infantry equipment, support equipment, artillery, anti-air, anti-tank, tanks, trucks and at least a few kinds of aircraft so at minimum that is around 10 different production lines, each with its own set of assigned factories, unique resource demands (which may need to be traded for, see below), variable production efficiency and so on. The military industrial production side is thus a fairly complex game of anticipating equipment needs in advance and assigning factories – allowing due time for them to gain production efficiency – to maximize the production of the equipment that divisions need, in the ratios they need it, when they need it. If I expect, for instance, to be at war by 1939 (as in the Britain playthrough we’ve been doing screenshots of), I am going to workout my intended army size, quickly math out the required amount of equipment on a piece of paper and then proportion my production accordingly.2 Gameplay-wise, it is a neat system which encourages player to think ahead and is, ironically, one of the closest systems to actually force a player to actually think about their doctrine in the real sense of the word: trying to predict how they will need to fight and then building the equipment to create the kind of divisions appropriate for that fight. Picking up again with our run as the United Kingdom, the stead attrition of the IJN through 1942 culminated with a major engagement in the South China Sea, where my fast squadron was able to engage and essentially annihilate an IJN fleet over the course of two battles. That was, in practice, the end of the IJN as a meaningful force in the war, as what was left swiftly crumbled under the pressure of the AI’s US Navy. Good for me, I needed to be focused in Europe. Civilian Industry and Civilians By contrast, the civilian industrial system is extremely simplified – streamlined might be a more generous term. Civilian factories, as noted, build other factories (including other civilian factories) as well as a number of other buildings (forts, infrastructure, ports, railways, etc.), but our main focus here is on their role building factories. Apart from the coal all factories require to run, civilian factories consume no resources and they require far less management. They do not gain in productivity over time working at the same kind of project, instead always being perfectly interchangeable with each other. In practice, the player merely creates a priority list of projects and the civilian factories get to the job of marching down the priority list in order, one by one, with up to 15 civilian factories per project. The civilian production screen, in this case quite a late game one. Notice just how much less information rich this screen is, because there simply isn’t a lot of information to give. This is a much less developed, less detailed system than the military industry system. Civilian factories are also responsible for consumer goods production. The number of factories required for this is determined by adding military and civilian factories (but not dockyards) together and then taking a percentage of that total: that number of civilian factories are then removed from use, serving to supply the civilian economy. Unlike in previous Hearts of Iron games, where civilian industry put to civilian use generated money (representing tax revenues), in HoI4, mechanically, consumer goods represent wasted production. We’ll come back to this, but for now mechanically the player cannot allocate more factories than required for consumer goods, nor is there any benefit at all for having more consumer goods producing factories. In Hearts of Iron IV, consumer goods production has no value: it does not impact stability or war support or politics. Notably, consumer goods production is entirely independent of civilian population: factories do not really consume any labor nor do they actually feed, cloth or house anyone. Instead, consumer goods function as a ‘tax’ to suppress the production of certain countries (the pre-war democracies, generally) and to prevent a player from focusing entirely on military production. In the latter case, as a player builds out a military industrial complex, the number of total factories (and thus the consumer goods requirement) rises, leading to fewer and fewer civilian factories free to build more military factories. The economy law tab. Notice in particular the toaster there with the percentage next to it – this is the base percentage of factories devoted to consumer-goods. As countries mobilize, this figure falls which counter-intuitively means those countries end up with more factories available for economic expansion even as they mobilize for war. Civilian factories are also ‘spent’ to gain raw resources (for military factories) via trade, essentially transferring one civilian factory per a set number of units of raw resources (usually 8) transferred the other way. One missing element you may have noticed is labor: labor is barely simulated at all. At most the effect here is expressed through conscription and mobilization laws, in a relatively blunt way. The highest economic mobilization law (‘total mobilization’) reduces the recruitable population (with a 3% modifier), reflecting military-aged men kept in the factories, while the highest conscription laws (‘service by requirement’ ‘all adults serve’ and ‘scraping the barrel’) lower factory output to reflect the labor shortages they generate. Notably, both of these effects happen regardless of the number of people in service or the number of factories: a country with Service by Requirement suffers its 10% penalty to factory output even if it has no army at all and a country on Total Mobilization suffers its 3% penalty to recruitable population even if it has almost no factories to absorb those workers. As is consistently the case with Hearts of Iron IV‘s design, civilians do not matter very much: not for politics, not for war, not even for industry. The next major push in Europe came right at the start of Spring, with a push over the Weser (using the foothold established in the first breakout) to push to the mouth of the Elbe. If you’ve noticed, my offensives tend to push from river to river and this is intentional: you want to end an offensive push on a position which can be defended from counter-attack, meaning you want to end on good defensive ground. As you can see, I am already preparing to push south, although my plan (not on the map) also allows for a push over the Elbe towards Denmark if AI Germany leaves itself thin there. The Implications of the System Having outlined in a general sense the shape of this system, it is worth going through the way that it generally develops over the course of any given playthrough, because there is a fairly predictable pattern and of course that pattern of mechanics speaks to the vision of history that Hearts of Iron IV is presenting, particularly because it more or less always happens. One of the first questions is where countries make the shift-over point from focusing primarily on building civilian industry to focusing primarily on military industry. If a country only builds civilian industry, its industrial capacity total grows geometrically, as the more civilian factories are built, the faster new ones are built. However, since the only real product of this system are weapons churned out by military factories, this produces a sort of calculation https://acoup.blog/2026/10/23/teaching-paradox-hearts-of-iron-iv-part-iva-the-fires-of-industry/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=teaching-paradox-hearts-of-iron-iv-part-iva-the-fires-of-industry #iron #hearts #worldwar #paradoxinteractive #iva #axis #allies #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IIIb: The Opposite of Love This is the second half of the third part (I, II IIIa) of our long-delayed series looking at the theory of history advanced by Paradox Interactive’s Hearts of Iron IV, one of the most popular strategy games today. This part (both halves together) is fundamentally about politics and policy and the implications that HoI4‘s choices – and its chosen omissions – have on the vision it presents of the history of the 1930s and 1940s. Last time, we looked at HoI4‘s political simulation and concludes that in an effort to streamline the political aspects of the game – to better facilitate the player getting to the ‘good stuff’ of fighting the war – HoI4 adopted a top-down, state-power-centered, frictionless vision of politics which was essentially authoritarian in nature. Democracy, meanwhile, was presented as something between meaningless and simply a collection of penalties. Such a vision of politics, we noted, is hardly required by the period, but is instead a product of the effort at simplification to ‘meme politics.’ For this second part, I must lead with a content warning, as we are going to be talking about mass murder, war crimes, intense human suffering and in some detail. I am going to include images, many of which you ought to find disturbing. While often in discussing history, there is value in remaining purely dispassionate it is also important sometimes to feel something in order to understand some portion of the import of a moment. I am thus including some difficult images because I want you to stop and feel something, to imagine the humanity of the victims, their suffering, their loss. If we do not feel something of the empty pit in our soul where these people should be, we have not fully absorbed the lesson. Because of course the politics of the previous part did not merely happen on the abstract moving of numbers, they happened to people. Millions upon millions of people. It is, on some level, fundamentally disingenuous to discuss World War II and the countries that fought it, without discussing those millions. They were part of World War II – indeed, the experience of a civilian being brutalized, murdered or starved to death was a far more common, a far more typical experience of WWII than that of the soldier fighting on the front lines. So we are going to discuss them and then we are going to discuss Hearts of Iron IV‘s decision not to discuss them. Buckle up, folks, this one is going to be rough. Via Wikipedia, the defendants at the Nuremberg trials in 1945. As we will discuss below, these were hardly the only men guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity as part of the Third Reich. Estimates, discussed below, suggest that at least half of all German soldiers on the Eastern Front were complicit (if not participants) in war crimes, which suggests that at minimum one in three German soldiers were war criminals (as about two-thirds of all German soldiers served at some time in the East); the true percentage is likely higher (as not all of the war crimes occurred on the Eastern Front), probably approaching an absolute majority. (Bibliography Note: Estimates for the human toll of World War II and the crimes of the Axis regimes vary to a significant degree and the following overview does not purport to be an exhaustive review of estimates. Chronologically speaking, this is not my area of expertise and I have simply done my best to relate the scholarly consensus, as best I can. I have relied in the first instance generally on the estimates collected in the “The Geography of Death” chapter in J. Parshall, 1942: Crux of War (2026), 904-908. For greater specificity, on the conduct and implications of the ‘Hunger Plan,’ see relevant sections of A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (2006). On atrocities in Eastern Europe more broadly, see W.W. Beorn, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (2025), T. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2012) and A.J. Kay and D. Stahel, “Crimes of the Wehrmacht: A Re-evaluation” JPR 3.1 (2020). On non-Jewish victims of Nazi extermination efforts, especially Soviet POWs, note T.E. Porter, “Hitler’s Forgotten Genocides: The Fate of Soviet POWs” Elon Law Review 5.2 (2013). On the horrors of the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ while somewhat dated, S. Ienaga, The Pacific War (1978)’s chapter on the topic provides a strong sense of the extent of atrocity and also how strongly linked they were to purely ‘military’ operations.) The Grim Tally of Inhumanity The scale and extent of human suffering – most of it suffered by civilians, not by soldiers – in World War II is so astoundingly vast that it beggars our feeble capacity for understanding. We reach for the simplest seeming question, ‘how many’ – a question vast in its implications and yet fundamentally bloodless in its imagination – and the figure is so enormous that even the best estimates have error bars larger than the populations of many countries. And yet the horror of it, the crimes of its perpetrators, are also so vast that even quite well educated and informed people are often unaware of entire swaths of the suffering that took place. It is worth, in that context, attempting an overview, however incomplete Jon Parshall in his recent 1942: Crux of War presents the following map of the ‘geography of death’ representing the death toll, civilian and military, by country, with larger circles indicating larger death tolls: Map by Jon Parshall, used with permission. You can find full, color versions of the maps and diagrams from 1942: Crux of War at the book’s website, 1942book.com. I want to focus here principally on civilian deaths. What follows is not intended in any way as an exhaustive list, but rather an exercise in setting the terms here, of giving a sense of the scale, variety and physical extent of the horrors of this period and of their strong connection to the strategy of the war. And to be frank, it is simply worthwhile to cover even just the basics, even in an incomplete way because these things need to be understood and remembered. We can start with strategic bombing in both Europe and Asia. The morality of strategic bombing remains a deeply fraught question; we have discussed its limited efficacy already. The US Strategic Bombing Survey after the war estimated 305,000 civilian deaths in Europe from Allied (American and British) strategic bombing; this was actually a higher figure than official German statistics. Modern historians have tended to edge this figure up; Richard Overy estimates around 350,000 while other estimates push north of 400,000.1 The United States maintained that its bombing campaign was ostensibly targeted at industrial facilities important to the war effort, not aimed at producing civilian casualties, but of course it did produce civilian casualties as its architects knew it would; the Royal Air Force, by contrast, openly practiced ‘morale bombing’ (what they would call ‘terror bombing’ when others did it) aiming to use civilian disruption and death to try to collapse German support for the war (in addition to industrial and military disruption), a strategy which did not work then and has never worked since in any war ever, despite repeated attempts. Via Wikipedia, a photograph of Tokyo burning after the American firebombing raid, May 26, 1945. The air raids against Tokyo killed more than 100,000 people, nearly all of them civilians. The effect they had in hastening the end of the war is, at best, unclear. The United States also engaged in strategic bombing against Japan. Official estimates by the post-war Japanese government calculated some 323,495 civilian deaths from bombing, including the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; subsequent academic estimates have tended to be fairly close to this figure. American bombing against Japan was notably significantly less concerned with even the token avoidance of civilian death shown in Europe, in no small part for racist reasons. We might thus give a very loose estimate of some roughly 700,000 civilian deaths from Allied strategic bombing across all theaters. That is already an enormous amount of human suffering and yet at the same time a number small enough to fit within the error bars of what we’re about to discuss. Of course the Western Allies were not the only parties engaged in strategic bombing and indeed they did not engage in terror bombing first. In Asia, the Japanese began terror-bombing against Chinese cities in 1938, before the war in Europe had even started (and in fact had terror-bombed Shanghai already back in 1932). The first German terror bombing attacks directed against Poland occurred on September 1, 1939, the very first day of the war. And of course the Germans also engaged in terror bombing against Britain from 1940 onward. The Axis powers first unleashed terror bombing as a tactic in the war and then complained that the Allies were better at it. It is rather late in the game to deplore knife fights after you have stabbed someone and only belatedly discovered that everyone else present have longer knives. Via Wikipedia, a photograph of Warsaw in flames under German aerial bombardment during the opening days of the war in September of 1939. I have found it almost impossible to find a clear estimate of the number of casualties of Axis terror bombing – in many cases the loss of life in areas that came under Axis occupation was so high that it obscures the impact. Some 40,000 British civilians were killed by German terror bombing during the Blitz and many tens of thousands more must have died from Axis bombing in Poland, China and elsewhere, but I have no secure figure for their numbers. Those deaths will be rolled into statistics below. Next, we can consider what we might term the ‘deaths of indifference’ – significantly unintentional deaths that nevertheless resulted from the war and the incompetence or apathy of the major powers. There are two major entries in this category: the Iranian famine (1942-3) and the Bengal Famine (1943). In the former case, Britain and the USSR had jointly invaded Iran in August of 1941 to secure supply lines to the USSR and secure Iran’s oil resources, which they feared falling into Axis hands; the invasion and subsequent allied use of the country’s infrastructure, compounded by a bad harvest caused major food shortages. The USSR banned any food from entering the territory (claiming they needed it for the front), while the United States and Britain both failed to backstop food supply in the part of the country Britain had occupied. The death toll from this famine remains highly contested, anywhere from 3 to 7 million, though most estimates cluster towards the bottom of this range, from 3-4 million. Meanwhile, a combination of labor and resources shifted to the war effort, the Japanese occupation of Burma (and the British response to it) which closed routes for food shipment and the prioritization of food shipments to Great Britain itself – which was, we must note, also facing food rationing – resulted in severe food shortages in South Asia, worst in Bengal but felt in British India as well. Britain failed to allocate sufficient shipping to relieve the crisis, prioritizing the on-going Battle of the Atlantic and so Churchill and his war cabinet bear some clear responsibility for these deaths too. Once again, the death toll remains contentious, but the scholarly consensus tends to be in the 2-3 million range. Thus the combined indifference by the western allies (to be blunt, chiefly Britain, but also the USSR and United States) to starving peoples over whom they had a fairly clear duty of care may have contributed to a total death toll of 5 to 7 million deaths.2 The Axis powers also starved huge numbers of people in territories they occupied. Japanese occupation and continued fighting caused a major famine in Henan province in China in 1942 with an estimated death toll between 2 to 3 million dead. Imperial Japanese conquests elsewhere also severed food routes and Japan was even less willing to divert any of its shipping towards the relief of conquered peoples than the allies, leading to famine in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies which – combined with brutal occupation and forced labor policies – resulted in 3.5 to 6 million deaths. Germany meanwhile employed hunger as a deliberate weapon of genocide, which will be discussed below. Which brings us, at last, to the largest total by far – the crimes of malice. The German Wehrmacht and SS entered Poland at the very beginning of the war in Europe already with specialized death squads intending to murder Polish leaders, intellectuals, clerics, teachers and, of course, Jews. It should be stressed that even at this point, the Wehrmacht was fully complicit and both facilitated and participated in war crimes including the mass murder of civilians. So once again, for everyone in the back, the regular German military, the Wehrmacht was fully involved and complicit in Nazi war crimes, alongside the SS and the rest of the Nazi regime. And those crimes were astoundingly vast. Nazi death squads, the Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht wherever it went (with its full compliance), murdering as they went. Others – Jews, Roma, Soviet POWs, Soviet and Polish civilians – were forced into brutal labor or extermination camps and there murdered in the millions. Yet more were intentionally starved as the Nazi regime used starvation as an intentional weapon of genocide as part of the ‘Hunger Plan,’ the execution and implications of which were inextricably wound through German military and economic planning as Adam Tooze notes in The Wages of Destruction (2006). Via Wikipedia, Hungarian Jews being sorted on arrival to the death camp at Auschwitz. Nearly all of these people were murdered. The numbers defy comprehension. The Nazis murdered roughly 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust; non-Jewish victims of Nazi extermination efforts were at least as numerous.3 Nazi Einsatzgruppen murdered roughly 1,350,000 people in the territory of the USSR alone already by the end of 1942. The Nazi Hunger Plan (alongside active extermination efforts) resulted in the deaths of roughly 4.2 million civilians and 3.3 million Soviet POWs, essentially murder by starvation. The plan had intended to murder more – as many as forty-five million people. Estimates for the total number of Soviet civilians killed by the Nazis range upwards from ten million.4 While the gas chambers of Nazi extermination camps are rightly infamous, most of the Nazis’ murders were done with bullets. The scale of Nazi murder is so vast it is difficult to describe any part of it without feeling like one risks minimizing the other parts of it, but all of it was of a piece with the murderous Nazi ideology and all of it was accomplished with the active, knowing participation of the Wehrmacht as both a direct function and an explicit goal of the Nazi war effort. Via Wikipedia, German soldiers standing over the bodies of Polish farmers they have murdered. Fascist Italy’s scope for atrocity was smaller, but Mussolini’s government added its share of horror. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia (which is on-going at the start of Hearts of Iron IV‘s time frame) killed an estimated 382,000 civilians: roughly 17,000 from terror bombing, another 65,000 murdered directly and a further 300,000 who died of starvation as a result of the war. Italian occupation in then-Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania also brought starvation, mass executions, and civilians herded into concentration camps under abominable conditions. And Italy, of course, cooperated with the Nazi attempt to murder the Jews. Via Wikipedia, soldiers of a Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine in 1942, murdering a Jewish family. The Soviet Union also carried out substantial numbers of war crimes and atrocities, although at a much smaller scale than the Axis. Most infamous was the murder of 21,857 Poles as part of the Katyn Massacre, carried out in 1940 while the USSR was still allied with Nazi Germany, but this was hardly the only such incident. It is important to remember when considering the moral implications of these regimes that both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union entered Poland in 1939 w https://acoup.blog/2026/10/16/teaching-paradox-hearts-of-iron-iv-part-iiib-the-opposite-of-love/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=teaching-paradox-hearts-of-iron-iv-part-iiib-the-opposite-of-love #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Gap Week: October 9, 2026 Hey, folks, no post this week as my work schedule has been pretty heavily disrupted and other tasks had to come first. Patrons will already know this background, but over the summer, we had a water leak issue in our basement (where my home office is), which wasn’t too bad but required pulling up a bunch of flooring and we are now at long last at the point of being able to put down new flooring. But that means I have had to essentially move everything in my office space and a ton of other things (our basement is about a third of our house’s square footage), including around 1,500 books – which both ate up a lot of time but also has made it harder to do a lot of things (given that my books are not on shelves but in alphabetized boxes). Fortunately, the bulk of the work should be done this week, so I expect to be back on schedule next week with the next part of the Hearts of Iron series. In the meantime, there is a new Pasts Imperfect to read if you are anxious for something ancient-history to read. And, as recompense for the missed post, here is a bonus cat picture, with both cats (who are also annoyed that they cannot hang out in the office). Ollie (top) and Percy (bottom) chilling out in floor-repair-imposed exile, alongside my Lego Himeji Castle. The basement that has to be refloored makes up something close to a third of our total square footage, so you may well imagine that clearing it for that process has meant the entire rest of the house is, as you see here, buried in boxes. https://acoup.blog/2026/10/09/gap-week-october-9-2026/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gap-week-october-9-2026