Bethesda Poured Cold Water on Hitler’s Penis Appearing in Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus could have shown players even more of Adolf Hitler than expected — until a fateful set of messages between developer MachineGames and publisher Bethesda ensured the führer’s penis was kept out of view.

Speaking to Noclip, MachineGames co-founder and creative director Jens Matthies recalled working on the memorable The New Colossus scene where Hitler casts a propaganda film, and wanting to surprise players with “something they haven’t seen before.”

The end result is an increasingly chaotic Hitler who does end up urinating in the scene — although, perhaps thankfully, players don’t get to see everything.

“We actually wanted to add another element — we wanted to actually show Hitler’s penis as well, when he was peeing,” MachineGames boss Jerk Gustafsson began. “But that was something that was a little bit too much, so we decided to skip that one. But that whole scene when you can see his weakness, I think, is very important, in combination with the ruthlessness and how vicious [the Nazis] are.”

“The concept around Hitler was that he was going to be extremely physical,” Matthies added, picking up the story. “Like, the opposite of spiritual, basically. If you have a Nazi enemy – or, in this case… the ultimate Nazi – how do you make something unique out of it? How do you make it interesting and something they haven’t seen before?”

This resulted in the darkly comic scene where Hitler gets increasingly irate, eats, vomits and has to urinate.

“I had this idea that… ‘Oh, maybe we just see it,'” Matthies laughed. “Y’know? I was Slacking with Todd Vaughn, VP of Production at Bethesda at the time, and I was like: ‘Er, you think that would be a problem if we see Hitler’s penis?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t advise doing that.’ I was like, ‘Ah, you’re probably right, maybe that’s too much…’ We all need to be saved from ourselves sometimes.”

Regardless of that decision, or perhaps because of it, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus landed as another strong entry in the studio’s beloved shooter series — and hopefully not the last. As part of the same interview, MachineGames suggested its team were still keen for a third entry to round off the trilogy, as they still had “story to tell”.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social