The marketing of Resident Evil Village leaned heavily on Lady Dimitrescu, but it’s Karl Heisenberg who's the villain that’s present during almost the entire game. But as with our previous character explainers, the following article has tons of spoilers, so come back later if you still haven’t finished the game yet.

Spoilers Ahead

Inspired by Doctor Frankenstein and his desire to revive dead flesh, Heisenberg is the only one of the Four Lords to not serve Mother Miranda willingly, using his genius to do his own secret experiments that can ensure his freedom from the village. However, more than a mad scientist, Heisenberg also plays another classic villain trope, by building an army that he intends to use in order to enforce his twisted view of humanity.

Heisenberg is the first of the Four Lords to greet Ethan, once our hero fights his way through the Village and tries to enter Dimitrescu’s Castle. The impressive encounter features Heisenberg carrying a huge metal hammer over one shoulder while bits and pieces of metal float around him. This first showdown foreshadows Heisenberg’s powers, the fruit of Mother Miranda’s experiments with the Cadou. Besides the regeneration powers all his siblings seem to share, the Cadou also gave Heisenberg super-strength, allowing him to carry the massive hammer with only one arm without any apparent effort, a tool that’s described as too heavy for any ordinary human to wield. Or is that simply a result of his mastery of magnetism? Heisenberg also controls magnetic fields thanks to internal organs, similar to those of Japanese electric rays, connected to his nervous system, gving him the ability to bend metal to his will, a particularly useful trait for a genius engineer.

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As if Heisenberg’s powers were not enough to make him a formidable foe, the mad scientist also shows a natural talent to command armies. Right after the first encounter with Ethan, while the player escapes from death traps, Heisenberg seems to be in control of the Lycans, which is even more commendable given that Salvatore Moreau is the real father of the werewolf monsters. The Lycans, however, are not the only creatures under Heisenberg’s rule. In the last big section of Resident Evil Village, before its explosive finale, we get to know more about Heisenberg’s own experiments, aimed at creating the perfect soldier. While these experiments were explicitly made to overrule Mother Miranda, a lot of small details indicate that Heisenberg might have plans beyond the village.

It’s no surprise that Heisenberg hates his position as one of Mother Miranda’s lieutenants. More than once, during the main story of Resident Evil Village, the mad scientist tries to convince Ethan to join forces so they both can take out Miranda by weaponizing Ethan’s daughter, Rose. Heisenberg is always ready to betray his surrogate family, which he sees as a group of failed experiments brainwashed by a tyrant. The long decades he spent in the village feel like torture to Heisenberg, who thinks it’s humiliating to serve under a woman who is so focused on resurrecting her own deceased daughter that she lost track of what the Cadou can really achieve.

A nice representation of Heisenberg’s hate for siblings is the target photos in his workshop, filled with perforations from the metal knives he throws at them. However, the villain also hates the missed opportunity of weaponizing the Cadou as a way to obtain power. After all, as Heisenberg himself says, the weak must perish under the rule of the strong, a twisted view of humanity that inspired one of the darkest periods of human history.

Heisenberg is never directly identified as a Nazi, but there are some similarities between how the villain operates and the far-right regime born in Germany that spread across Europe in the first half of the 20th century. First of all, while every character on Resident Evil Village has an obvious European origin, Heisenberg nationality is the most underlined of them all. All of his creations are named in German and his English voice actor, Neil Newbon, seems to be the only cast member to be asked to use a strong and recognizable accent. As for Heisenberg’s creations themselves, they are all baptized with warlike intentions. “Soldat” is the German for “Soldier”, “Panzer” the German for “Tank,” and even “Sturm” means both “Storm” and “Assault.”

Let’s recap: Heisenberg is creating bio-weapons, truly believes that the strong should rule the weak, disregards the value of human life while conducting his twisted experiments, and his headquarters is a factory. Even if Heinseberg might not be identified as a Nazi, it looks like the Resident Evil Village designers were at least inspired by that idea. Nevertheless, if we take the game’s timeline into consideration, it’s not even hard to imagine that Heisenberg was around during the Nazi expansion in Europe.

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We know Mother Miranda lost her daughter to the Spanish Flu in 1919. Soon after, she discovered the Mold and started to conduct experiments. These experiments gave birth to her most special children, the Four Lords of the Village. In the early 1950s, Miranda employed Oswell E. Spencer as a research assistant, and as Resident Evil Village’s files indicate, the Four Lords were around before that. We don’t know when Heisenberg was transformed by Miranda, but if this happened between 1920 and 1950, chances are the German man was at least aware of the Nazi expansion, if not allied and aligned with its wicked philosophy.

Heisenberg might have even fought with the German army during the Nazi expansion, as he proudly displays dog tags over his shirt in Resident Evil Village, a clear indication that the villain has some military background. Heisenberg’s dog tags are surprisingly like World War II German dog tags, giving this theory even more support.

Identifying Karl Heisenberg as a Nazi has some pretty nice implications to Resident Evil Village. As the mad science experiments are made in dead bodies, by the union of Cadou and electric devices, we can now say that the Resident Evil franchise has Nazi zombies. Resident Evil Village is certainly one of the wackiest entries in the franchise, which fortunately embraces its B-movie nature til its very end. Featuring Nazi zombies, then, is just another masterstroke in a game that makes vampires, werewolves, and possessed dolls canon.

The more we dig through Resident Evil Village, the more we uncover homages to horror tropes we love so much. Even we still don’t have any news about a sequel to Resident Evil Village, it’s going to be one hell of a challenge to beat this much madness, both ridiculous and glorious.

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