My last sentence pretty much explained why we can't just hand wave away these things because they are coincidences: The developers' own comments just make them sound oblivious to all the imagery they're drawing from, but it comes off a bit willfully ignorant, or at the least lazy because they didn't do research on how this iconography might play to other groups who are more aware of the history.
This isn't just about the
intent of the developers. I mean, yeah let's all hope these guys weren't putting subtle racist messages in their game, and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that. What this is about, and what the article was trying to express, is that game developers have the same responsibility as filmmakers to do research about the art and the culture that they are putting into their game. That's important because imagery that you just think looks cool can have a completely different meaning to someone who is aware. On the rat character for instance, I'm not a holocaust expert or even Jewish, but rats have had a long history of being used to describe Jews and other minority groups that are seen as dirty and unwanted. The Nazis were obsessed with this association and in releasing propaganda movies and posters to affirm it, and even the gas used to kill Jews in concentration camps was a pesticide used to kill rats. So a German cartoon rat already kind of evokes this association. But then when the rat is given a Jewish name, well. It's hard not to make that connection, regardless of the fact that it is dressed as a soldier. That pea soup of character attributes still evokes something vile from our past. And this imagery is still powerful. Even as recently as 2015,
The Daily Mail had a cartoon about immigrants that had rats scurrying and it caused a big uproar. It doesn't matter as much whether the newspaper intended to evoke antisemitic imagery, it's that the cartoonist was oblivious to that imagery and how it might look to other groups.
That's the same case with this game -- the creators seem to have just grabbed art motifs and caricatures as they pleased without considering what kind of historical foundation they were building upon. And when you do that as a creator, you risk inadvertently empowering that imagery and risk that context becoming part of your own work.