Venus

Next stop: Venus!

"After you atom-bombed the bejeezus out of the old Oberkommando at Roswell, the Nazis ran scared. They took all their top brass, all their top military secrets, and they reestablished the Oberkommando on Venus. Venus, the planetary body, Venus in space, man."

―Wyatt to B.J., Anya, Grace, and Horton.

Venus is a planet featured in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and mentioned in Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Description

The second planet from the sun, Venus is only slightly smaller than Earth and is covered by a toxic, extremely hot and extremely dense atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide. The Nazis, having colonized the Moon, have also begun colonizing Venus as well, starting by building a massive floating city in the upper atmosphere, where the conditions are comparatively Earth-like. The atmospheric base appears to be supported by a second base located on the surface of the planet, just beneath the atmospheric base.

Considering the sheer size of the assembly, it can be presumed that construction of the base begun at some point after 1951, when the Nazis first begun large-scale spaceflight missions after reaching the moon. The upper part of the base is modelled like a city far up in the atmosphere where Adolf Hitler himself has made residence.

On the surface resides the Oberkommando, who were relocated there following the destruction of Area 52. Unlike the Lunar Base, the Venus facilities' security is maintained by regular soldiers rather than Space Marines, since B.J.'s past rampage in the Lunar Base presumably depleted most of the German Space Marine Corps, thus forcing the Nazis to reassign their soldiers to compensate for the loss of specialized manpower.

Wolfenstein: The New Colossus

Symbol of Nazi Venus

After the publicized execution of William J. Blazkowicz by Frau Engel, Adolf Hitler announced that production had begun on a new film telling the highly propagandized account of the life and downfall of the Nazi regime's greatest enemy; production was to be overseen by rising German film director Helene Winter, with auditions for the part of Blazkowicz to be held on Venus. Unbeknownst to the Nazis, BJ had survived his televised decapitation thanks to the timely intervention of the Kreisau Circle, who were plotting the capture of the Ausmerzer which had been used to suppress numerous insurrections across the American Territories. The codes that granted access to the Ausmerzer's automated defensive systems were kept safe on Venus, and resistance member Anya Oliwa concocted a plan to have BJ impersonate an auditioning actor in order to infiltrate the Nazi facility on Venus.

Upon arriving, BJ and the other actors gathered before Helene Winter and Adolf Hitler himself in his office, where the deranged dictator was found to be in worsening health and increasingly unhinged, killing the auditioning actors when they could not meet his demands. BJ successfully deceived the Fuhrer and his cohorts however, and once out of sight launched a one-man assault on the Venus facility in search of the ODIN codes for the Ausmerzer. Despite fierce resistance from the intervening Nazi personnel, they were unable to thwart BJ and were forced to evacuate Hitler to a safer location. BJ was eventually successful in capturing the ODIN codes and fled back to Earth on a Nazi spacecraft, having caused considerable damage to the Nazi presence on Venus.

With the success of the Second American Revolution in the following months and the subsequent assassination of Hitler by Blazkowicz in the mid-sixties, the Greater Germanic Reich was gradually forced to withdraw back to continental Europe, and it is implied that their diminished reach across Earth has forced them to abandon their space program on Venus.

Trivia

• In addition to the base assembly, the Nazis also have plans to send out drones to look for possible signs of life on Venus, even if they are only microbiological.
• The atmospheric base on Venus is more akin to a very tall tower anchored to the ground than a floating city. Based on this fact, it can be presumed that that top segment is anchored to the surface segment to keep it stable.
  • The base also highly resembles Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back, with its mushroom shape.
• The Venusian surface has an average temperature of 464 degrees Celsius and an extreme pressure 92 times that on Earth. No man-made equipment has managed to survive on the Venusian surface for more than a matter of hours. The atmosphere is a "sea" of supercritical carbon dioxide (fluid like). Given the extreme density of the atmosphere, which is similar to being a few hundred feet underwater, walking at even a reasonable speed of a few kph would be very difficult due to the immense drag.
  • It may be possible that the Nazis have altered the planet's atmosphere with Da'at Yichud technology to reduce its pressure, thus allowing habitation. At the very least, they needed the technology to build the surface base and cooled suits.
  • It would make sense for the base to be located high up in a mountainous area such as the Ishtar Terra plateau, with a likely corresponding reduction in local atmospheric pressure, though even at the highest point of Venus, Maxwell Montes, the pressure is still 45 times more than the Earth sea-level pressure, and temperature is still about 380 degrees Celsius.
  • The Nazi base is located between 36 and 37 degrees N latitude, based on the info given by the Enigma machine. (Longitude is given as about 117 W, or -117, but the prime meridian on Venus would have been selected by the Germans and not be the same one as in our timeline.) The only highland region at that latitude is Rhea Mons, apparently a volcano, in Beta Regio.
  • At an altitude of 50 kilometers (30 miles) above Venus' surface, the atmospheric pressure is the same as that on Earth's surface and the air temperature is between 0 and 50 degrees Celsius. Additionally, Earth air functions as a lifting gas in Venus' CO₂-rich atmosphere, allowing a habitat to use its air supply to float. The atmospheric base, which bears a striking resemblance to Cloud City from the Star Wars franchise, is most likely in this part of the atmosphere.
• Despite the extreme atmosphere, the player can still hear audio as if was it similar to our own, though it does sound muffled.
• Furthermore, despite the hostile conditions, there are human Nazi troops and even a captain (as opposed to only robots, which would be more believable) patrolling the outside of the Venus base.
• The Venus base has several quotes/mottos painted on the walls that can be seen frequently used by Deathshead in his compounds. This makes it possible that Deathshead was somehow involved in the early making and designing of the base, especially likely since he was one of the driving forces (in his role as Minister of Advanced Research) behind the Lunar Base the Nazis have on the Moon. Though it is also possible these quotes/mottos have become commonplace throughout Nazi Germany as a whole.
• When BJ flees out of the atmospheric base and makes a crash landing on the ground, he works his way up the surface base from the bottom to the top where the Oberkommando is located.

Gallery

B.J. on the surface of Venus.

Venus Habitat

The insignia of the Nazi base on Venus.