BJ Blazkowicz's Entire Story Explained

William "BJ" Blazkowicz has been a Nazi-killing, first-person shooting, kick-ass American hero since 1992. The original Wolfenstein games piloted some of the most popular game mechanics of today: gunplay, stealth, and secret-finding. BJ came on the scene in the seminal Wolfenstein 3D as a captured American spy. The following game, Spear of Destiny, showed how BJ was apprehended by the Third Reich. It turns out that BJ's specialty is foiling Nazi plans to use supernatural powers to turn the tide of the war, and the titular spear of destiny turns its wielder into a godlike being. Sounds like a job for Sergeant Blazkowicz. In following titles like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the ever-popular concept of Nazi zombies was first introduced, created by Heinrich Himmler himself.

Then in 2009, id Software ever-so-slightly retconned the Wolfenstein timeline. The story of BJ Blazkowicz began anew, but no worries, because one thing never changes: killing Nazis. Here's everything you need to know about the new story arc for the rebooted Wolfenstein series.

Before Nazis were a thing, little William Joseph Blazkowicz had other nightmares to contend with, as we learn through flashbacks in Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. He grew up in Mesquite, Texas on an estate just about as dusty and unforgiving as his father. Rip Blazkowicz wasn't exactly father of the year, abusive toward both his son and wife Zofia. He also wasn't a great businessman and took out his frustrations on his family. BJ's lone respite was loyal family dog Bessie. Yes, that's some serious foreshadowing. 

BJ was plagued with nightmares, so good old Rip would lock his young son in the basement with weapons to ostensibly fight the nightmares. This actually managed to cure BJ of his night terrors, not that it improved his relationship with Rip. But the worst trial of his childhood was when he developed a crush on his friend Billie. She was a nice girl, but Rip was a huge racist and was enraged by BJ's relationship with the African American girl. He locked BJ in a closet and beat Zofia; when BJ tried to step in, he was strangled unconscious. He woke in the basement, tied to sawhorses, where a sadistic Rip forced his son to shoot his beloved Bessie.

As one might imagine, BJ didn't want to stay in Mesquite. As soon as he could, he ran away to join the army. All that nightmare-fighting in the basement seemed to serve as training, as he quickly rose through the ranks. He joined the Army Rangers and, well-suited for Nazi killing, was recruited into the ultra-secret Office of Secret Actions. 

The fictional OSA is based on the actual OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which trained soldiers for espionage purposes during World War II. The OSA has a similar mission in sending specially trained operatives behind enemy lines to take down their foes from the inside out. BJ's comrades include Welsh Richard "Agent One" Wesley, Pippa "Agent Two" Shepard, and his best buddy Fergus Reid. Their missions mostly center around looking into Heinrich Himmler's increasing interest in the occult, another fictional plotline based on a real occurrences during World War II. The Nazis were weird, man.

In the long-anticipated sequel to the classic series, Wolfenstein 2009, BJ discovers that he has superpowers. Well, he discovers that a Thule Medallion recovered from a German battleship has superpowers. It uses crystals to access the power of the Veil or "Black Sun," another dimension populated by ghostly energy beings that usually will leave interlopers alone. Usually. BJ is sent to Isenstadt, where the Nazis are mining these so-called Nachtsonne crystals. 

In Isenstadt, the Kreisau Circle, led by Caroline Becker, are working to free the city from Nazi control. BJ uses the Medallion to power some of his good old-fashioned Nazi-killing before Becker is captured by Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse. His right hand man, Hans Grosse, shoots Becker, but BJ will get revenge. He uncovers a plan to use the Black Sun dimension to make a superweapon that will destroy the whole of the city. One mech battle later and Grosse is dead, the portal to the Black Sun Dimension is destroyed, and BJ has effectively made a mortal enemy out of Deathshead.

There are a surprising amount of mech fights throughout the Wolfenstein series. These bombastic boss fights are inspired from the original Wolfenstein 3D, wherein BJ faces down the Fuhrer himself in a robotic suit outfitted with chain guns. Even in the retconned universe, this showdown is a major plot point. Sometime after the events in Isenstadt, BJ returns to Castle Wolfenstein, where he uses one of Strasse's own mech suits to fight Hitler. He allegedly injures Adolf but is ultimately captured and hanged for his crimes. So why is there still a whole lot more to BJ's story if he died in 1945? 

BJ, being BJ, escaped execution, infuriating Hitler. This led the Fuhrer, a lover of the cinematic arts, to make an alternate history movie of the encounter entitled Das Ende Alles Bösen, which is German for "The End of All Evil." Evil in this case was the Wolfenstein Assassin otherwise known as BJ Blazkowicz. The uncontested villain, Hitler envisioned him bombing orphanages and threatening pretty blonde teachers.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood sees BJ and his OSA buddy Wesley disguise themselves as SS officers, sent to the titular Castle Wolfenstein in order to snatch a secret folder belonging to one Helga von Schabbs. Inside the folder is the location of the Deathshead Compound, where the Nazis have been creating their ultra-advanced technology. What they find instead is an empty safe and Rudi "The Warden"Jager, the Ramsey Bolton-esque second-in-command of the castle. He and his mutated mutt Greta doggedly pursue BJ and torture and kill Wesley. 

Escaping the castle and Jager's clutches, BJ goes to Paderborn Village to meet up with allies. In the final showdown with Jager, who is naturally strapped into a mech suit, the team heads to Wulfburg to meet with Agent Two. Back in disguise once more, BJ must pose as a mild-mannered waiter to attempt to purloin the secret folder from Helga von Schabbs herself.

Von Schabbs is hanging out in Wulfburg because beneath the town is the ancient crypt of King Otto, a powerful German emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. He was a big fan of alchemy and was researching a way to create a serum that would bring the dead back to life. But his experiments only created monsters, and thus he had a priest seal off his work and destroy any and all evidence of his tampering with life and death. Tampering with life and death is something that Nazis are totally into, however. The moment that von Schabbs blows BJ's cover, the tavern is rocked by an earthquake: von Schabbs' forces cracked open King Otto's crypt. 

From the crypt, a chemical pours out that instantly reanimates the dead into Shamblers, and thus we officially have Nazi zombies. Pippa unfortunately becomes one of these undead monstrosities, and BJ has to face the biggest monstrosity yet: Helga von Schabbs discovered a massive, faceless creature entombed by her ancestor King Otto. BJ has to kill it and its master to obtain the secret folder at last.

In Wolfenstein: The New Order, armed with the location of the Deathshead Compound, BJ, Fergus Reid, and Private Probst Wyatt III take part in an Allied raid on the sea fortress. The OSA officers are quickly cornered by Deathshead himself and BJ must choose to sacrifice Fergus or Wyatt. Deathshead leaves them all to die in a fiery explosion, but they manage to escape just as the room blows up. Shrapnel strikes BJ, giving him a powerful case of amnesia. When he is fished from the ocean, he is sent to a Polish psychiatric asylum where he sits blank-faced for fourteen years, cared for by Anya Oliwa. 

BJ becomes BJ again only after the Nazis come to kill everyone in the asylum, including Anya's parents. He exterminates the extermination squad and is horrified to discover that the Nazis won the war. All his resistance buddies are locked up in Berlin, so he and Anya plan a good old-fashioned prison break. This is slightly waylaid by the smiling Frau Engel, who compliments BJ for his Aryan looks on the train to Berlin. She's in charge of the forced labor camps. This encounter certainly won't be the last with her and her empty-headed lover Bubi.

Successfully busting his buds out of prison, BJ has another reunion with Caroline Becker of the Kreisau Circle. She wasn't killed all those years ago after all, just paralyzed. Now that BJ is back, everyone wants to really stick it to the Nazis. They raid the London Nautica Nazi research center and steal aircraft and top secret documents. This is how the gang finds out the key to the spread of the Third Reich has been Uber Concrete, which is like regular concrete but uber-strong and uber-easy to use. 

Set Roth, a Jewish watchmaker, had developed the Uber Concrete, but he put a fatal flaw into the mix that made it mold and crumble after time. BJ breaks Set out of the forced labor camp run by Frau Engel, disfiguring her in the process. Set explains that the Nazi's advanced technology was stolen from a secret Jewish society known as the Da'at Yichud and that there are stashes of ancient tech ripe for the picking. If you can get underwater, that is.

The gang hijacks a U-boat, which just so happens to be Eva's Hammer, the flagship of the Nazi Navy laden with nuclear warheads. They take this precious cargo to the undersea cache of Da'at Yichud tech where they recover the Spindly Torque, a strange little sphere that is much more useful than it looks. It can bring down anything, even Uber Concrete. But nukes are useful too, so the resistance decides to recover the codes needed to launch the nukes from the Nazi lunar base. It's the '60s and there are Nazis on the Moon. 

After retrieving the codes and more or less safely returning to earth, BJ is ready for part two of the raid on the Deathshead Compound. This time it's personal: Frau Engel captured Set and Anya while BJ was away. Using the Spindly Torque, BJ takes down a wall of the fortress and goes after Deathshead himself, who sics BJ's sacrificed friend (in new robot form, of course) on him. When BJ gets ahold of Deathshead himself after — you guessed it — a mech fight, Strasse detonates a grenade, killing himself and maiming BJ. Barely conscious, BJ confirms the order to nuke the Deathshead Compound before blacking out.

It's not easy to kill BJ Blazkowicz, as Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus throughly demonstrates. He survives being grenaded into oblivion but falls into a five-month long coma. Set had to remove some intestines damaged by the blast and his prognosis is grim. In happier news, Anya is pregnant! With twins! In less happy news, Frau Engel attacks Eva's Hammer with vengeance in mind, using her air fortress, the Ausmerzer. She tries to make the slaughter a family affair, but her daughter Sigrun isn't cool with decapitating Caroline and winds up helping BJ escape. 

BJ is a little more like his old self, using Caroline's Da'at Yichud power suit to beat down the last of the Nazis hiding out in their stolen U-boat. After paying respects to Caroline, the Kreisau Circle decides to move on with the next part of her plan: liberating America. BJ, radiation-proof in his power armor, hikes into the irradiated remains of New York City to make contact with a freedom fighting force there. The situation in the US is bleak at best: the KKK is happily ruling the South, and the Ausmerzer roams the skies, putting down any sign of insurrection. But BJ has faced worse odds before.

Grace Walker, one of the architects of this new American Revolution, wants to destroy the German High Command, the Oberkommando, with one of the nuclear warheads from the U-boat. The Oberkommando is right beside Area 52, where one of the largest caches of Da'at Yichud tech was stored rather than space aliens, as lawyer/conspiracy theorist Super Spesh believes. 

BJ heads to New Mexico disguised as a firefighter and uses a tunnel under Super Spesh's old fashioned diner to blow the Oberkommando to smithereens. With that nasty business taken care of, BJ goes home to Mesquite. There he finds his old house and his mother's heirloom ring, but no Zofia. BJ's old man Rip shows up, saying that he was doing just fine as a white man in the Nazi's new order, thank you very much. He sold out Zofia for being Jewish, and he's ready and willing to do the same to BJ. Even as BJ commits a well-deserved patricide, the Ausmerzer picks up the old Blazkowicz Estate. Frau Engel comes for revenge. Again.

And this time Frau Engel gets it. She steals Zofia's ring and kills Super Spesh, who came as BJ's lawyer. Keeping BJ sedated so as not to let him do his Nazi-killing thing, she takes him to the Nazi-fied Lincoln Memorial to execute the "Terror-Billy" on live television herself. With three not-so-clean strikes of her sword, it's curtains for William Joseph Blazkowicz. Except it's not, because he has the best in the business of espionage on his side. Set, Anya, and the gang use a drone to steal BJ's head and quickly oxygenate it before the brain dies. Set puts BJ's head on a super soldier body, effectively giving him a new lease on life and some seriously impressive abs. 

The next order of business is rescuing more freedom fighters from New Orleans, which the Nazis plan to purge. BJ has to get drunk to win the respect of Horton Boone, but win his respect he does. Onboard the U-boat, Boone informs the Circle that either defeating or hijacking the Ausmerzer will be key to wresting control from the Nazis. The codes to the automatic defense system are on Venus (yes, the planet), since the Oberkommando is kaput.

Guess who gets to go to space again? It's BJ. This time he is assuming the identity of actor Jules Redfield to audition for the role of ... BJ Blazkowicz. Hitler wrote and plans on directing his very own film about his heroic battle and defeat of the Terror-Billy himself. Hitler has gone senile and kills young actor Ronald Reagan for not addressing him properly and another actor for an underwhelming performance. BJ ultimately gets the part because of his dedication to the role (read: killing a volunteer guard). But he's not there to act. He's there for the codes. 

Back on Earth with codes in hand, the resistance is officially ready to launch the assault on the Ausmerzer. But first, there's a birthday that needs celebrating. It's BJ's 50th birthday, even though he doesn't look it, especially with his Bio-Engineered Super Soldier Body. The following day, maybe a little hungover, the Kreisau Circle disables the defense system of the Ausmerzer and effectively takes over the flying fortress.

The Second American Revolution was indeed televised. Now that the Nazi hold on America had been loosened, the people needed to be mobilized. Propaganda is the name of the game in the  former United States of America, and so of course Frau Engel was giving a rousing interview on the Jimmy Carter Show. The Kreisau Circle infiltrated the television studio to prove that the Terror-Billy that Frau Engel was gloating about killing — ostensibly for the safety of the people — wasn't so dead after all. 

On prime time television, BJ Blazkowicz returned from the dead to put a tomahawk between Frau Engel's eyes. Following this grisly scene Grace and Boone gave a hand-raising hallelujah speech about hell-raising, encouraging the American people to rise up against their oppressors and take back the US. Equally good television, BJ retrieved his mother's ring from Frau Engel's corpse and popped the question to Anya. Despite everything he had been through, BJ got his happy ending.

As we know, BJ Blazkowicz is tougher than nails and twice as stubborn. Being 20 years older, grey, and creaky-jointed isn't about to stop him from killing Nazis. Unfortunately, 19 years after the events of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, there are still Nazis in the world. Though America is the land of the free thanks to BJ's good work, France is still occupied by the Greater Reich. This is where BJ disappeared, leaving behind his worried family. His girls, Jess and Soph, have his determination, grit, and sewer mouth. They're not about to let their dear old dad do all the Nazi killing all by himself. 

In Wolfenstein: Youngblood, the aptly named "Terror Twins" go in search of their missing dad. The girls discover BJ in the mysterious Nazi Lab X, where he tells them that when he killed Hitler, he accidentally set off a doomsday device that has slowly made the earth uninhabitable. Good thing there's a convenient alternate dimension on hand via Da'at Yichud tech. Before abandoning their doomed world, the Blazkowicz family first has to take down the rising rebel Fourth Reich.