writers/designers like Nazis not because they're generic but because they were horribly weird, they were associated with multiple mystic organizations like the Ahnenerbe and the Thule society, they worked on crazy engineering projects like superweapons, megacities, and rocketry, they did lovecraftian experiments on people in concentration camps
the reason people use Nazi Germany in their media is because they were extremely interesting
which is why we have all this media about fighting robo-Ottomans during the Armenian genocide or protecting Huguenots from Catholic necromancers right?
Nazis are used as all-purpose villains because the evil of their movement is universally recognized, not because of this Thule Society nonsense. It's because nobody likes Nazis.
The weirdness is part of what attracts people to Nazism in the first place. Fascism is an anti-rationalist ideology which caters to people's quest for a psychic identity that transcends materialistic impulses. The same dynamic is leveraged by people like Aleksandr Dugin in Russia.
I'm not arguing about what attracts adherents of Nazism to Nazism. Something is deeply wrong with anyone who decided to become a Nazi, and I'm not qualified to diagnose what.
I'm simply saying that movie producers and game designers don't cast Nazis in the villain role because of Nazi weirdness. They do it because we all agree that Nazis are, almost alone among historical western adversaries, categorically and indefensibly evil.
