Chapter 19
Nazis, Cardassians, and Other Villains in the Final Frontier
Amy Carney
In the midst of directing the final battle against a joint Federation-Klingon-Romulan enemy, the nameless Female Founder, a leading figure in a militant species known as the Dominion, learns that her allies, the Cardassians, have betrayed her. Not only has a resistance movement led by a former Cardassian head of state, Gul Damar, sabotaged their war efforts, but the Cardassian fleet has turned against them. In a fit of rage over this betrayal, the normally placid Founder declares, “I want the Cardassians exterminated.” Weyoun, her most loyal underling, immediately seeks to implement her command, but he does ask a simple question: “Which ones?” The Founder replies, “All of them—the entire people.” While not wanting to deny his master anything, Weyoun pragmatically states, “That will take some time.” However, his comment does not deter her, and she reconfirms her genocidal intent: “Then I suggest you begin at once” (DS9, “What You Leave Behind”).
Death is a common motif in Star Trek, and genocide is an often-used plot device in the third series, Deep Space Nine. Yet, this particular demand for the extermination of an entire species is not without irony. The Cardassians are the defining villains of this series, but now the perpetrators have become the victims, and eight hundred million Cardassians perish as a result. This fate would have been nothing more than fictional comeuppance if there were not an additional factor. Throughout its every incarnation, Star Trek has relied heavily on human history when creating a fictional future. Past peoples have served as templates for Star Trek villains, the most well-established archetypal connection being the Soviets and the Klingons. However, the ideal of the Nazi villain has also been used when creating enemy species. A number of Star Trek races, such as the aforementioned Founders, exhibit identifiably fascist characteristics, but none more so than the Cardassians.1 The similarities between Germany, especially during the Third Reich, and the Cardassian Empire, which is primarily portrayed in Deep Space Nine, demonstrate some of the cultural beliefs that people in the United States have about this era of history as well as what defines a fictional villain.
Nazis in the Star Trek Canon
As many movies and television shows demonstrate, characters based on Nazis are easily recognizable as the “bad guys,” whether or not they accurately reflect real Nazis. Audiences have been conditioned by decades of imagery in film and on television to recognize certain villainous types as Nazis.2 Star Trek is no exception in using this motif. The Cardassian-Nazi connection hardly represents the first time that the Nazis, or characters who remind the audience of Nazis, appear in this future universe. For instance, in the original series episode “Patterns of Force,” Kirk, Spock, and McCoy visit the planet Ekos, where they discover that a Federation historian, John Gill, has intervened in the conflicts of an indigenous society. Acting with what he believed were good intentions, Gill introduced a Nazi-style government, naively hoping that it could bring order to Ekos. This perception of the Nazi regime as a well-structured system reflected a view of Nazism then prevalent among postwar historians.3 By the time Kirk and his crew arrive at the planet, the reverse of Gill’s intentions had become reality; racism and militarism have become the norm among Ekosians. As is typical in the original series, the trio of heroes set matters right by the end of the episode, and due to their intervention, Ekos embarks on a less violent way of life.
Another notable example occurs in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. In a scene that evokes the classic film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, a lively conversation takes place over a meal, only instead of confronting the issue of race in America, the issue is interspecies relations between the human-based Federation and the Klingon Empire. Near the end of dinner, the militant Klingon general Chang passionately argues for the plight of his people: “‘To be or not to be?’ That is the question which preoccupies our people, Captain Kirk. We need breathing room.” Instead of identifying the scene in Hamlet from which Shakespeare’s most famous quote comes, Kirk addresses the latter half of his nemesis’s assertion by dryly quipping, “Earth. Hitler. 1938.”4 Slightly nonplussed by his statement, Chang replies, “I beg your pardon?” The only response he receives is a pregnant silence. This uncomfortable pause ends when Gorkon, the Klingon chancellor, diplomatically ends the conversation: “Well . . . I see we have a long way to go.”5
These particular cases represent two of many instances in which Nazi imagery and direct references to the Third Reich serve to further the plot of an individual episode or scene within a movie. Similar allusions also occur in Enterprise and Voyager. Yet, the opposite is true for Deep Space Nine. The Cardassians are never directly labeled Nazis, nor is their significance limited to a few random episodes. Instead, their history and culture are constructed over many episodes, and through this progression a pattern emerges that demonstrates the many connections between Nazi Germany and the Cardassian Empire.
The History of the Cardassian Empire
The Cardassians were first introduced in several episodes of The Next Generation, but they were more prominently featured in Deep Space Nine. The Cardassian people once prided themselves on having a rich cultural and spiritual life, one exemplified by archeological and literary achievements. That fruitful period in history was brought to an end by warfare, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, depleted food supplies, and left Cardassia culturally bereft as many historical artifacts were plundered to pay for the carnage. Cardassia only emerged from the turmoil when the military took control. During the period that followed, there was peace, people were fed, and a rebuilding program made Cardassia strong again (TNG, “Chain of Command”).
Military leaders effectively governed Cardassia for centuries, in spite of the presence of a nominal political authority, the Detapa Council.6 The Central Command (the military) and the Obsidian Order (the secret police/intelligence agency) did not report to the Detapa Council, but instead they ran their affairs quite independent of it, and each other (DS9, “Defiant”). In particular, the independence of the Central Command led to the establishment of an expansionist Cardassian Empire that conquered neighboring planets and fought a war with the Federation in the mid-twenty-fourth century (TNG, “The Wounded”).
The most prominent Cardassian conquest was Bajor, annexed and occupied for forty years (TNG, “Ensign Ro”). Cardassian occupiers ruthlessly exploited the planet and its people, deporting most Bajorans to refugee and work camps as forced labor, including to process ore in a mining facility on the Terok Nor space station. Cardassian brutality led to a resistance movement. These fighters constantly exasperated occupation officials, but the occupation of Bajor only came to an end when Cardassia chose to withdraw from the planet and the station in 2369 (DS9, “Emissary” and “Necessary Evil”).
The end of the occupation of Bajor was not the end of Cardassia’s imperial ambitions or military culture. Cardassian relations with the Bajorans and the Federation were tenuous at best, as many Cardassians—among them Gul Dukat, the former commander of Terok Nor—wished to reclaim all that they had lost, including the station now called Deep Space Nine. Such ambitions became secondary when the Obsidian Order joined its Romulan counterpart in a foolish mission to destroy their joint enemy, the Founders.7 The failure of this scheme brought an end to the Obsidian Order (DS9, “The Die Is Cast” and “The Way of the Warrior”). Its demise allowed a civilian resistance movement to gain control of the Cardassian government. This switch from military to civilian control lacked stability, which led to war with the Klingons. Stepping into the power vacuum, Gul Dukat allied Cardassia with the very enemy it had recently tried to destroy: the Founders (DS9, “By Inferno’s Light”).
Aligned with their former enemies, the Cardassians went to war against the Klingons, the Federation, and the Romulans. During this two-year war, Cardassia and its people suffered heavily. Gul Damar, Dukat’s successor, discovered that his planet’s supposed allies considered the C
ardassians their vassals, not their peers. His disillusionment with the war and the condition of his people convinced him to lead an underground liberation movement, one that ironically needed the help of Kira Nerys, a former Bajoran resistance fighter (DS9, “The Changing Face of Evil” and “When It Rains . . .”). Angered by Cardassian resistance, the Founders turned on their Cardassian allies and attempted to exterminate them. Although the Founders ultimately lost the war, they destroyed Cardassia and nearly annihilated its people and culture (DS9, “What You Leave Behind”).
The Nazis of Star Trek
Audiences can recognize parallels between Cardassia and modern Germany. As in Germany before the rise of Nazism, Cardassia was not defined solely by militarism. Many of the greatest artistic and intellectual luminaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were from German-speaking Europe; the works of Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, Marx, and Wagner helped to define modern Western society. Cardassian artistic achievement was no less significant. Gul Madred discusses the vast array of archeological artifacts that demonstrate the cultural prowess of his people in a conversation with Captain Picard (TNG, “Chain of Command”). Another example is Garak, the lone Cardassian on Deep Space Nine, not to mention its resident tailor and spy, who extols the virtues of Cardassian literature during his weekly lunches with the station’s Federation doctor, Bashir.8
Besides highlighting a distinct culture, literature functions in a second way to establish a parallel with Germany. Bashir occasionally reads Cardassian novels that Garak has recommended. Bashir’s reactions to the novels as well as Garak’s counterreactions to the doctor’s perspective underscore specific Germanic features of Cardassian culture. One of the novels they discuss is The Never-Ending Sacrifice. To Garak, the work is “superb” and “without a doubt, the finest Cardassian novel ever written,” but to Bashir, it is dreadfully repetitive. He complains that over the seven generations of a family chronicled in the tale, all of them do the exact same thing—lead a selfless life in service of the state. He does not understand, as Garak reveals in the Deep Space Nine episode “The Wire,” that that is the point:
Garak: The repetitive epic is the most elegant form in Cardassian literature, and The Never-Ending Sacrifice is its greatest achievement.
Bashir: There’s more to life than duty to the state.
Garak: A Federation viewpoint if ever I heard one.
The Cardassian emphasis on duty to the state seems similar to earlier Prussian culture. In the eighteenth century, Prussian civil servants worked according to a code of honor and obedience to a king who considered himself a servant of his own kingdom.9 Devotion to the sovereign state remained a defining cultural ideal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in unified Germany, particularly among Germans on the right side of the political spectrum. It was seen by many people as a life of highest honor, especially when it came to fighting for the nation during World War I.10 When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, it drew upon existing concepts of duty to popularize the idea of subordination of the individual to the needs of the state.11 Nazi propaganda lionized the concept of duty to the state through the creation of martyrs, both those who had died during war and those who had given their lives to further the Nazi cause.12
Serving the state is not the only characteristic that Germans and Cardassians share. Many Deep Space Nine episodes mention additional attributes that link the two, leading recurrent Star Trek director Winrich Kolbe to define Cardassians as “the Prussians of the universe.”13 Both cultures emphasized cleanliness, order, punctuality, and efficiency and took pride in keeping meticulous records (DS9, “Duet,” “Cardassians,” “The Wire,” “The Way of the Warrior,” and “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”). Among these traits, order, efficiency, and record-keeping are not merely mentioned, but they find representation in the historic Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, and the Cardassian fictional counterpart, the Obsidian Order.
It was a commonly held but erroneous belief among German citizens in the Third Reich and many postwar historians that the Nazi secret police was an extensive organization that had the capability to monitor every word a person spoke or action he committed.14 While the Gestapo did accumulate a vast array of records, it was not an all-powerful organization that had the ability to know everything about all people at all times; it merely created the perception of being omnipotent. In order to carry out its tasks, the Gestapo relied on the support of ordinary citizens, who sometimes denounced their neighbors or acquaintances to the authorities. The Gestapo primarily acted on the information that citizens provided and would have been unable to exercise authority without popular cooperation.
The writers of Deep Space Nine had the Gestapo in mind when they created the Obsidian Order.15 However, they chose to show much less about its inner workings than historians know about the Gestapo. Viewers do not see whether the Order relies on informants, collaborators, or spies for information or if it accumulates data through technological means. Instead, characters assert that the Order has the ability to find out anything. As one operative boasts, “When it comes to the Obsidian Order, nothing is impossible” (DS9, “Second Skin”). While such a remark could be dismissed as self-serving, Odo, who is the station’s constable for first the Cardassians and then the Federation and a more objective observer, confirms it with his own assessment: “They’re the ever vigilant eyes and ears of the Cardassian Empire. It is said that a Cardassian citizen cannot sit down to a meal without each dish being duly noted and recorded by the Order” (DS9, “The Wire”). Whether or not this is true, this belief gives the Cardassians very good reasons to remain dutiful citizens.
Thus, the Order is in a position similar to that of the Gestapo. In both cases, the public belief in omnipotence is more important than the actual capabilities of either organization. Fear of repression by the state is as powerful a deterrent as is the perception—whether true or not—that the authorities have the ability to detect any type of deviation by its citizens and to punish them at any time.16 For the Gestapo, this perceived ability lasted until the end of the Third Reich, whereas for the Obsidian Order, its demise comes years before the destruction of Cardassia by the Founders.
In addition to making the Obsidian Order an analogue to the Gestapo, the show’s writers also established similarities between the Cardassians and the Nazis as occupiers of conquered nations. Between 1938 and 1945, Nazi Germany annexed or conquered a good portion of continental Europe. Nazi occupation policies were determined by ideology, including a plan to eradicate all Jews and a belief in German racial superiority to Slavs. The regime expanded the concentration camp system it had initially designed to incarcerate political enemies to imprison racial enemies. These included Jewish Germans who were already segregated by racist laws prior to World War II. Through policies of forced labor, mass shootings, and starvation, the Nazis killed millions of civilians; in Poland alone, six million civilians died, about half of whom were Polish Jews. Finally, in 1941, the Nazis set up death camps and began to systematically gas their racial and ideological enemies. Jews were prominent among the victims as they were deported to these death camps from every occupied city in Europe.17
The Bajorans accuse the Cardassians of genocide. Dukat describes Cardassian atrocities as “alleged,” but he later admits that he believes he should have killed every Bajoran when he had the opportunity (DS9, “Duet” and “Waltz”). However, no episodes have flashbacks to mass murder; instead, most of them that delve into the occupation focus on the labor camps. The camp on the station is shown most often; when it was Terok Nor, there were mines and an ore-processing facility where Bajorans worked. When not toiling, they lived behind a fenced-off, guarded, communal living space, one that production designer Herman Zimmerman described as “a ghetto area.”18 Cardassians harshly punished Bajoran disobedience and insurgency, usually by executing random, and thus possibly innocent, workers to make an example (DS9, “Necessary Evil,” “Civil Defense,” and “Things Past”).
&nb
sp; Besides the use of Bajoran forced labor on Terok Nor, Cardassians are shown to be Nazi-like in another important way. One episode of Voyager fictionalizes the medical experiments conducted in the Nazi camps by physicians including Josef Mengele and Sigmund Rascher by referencing Cardassian doctors experimenting on Bajorans.19 Officers on Voyager face the moral dilemma of whether to use the research gained by unethical means during the experiments of one Cardassian doctor, Crell Moset, to save a crewmember’s life. Some officers, including the one whose life is at stake, are adamantly against using the work of that “infamous Cardassian doctor,” but in the end, Captain Janeway authorizes a procedure based on Moset’s knowledge, knowing that she has earned the enmity of several crewmembers (VOY, “Nothing Human”).
Life for Bajorans under Cardassian rule is analogous to the real-life suffering of civilians under Nazi occupation, and both groups face the question of whether to mitigate their suffering by collaborating with occupation authorities.20 There is a Bajoran puppet government under the Cardassian occupation, and the workers on Terok Nor talk about how individual collaborators receive money, are treated favorably, and receive private living quarters (DS9, “Necessary Evil” and “The Collaborator”). One of the main characters, Kira—a former resistance fighter and the current second-in-command of Deep Space Nine—learns after the end of the occupation that her mother was one of many Bajoran women who served Cardassian officers as “comfort women,” the name Japanese officers gave to the Korean women they used as prostitutes during World War II.21 Kira has difficulty reconciling her cherished memories of her mother, her hatred for the collaborators, and the knowledge that her mother willingly had a sexual relationship with Dukat, of all Cardassians, in order to ensure that her husband and children received better food (DS9, “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”).
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