Even by the standards of Nazi officials, he's noted as being the worst in the camp.
This will be my final Pure Evil proposal, and after this, I'll be leaving FANDOM. Will say, I was originally not going to do this, but since I was going through this game to do my last proposal and it was discussed that he counted, I felt like I could do this one since he is a minor character who only appears in one chapter of the game and can be dealt with in less than five minutes.
With that said, let's start.
What's the work?
Wolfenstein: The New Order is a 2014 action adventure first-person shooter that was made by Bethesda and Machine Games. It is set in the year of 1960, in an alternate world where instead of the Allies winning World War II, the Nazi Germany was able to find highly advanced technology that allowed them to create weapons to win the war, with them now ruling over the entire world. It is up to the main character, William Joseph Blazkowicz, and his group of friends and allies, the Kreisau Circle, to bring an end to the tyranny their world is going through.
Who is he/What has he done?
The Knife is the SS-Untersturmführer of Camp Belica, a concentration camp located in Northern Croatia. He is feared by the prisoners of the camp for his habit to bring prisoners into his laboratory, torture them with a knife, earning him his nickname, before incinerating their bodies after killing them. As noted by one of the prisoners, while all the guards in the camp are dangerous, the Knife is the one who will decide to kill you just by a simple look.
When B.J. infiltrates the camp, Set tells him that in order to get to Block 6 and find the controls for the giant robot that guards the camp and thus be able to escape, they needed to deactivate the security systems that were controlled in the labratory of Block 4, the same where the Knife was. When B.J. sneaks in, he is attacked by suprised by the Knife, who begins to torture him, and after stabbing him to near death, has one of his soldiers throw him to an incinerator.
Despite this, B.J. is able to survive and escape, with him then being able to get to the Knife, who was just finished torturing another prisoner to death, and killing him, bringing an end to his cruelty against the prisoners, with a woman even thanking him for doing the right thing.
Mitigating Factors
Nothing. He is defined by both his sadism in torturing prisoners and his believes of racial supremacy that make him think he is above the prisoners in the camp, whom he refers as "insects" and "cockroaches". There's no indication from his screentime that he has anything positive, so here, there's no issue.
Heinous Standards
These are just some of the Knife's victims.
Now, here's the thing, Wolfenstein has a very high heinous standards, with us getting to see many Nazis and their colaborators who are utterly awful people, for example Deathshead who is responsible for the Nazis winning World War II which caused the deaths of millions around the world, the creation of concentration camps and prisons where people are tortured and executed en masse, and even entire regions of the globe are sealed so they can throw all the people they deem unfit to their society standards and live in terrible conditions until they are decided to be wiped out. Deathshead himself also brutally tortures and experiments on hundreds of people, having mentally ill individuals from an asylum be kidnapped and brought to him for experiments and then having almost all of the people in it killed once they served their purpose. The most screwed up thing we see Deathshead do onscreen is brutally removing the brain of one of B.J.'s friends (either Fergus or Wyatt depending on the player's choice), and 14 years later when confronted by B.J. putting said friend's brain in a machine and force him to try to kill B.J., with them saying that they have no control over their actions and ask B.J. to kill them to bring an end to their suffering.
Then there's Irene Engel, who, during her time as the kommandant, had her prisoners whipped for her own enjoyment and to assert her authority over them, with her having killed many people in the camp, including implicitly even an infant, with the biggest example being when she had all of Block 4 killed except Set and B.J. after the latter broke into Block 6 to take the controls of the camp's guard machine, Herr Faust. After getting her jaw broken by Herr Faust, Engel would try to shoot all the escaping prisoners, killing several of them in the process. Getting promoted by Deathshead, Engel led an attack on the Kreisau Circle's base and killed a significant portion of them. Engel would later get promoted and start leading operations to hunt down "terrorist groups", killing dozens of people who fought back against the Nazi regime. She would lead an attack on the Kreisau's U-Boat and kill dozens of their members, later decapitating Caroline in front of B.J. and Wyatt/Fergus, and later killing Super Spech while then putting her gun through B.J.'s mouth so he could "taste the bullet's gunpowder". Following B.J.'s seeming death, Engel would lead an operation to wipe out the people of New Orleans, killing hundreds.
Another character that is worth bringing up is the the Furher himself who was behind the creation of the Nazi party, which lead to the death and suffering caused by the regime both before and decades after World War 2. Onscreen, Hitler kills three actors due to not thinking they didn't fit for the role in his film or assuming they were a jew, and as revealed in Youngblood, had a device that would destroy the world through devastating weather in case he died, which is shown to be what is happening by the time of that game.
In general, there are several Nazi figureheads who have killed many people. In spite of this, the Knife is able to stand out both through limited resourses and screentime, as he is a doctor in a block of a concentration camp and isn't even close to being among the highest members of the regime, and as just a side villain in a chapter of a single game, he has a high kill count on the dozens which he got by torturing prisoners to death before incinerating their bodies, and is noted by the prisoners to be the worst among the Nazi officials there since he can just simply choose to kill you just by looking at you, and thus everyone tries to avoid him.
So, even with the high heinous standards, I think his significantly low screentime and lower resourses than the main villains, his torture and killing of dozens of people, and him being noted as the worst among the Nazis in the concentration camp, make him enough to stands out.
Final Verdict?
I think he's fine.