There is a couple of very good reasons for that on several levels. While I will point to several of them that are related to cultures of memory, the portrayal of WWII in popular media, the historic problems behind such an endeavor etc. the one that looms large over all of them and that always ties into it is the financial one. While this isn't the forum to discuss this in-depth and also not exactly my expertise, I strongly assume that companies who produce these games have made assessments and think that that such a portrayal would have in one or another a negative impact on sales. It's important to keep this in mind: As proven many times, these are companies that want to make money from selling consumers a product and both artistic merit, historical accuracy and other production values figure strongly in this calculation.

So, first of all, games like CoD especially, rely a lot on re-creating popular images, particularly from the medium of film, as something the player can experience. This is evident in CoD1 which borrows heavily from Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers and, for its Soviet Campaign, Enemy at the Gates. That game in particular is a virtual rip-off of these media products, enabling the consumer to themselves experience the impressive images they are so familiar with from other WWII media.

In a similar way, these products do not just recreate the images from these movies, they also re-create their message, if you will, about the realities of WWII and the people who fought in it. Despite there being very little story telling in the first two CoDs, the general feel of the campaign is very similar to the feel the above mentioned movies want to convey about the experience of WWII for the people who fought in it:

The American Campaign is basically a "greatest generation" narrative about how average Joe from small town USA takes up arms to defend liberty and freedom akin to Saving Private Ryan where Tom Hanks' character background as a schoolteacher that coaches the baseball team and is afraid his wife won't recognize him anymore essentially serves to enforce this narrative. Similarly, the new CoD in its campaign is to enforce a message about camaraderie and friendship in times of war by people who have been thrown together by the army etc. pp.

The Soviet Campaign on the other hand, also especially in the first CoD, has a different feel to it as it tries to portray your experience as being this small cog in a mighty and uncaring military machine yet still being able of doing things that fall under what we have become to understand as heroism, even if that is unthanked at best or exploited by said uncaring military machine at worst. This too, aligns closely with Enemy at the Gates, which revolves strongly around this theme even if dealing with someone celebrated by the Soviets like Zaitzev.

Having established that these games strongly rely on the re-production of common cultural tropes and conventions of the portrayal and feel of WWII, we need to ask what media would be available to build a German perspective from. And the answer to that is not really easy. At the time when the first CoD game appeared, the only major media products that enjoyed recognition in the US and portrayed the German perspective of the war were Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot from 1997, Joseph Vilsmaier's Stalingrad from 1993, and Sam Peckinpah's 1977 movie Cross of Iron, incidentally all of them (at least partly) German productions.

Reviewing these movies it becomes pretty clear why they are unsuited to be recreated in form of a video game to be experienced: Das Boot is pretty obvious as it doesn't involve land combat and as a movie is strongly focused on the dynamics, desperation, and group relations of people on a submarine. Stalingrad and Cross of Iron on the other hand do involve land combat but their feel if you will is unlike the tropes taken from Saving Private Ryan and Enemy at the Gates pretty much impossible to import into a video game with minimal story telling and would even with more story telling present a challenge: Cross of Iron starts right off with the main character Sergeant Rolf Steiner being ordered by his superior, who only came to the Eastern Front to win an Iron Cross, to execute a young Russian boy. It further involves soldiers being blackmailed for their homosexuality, the bitten off genitals of a rapist, friendly fire and complete sense of despair and hopelessness. Stalingrad too is a movie about despair and hopelessness with main characters killed off one after another, desertion being involved and a general feel of complete and utter futility.

All of these things do not lend themselves to being re-created in video games. Except for those games scorned as "walking simulators", conveying despair and desperation is hard task, especially in a genre that both on film and even more so in video games relies on narratives of triumph and victory over a seemingly insurmountable foe. CoD as a product is designed to make you feel good, strong, and like you have overcome something in service of a righteous cause, from freedom and liberty to camaraderie. The German perspective is unable to offer such.

As evident by the above mentioned movies as well as other portrayals – and here is the importance of these production being German – from the German perspective the Second World War as conveyed by popular media was an ultimate futile effort in service of an evil regime that amassed mounts and mounts of dead people and forced them into desperation and destitute. Aside media produced by Nazis, there is no media portrayal of the German perspective that emphasizes heroism and triumph when it comes to the portrayal of WWII.

And this also brings us to the actual history of the war, which ties directly into why Cross if Iron starts immediately with Steiner grappling with the fact that he is ordered to commit a war crime. While for the allies the Second World War was a war of defense against a regime that sought to enslave and murder millions of people – and thus can be experienced as a a story of heroism and triumph –, from the German perspective, it was a war fought to enslave and murder millions of people.

The Wehrmacht, the army was an institution that was responsible and complicit in some of the most shocking crimes of the last century and its individual soldiers were far from removed from it but rather instrumental in committing these crimes. I have written about this before here, here, and here but the gist of it is that the Wehrmacht was an institution of the Nazi state and as such played an important role in realizing the Nazi agenda. They let millions of POWs starve, implemented policies of ethnic cleansing, and fought the war against the Soviet Union as a war of annihilation that involved the wholesale murder of the population of whole regions as the "normal" everyday activity of their troops.

And the Wehrmacht soldiers bought into it on the whole. While impossible to say just how many were directly involved in war crimes – estimates range at about 80% –, the above linked protocols used by Welzer and Römer show the massive support many of these murderous and criminal policies enjoyed among Wehrmacht troops. The German Wehrmacht was in essence a military responsible and complicit in massive criminal activity made up by troops who en large supported and carried out these criminal activities.

And while in movies like Iron Cross you can have the protagonist Steiner grapple with this, who would want to play a video game that consists of having to send Russian civilians into a minefield in order to clear, shoot the Jewish population of villages, guard starving POWs, and send people on death marches except a sociopath?

There is just no simple way to transform this into something of a clean narrative and experience because the war the Germans fought was criminal in its conduct and criminal in its goals of genocide and ethnic cleansing. There is no sidestepping that every bullet fired was in service of the regime of Hitler and that doesn't translate well into a product like CoD that is not primary designed to convey something about the human condition but be a foremost pleasurable experience.

Strategy games have an easier time with this because they can clean up the experience since you are this floating head high up in the sky but once you are put into a German soldiers shoes, this issues become immediately apparent if you want to make a game that is not merely a product glorifying a murderous regime and its genocidal agenda by portraying a clean version of it.

So, in essence, there is no German perspective for lack of potential media products to rely on as base for that, which is related to the history of the war in that the war the Germans fought was a war that was criminal in both conduct and goal and virtually every German who fought in it being complicit in that.

Thanks... That was very detailed :D