Helmut Zemo (Marvel Cinematic Universe)

"I admit it. This war is my doing. The Avengers destroyed my home. They stole my family from me. So what better revenge than to have them fight each other, and tear themselves apart?"

- Helmut Zemo confessing his true plan to destroy the Avengers

Helmut Zemo is the main antagonist of the 2016 Marvel Cinematic Universe film, ''Captain America: Civil War. ''

He is a former soldier-turned-terrorist mastermind who is bent on destroying the Avengers to avenge his family's demise. As he knew that he would not be able to head them on, he devised a scheme to manipulate the Avengers into fighting and killing each other.

He is portrayed by Daniel Brühl, who also portrayed Fredrick Zoller in Inglorious Basterds.

Origins
Helmut Zemo is a former Slovakian soldier who lived a happy life with his family in Sokovia. However, his happiness was cut short when the evil robot Ultron destroyed Sokovia, which tragically cost the lives of Zemo's family. Though Ultron was defeated and killed by the Avengers, Zemo angrily blames the Avengers for causing his family's death, and vowed to destroy the team at all costs.

However, he knew that he would not be able to fight them personally, as people more powerful than him had tried that and failed. So he devised a plan to manipulate the Avengers to turn against each other. After Black Widow released multiple coded HYDRA files after the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D., Zemo spent all his time trying to decode them. He eventually learned about a secret facility in which HYDRA created the Winter Soldier and that HYDRA used trigger words which would ensure his complete obedience. From the files Black Widow released, Zemo found out where the leader of the Winter Soldier facility lived.

Captain America: Civil War
At the beginning of the movie, Zemo drives to the home of the former HYDRA agent, deliberately crashing his own car into the man's car. Acting as if it was an accident, Zemo rings at the agent's door claiming that he wants to peacefully settle the matter. However, once the man opens the door, Zemo knocks him out and hangs him upside down over a sink which slowly fills with water. While the water rises, Zemo smashes a wall in the agent's house in with a sledgehammer. In a secret storage, he finds a book which contain the trigger words to activate the Winter Soldier. With the book, he returns to the HYDRA agent and asks for the location of the facility. However, the agent refuses to talk and is thus subsequently drowned by Zemo.

As the next step of his master plan, Zemo bombs the UN meeting in Vienna, resulting the deaths of the Wakadan king T'Chaka and several others. He then proceeds to frame the Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes for the bombing, causing T'Chacka's son Prince T'Challa (the Black Panther) to personally hunt down Bucky to avenge his father's death. This was coincided when signing was put into place for the Sokovia Accords, a framework that would place enhanced people under government oversight, causing a friction between two factions of the Avengers; one led by Captain America against the accords, and the other led by Iron Man supporting the accords.

Barnes, as well as Captain America and Sam Wilson are arrested by a special task force and brought to a Secret Service Office in Berlin. All this happens in accordance with Zemo's plans. Zemo, who had previously killed a psychiatrist who was supposed to make a psychiatric evaluation on Barnes, takes the man's place and triggers Barnes with the HYDRA key words. Barnes is forced to reveal to Zemo the location of the HYDRA base, revealing that it is in Siberia. To escape the building, Zemo releases Barnes who attacks Rogers and Wilson when they try to arrest Zemo. Rogers eventually manages to free Barnes from the trigger word's influence but Zemo has already escaped and headed for Siberia.

Around the same time, Romanoff learns of the truth that Zemo was the true culprit behind the bombings and informs Stark, who heads over to Siberia with Rogers and Barnes.

At the base in Siberia, Zemo has meanwhile located the facility and found the five other Winter Soldiers who are still in cryo-sleep. When Barnes, Rogers, and Stark arrive, believing that Zemo intends to unleash the Winter Soldiers on the world, they are surprised to see that Zemo had killed them all. Zemo, who has bunkered himself in a safe room reveals that he does not intend to use the Winter Soldiers but to make sure the Avengers lost everything with each other, as Zemo himself had. Zemo then proceeds to enact his final part of his plan by playing exclusive security footage of Stark's parents being murdered by Barnes when he was being brainwashed by HYDRA in 1991. This provoked an angry Stark to fight Barnes in an attempt to kill him, forcing Rogers to fight him. The battle ends with Rogers disabling Stark's armor while Barnes loses his robotic arm.

Witnessing the beginning of the battle and satisfied by the outcome, Zemo heads to the surface where he is confronted by T'Challa, who now knows the truth behind his father's death. However, seeing what the pursuit of his vengeance turned Zemo in, T'Challa decides to spare his life. After deleting the last voice mail of his wife from his phone, Zemo declares his work to be done and tries to commit suicide to join his dead family, but is stopped by T'Challa, who then delivers him to government agent Ross.

In the end, as Zemo is being taken to prison for his crimes, Ross asks him how it feels when after so much scheming that his grand plan failed, only for Zemo to respond that despite his fate, he still has successfully driven the Avengers apart. This was affirmative as Zemo's actions have caused the Avengers in total disarray as many of the members (including Rogers) have left the team in shame, leaving only Stark, Rhodes, Lang, Vision, and Peter Parker to remain as the sole members of the team.

Trivia

 * In the comics, he was German.
 * Brühl, who was cast due to his German accent, did not feel the role was a stereotype, saying, "It's not a guy who's mean and sinister, but he's actually very clever - a very smart guy who does everything out of a very understandable reason and motivation." He also stated that Zemo may also appear in future MCU films, with Moore adding that, while Zemo has a purpose in this film, it is more to set up a future film.
 * he had simliators with Dušan Gavrić