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This Villain was proposed and approved by Villains Wiki's Pure Evil Proposals Thread. Any act of removing this villain from the category without a Removal Proposal shall be considered vandalism (or a futile "heroic" attempt of redemption) and the user will have high chances of being | ||
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| “ | Indiana Jones: You. Jürgen Voller: Have we met? Indiana Jones: My memory's a little fuzzy, but your face rings a bell. Are you still a Nazi? |
„ |
| ~ Indiana Jones crossing paths with Dr. Jürgen Voller again. |
| “ | Indiana Jones: What kind of Nazi kills the Führer? Jürgen Voller: The kind that believes in victory, Dr. Jones. Hitler lit a fire that could have burned a thousand years. I saw every mistake. Every blunder. And I will correct them all. History is a long list of losses, Dr. Jones. It's just a question of whose. |
„ |
| ~ Jürgen Voller's most famous quote while he shows plans for the Dial of Destiny. |
Dr. Jürgen Voller, later known under the cover identity of Professor Schmidt, is the main antagonist of the 2023 action-adventure film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth and final installment of Lucasfilm‘s Indiana Jones film series.
He is a former Schutzstaffel officer who was recruited into the NASA's Apollo program following World War II, assisting them in beating up the Soviet Union in the Space Race. However, Voller actually longs to use Archimedes' Dial to erase Adolf Hitler's mistakes by altering history to ensure the ascendancy of a new Führer, likely himself, to lead the Third Reich to victory and change the outcome of World War II and remake Nazi history in his own image. He is also Indiana Jones' final arch-nemesis who would lead him to his final adventure during his retirement.
He was portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen, who also played Randall Boggs in the Danish dub of Monsters, Inc., Chick Hicks in the Danish dub of Cars, Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, Captain Rochefort in The Three Musketeers, Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal, Kaecilius in Doctor Strange, Cliff Unger in Death Stranding, David Prentiss in Chaos Walking, Gellert Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore and Kiros in Mufasa: The Lion King.
Personality[]
Jürgen Voller is a man who is defined by both his intelligence and ego; both of which are his greatest strength and weakness respectively. He uses his intellect to locate and use the movie's titular dial as well as examine all the angles in his plan to go back in time and usurp Hitler. However, this also plays into the weakness of his ego as he is so assured that his plan will work no-questions-asked that he takes no precautions whenever he sets his plans into motion as he doesn't test the use of the dial when he gets a hold of it, which ultimately leads to his demise when he and his cohorts are sent back in time to the Siege of Syracuse and the aforementioned siege that was going on there killed them.
Voller is also very patriotic to the Germans, but this is also an example of his ego as he has come to disrespect Hitler as a leader of the Nazis due to his poor choices and wants to kill Hitler and take his place, seeing himself as a more ideal leader because of his intellect and planning on using said intellect to make the Nazi's win the war.
History[]
Past[]
Jürgen Voller was born in Germany, possibly sometime before the beginning of World War I in 1914. As a result of the German Empire's defeat in 1918, the Nazi Party was formed, promising to restore Germany to its former glory under the beliefs of racial superiority and antisemitism, with Voller joining the movement. Over time, the Nazi influence resulted in Voller becoming a fanatical devotee to both the party's racist ideology and its leader Adolf Hitler, whom he deeply admired. Additionally, by the time of his adulthood, Voller also became a highly capable mathematician and astrophysicist, seeking to use his scientific and mathematical skills in service to the Nazi's goals.
Following Hitler’s rise to power as Germany’s Führer in 1933, Voller joined the ranks of the Nazis as an officer in the Schutzstaffel (SS), earning the ranks of Doctor and Mathematician as well as serving as one of the leading scientists and engineers in the development of the V-1 rockets. During this time, approximately one week prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Voller met Hitler in person during the dictator's visit to the V-1 testing site outside of Munich. Following the beginning of WWII, however, Voller's faith in Hitler began to diminish as the war's tide slowly shifted in favor of the Allies, coming to see him as an incompetent leader whose poor decisions were ensuring Germany's defeat.
In 1944, alongside Colonel Weber, Voller raided a castle in the Alps of Western France and loaded a train with stolen artefacts, including the long sought-after Lance of Longinus, which both men believed that could be key for a Nazi victory. Upon closer inspection, Voller deduced that the Lance, along with a majority of the other artefacts on board, were all fakes save for one: the first half of the Antikythera Mechanism, a metallic compass designed by the ancient Sicilian mathematician Archimedes. The train was then raided by Indiana Jones and Basil Shaw, the former who knocked him out and stole the artefact. Recovering consciousness in time, Voller caught up to Jones and Shaw on the roof of the train after killing Weber. Holding them at gunpoint, he demanded the Antikythera, but ended up getting tricked with a fake bag and knocked off the train by an outstretched water tower, leading Jones and Shaw to presume his death before jumping off the train to safety while the Allies retrieved them.
Unknown to both men, in reality, Voller somehow survived the ordeal and, sometime after the battle, was captured by American forces and taken to the United States of America where he would be given the identity "Professor Schmidt" from the University of Alabama and assigned to work for NASA under the Operation Paperclip project, working closely with American rocket scientists to make the Apollo moon landings possible in 1969.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny[]
By 1969, Jürgen Voller's efforts to help America to beat out the Soviet Union in the Space Race prove successful and the Apollo 11, captained by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, lands on the Moon, an achievement celebrated over all of the nation. This secures a wealthy lifestyle for Voller, who is granted stay in a luxurious hotel at New York City and is scheduled to receive a medal by President Richard Nixon. However, despite the American's beliefs, Voller was still a fanatical Nazi all this time. Now knowing that Hitler was a delusional madman and blaming his military incompetence for the German defeat, Voller planned to track down both halves of the Antikythera and use it to travel back to 1939, where he would usurp and kill Hitler prior to Poland's invasion and use his superior knowledge of the war and Hitler's mistakes to lead Germany to victory. He was assisted by several Neo-Nazi followers, including Klaber and Hauke, both fanatical American men. His CIA handler Agent Mason was also reluctantly forced to help him with his search, even though Voller despised her due to her African American heritage.
One August day, after horribly mistreating an African American bellhop bringing him his breakfast, Voller and his followers observe Basil Shaw's daughter Helena, who was also looking for the Antikythera. When Helena goes to Jones, whom her father had entrusted the Antikythera segment to, to ask about it, she is tailed by Voller's henchmen, who follow the two of them led by Durkin to the archives where Jones had hidden it. They fail to obtain the Antikythera half, which Helena escapes with, and Durkin gets seemingly killed or incapacitated at best after Klaber and Hauke end up killing two of Jones' colleagues, angering the CIA, with the American government mistakenly assuming that Jones himself had committed the murders out of spite for his forced retirement and in revenge of his son Mutt Williams' death in the Vietnam War. Voller's men still capture Jones, but he manages to escape during an Apollo 11 ticket tape parade and an anti-Vietnam War protest, though Voller recognizes Jones from his World War II days.
Voller, Hauke and Klaber follow Helena and Jones to Morocco, where Helena is planning to sell the half of the Antikythera she had stolen at an illegal auction. They interrupt the auction at gunpoint and manage to steal the Antikythera half after a fight, as Voller claims that the Antikythera belongs to him upon failing to buy it when Jones reveals Voller's Nazi past to Helena, before fleeing in their car, pursued by Jones, Helena and Helena's teen sidekick Teddy Kumar in a tuk-tuk. Helena at one point manages to board Voller's car, breaks through the back window and begins strangling him until one of Voller's men manages to knock her off. The chase continues until an attack by Helena's former fiancée Aziz Rahim and his men leave the tuk-tuk too badly damaged to continue, allowing Voller to escape; however, he and his men are then arrested by a CIA team led by Agent Mason for the murders in the United States. Mason attempted to take Voller, Hauke and Klaber back to America as prisoners, but Hauke and Klaber manage to overpower and kill their CIA captors and take control of the plane, with Voller gloating to Mason about his Nazi past as she dies.
Voller and his men then head to Greece to retrieve the Graphikos tablet, on which the directions to the second half of the Antikythera were written, from a shipwreck in the Aegean Sea. They allow Jones and Helena to recover the Graphikos with the help of a diving team led by Jones' friend Renaldo, then take control of Renaldo's boat, murdering his two divers and taking the Graphikos from Helena. Voller orders Jones to interpret the code the Graphikos was written in, remorselessly shooting Renaldo dead when he refuses. Helena then volunteers to translate in exchange of some diamonds, which she had no reservations about because she correctly assumed that the directions given on the tablet were wrong and the real directions were hidden inside the tablet. She explains that the directions on the tablet pointed to Alexandria as the location of the second half, using her explanation as an opportunity to steal a stick of dynamite which she ignites with Voller's cigarette before throwing it at Voller, giving her, Jones and Teddy an opportunity to steal Voller's boat and escape while Klaber deals with the dynamite. Jones and Helena then work out that the second half of the Antikythera is at Archimedes' tomb at the Ear of Dionysus cave in Sicily and set out for the tomb, not realizing that Voller is watching and, seeing they were going away from Alexandria, orders them followed.
Voller and his henchmen pursue them to Sicily, where they capture Teddy and force him to tell them where Jones and Helena are going. They then follow him to the Ear of Dionysus, where they murder a worker who tells them the cave is closed and pursue Jones and Helena. While they are tracking the two, Teddy, who is handcuffed to Hauke, manages to drag the two of them into the water, to which Voller orders the rest of his men to keep moving and leave him; Teddy gets free, but Hauke drowns after being handcuffed to an underwater grate.
Unbothered, Voller and his men keep moving and corner Jones and Helena just after they recover the second half, with Klaber wounding and capturing Jones, who has the second half, although Helena gets away with Teddy's help. Voller takes Jones to an airfield manned by his Nazi henchmen, where he assembles the Antikythera. Indy wonders if Voller intends to time travel to assassinate Winston Churchill or Dwight D. Eisenhower, but Voller instead explains to him that his plan is to assassinate Hitler with the help of his fellow collective of Nazis and become the new Fuhrer of Germany. Using the Antikythera, Voller identifies a time fissure nearby and sets a flight path towards it, with Jones held captive on his plane. Helena and Teddy follow them there, with Helena hiding inside the landing gear while Teddy steals a plane with a sleeping pilot and pursues Voller, following them through the time fissure.
Unfortunately for Voller, the Antikythera was rigged by Archimedes to send the user back to the Siege of Syracuse in 212 BC so they could help lift it. As such, Voller finds himself flying over a Roman fleet in 212 BC, with both the Romans and the Syracusans firing on his plane after mistaking it for a dragon, not helped by Klaber losing his mind and opening fire on both sides indiscriminately while Voller desperately orders his men to pull up the plane and escape through the still-opened time fissure in a futile attempt to somehow still travel back to 1939 until one of his pilots gets impaled by a ballista.
Meanwhile, Jones frees himself and he and Helena attack Voller's crew, killing several of them, by dropping them off to their deaths. Indy gets a parachute to jump out to safety with Helena, but Voller tries to take the parachute from him by pointing a gun to Jones, so Helena forces him to back off by shooting him. With nothing to do other than watch from the cockpit along with Klaber, Voller's plane is eventually shot down by a Roman ballista launched by Pontimus' troops, sending it into a downward spiral from which it cannot pull up. Jones and Helena are able to parachute out to safety, but Voller, Klaber and the pilots aren't so lucky and are killed when the plane crashes in a Syracusan street during the middle of the battle.
Archimedes later comes across Voller's charred corpse when he goes to examine the crash site along with his aide, stealing his wristwatch from his carbonized body, concluding that the Antikythera did work; Archimedes wears this watch beyond his dying day and is still wearing it in his tomb in 1969, with his coffin bearing carvings depicting Voller's plane, suggesting that Voller's plane inspired several dragon myths, but otherwise, Voller goes down pretty much forgotten by history. Following Voller's death, Jones and his allies return to the present day and the dial is kept hidden to prevent anyone else from using it for their own uses and keep history safe.
Trivia[]
- Jürgen Voller was inspired by the late Wernher von Braun, a historical member of the Nazi Party and war criminal who later joined NASA as an engineer to work with them in the Apollo program as part of an off-the-books program called Operation Paperclip.
- Ironically, Colonel Weber's actor Thomas Kretschmann portrayed Wernher von Braun in the TV series Project Blue Book.
- Mads Mikkelsen is the second actor who plays an Indiana Jones villain and a James Bond villain: Julian Glover portrayed Aris Kristatos in For Your Eyes Only before portraying Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Mikkelsen portrayed Le Chiffre in Casino Royale before portraying Voller in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Incidentally, the James Bond film series is known for having had a huge influence in the Indiana Jones film series, as the franchise originated partially due to Steven Spielberg's desire to make a James Bond picture.
- Like most of his villainous performances throughout his career, Mads Mikkelsen doesn't think of Voller as an evil person, but just "misunderstood".
- Jurgën Voller is the second new main antagonist of Lucasfilm Ltd. property that doesn't belong to the Star Wars franchise, as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the second Lucasfilm non-Star Wars production since the company and its film library were acquired by Disney in 2012, following The Crone from the Disney+ Willow sequel series.
- Interestingly, years before the development of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a character called Magnus Völler appeared as the main villain of the Indiana Jones video game Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings.
- He is the franchise's only villain who isn't killed directly by the power of the artifact that he sought, although the power of the artifact did send him to his death.
- As he dies simply in a plane crash, he is also the only Indiana Jones main villain whose death is not particularly gruesome, with René Belloq having his head explode, Mola Ram being devoured by crocodiles, Walter Donovan aging into dust and Irina Spalko being disintegrated. That being said, the tradition is still somewhat maintained by showing Voller’s mutilated corpse up close.
- Voller is the only Nazi who didn't pursue an artifact that had religious significance. René Belloq, Arnold Toht and Herman Dietrich all sought the Ark of the Covenant whilst Walter Donovan, Elsa Schneider, and Colonel Vogel all sought the Holy Grail.
External Links[]
- Jürgen Voller on the Pure Evil Wiki
- Jürgen Voller on the Disney Wiki
- Jürgen Voller on the Indiana Jones Wiki
- Jürgen Voller on the Historica Wiki
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