Red Skull (Johann Shmidt)

In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, when Captain America and Black Widow discover Anim Zola‘s hideout, the good old scientist offers a summary of HYDRA‘s history via monitor. Of course, at the very beginning of the recap, Zola shows the image of HYDRA’s founder and leader, the Red Skull, portrayed by Hugo Weaving. In The First Avenger he acted as the main villain, being for the Axis the equivalent of Captain America for the Allies, until he decided Adolf Hitler‘s goal was far too puny for him and detached himself from Germany. He fought with Cap, until the Tesseract he carelessly used teleported him to an unknown location. The character had already appeared in the awful Captain America portrayed by Scott Paulin, but his origins were slightly changed: he was an Italian kid named Tadzio de Santis, kidnapped by Fascists and transformed into their super soldier. He survived through unknown means to our days, and kept threatening the world along with his daughter Valentina, before meeting his end at the hands of his nemesis, Captain America. While the comics version is more similar to the most recent movie one, there are still some differences: for example, the Skull has never been a part of HYDRA. Let’s see together.

Johann Shmidt was born in a small village near Munich, in Germany, son of drunkard Hermann Shmidt and his wife, Martha. The woman died of childbirth, and Hermann, overwhelmed with grief, tried to kill the baby, blaming him for her death: only the obstetrical’s intervention saved baby Johann, and Hermann committed suicide the morning after, making his son an orphan. Raised in an orphanage, Johann soon escaped, surviving as both a beggar and a thief on the streets of Munich. Escaping from an older boy who wanted him to steal for him, Johann took refuge in the shop of a Jew man, and lied to him telling he was of a Jew family himself, and that he had been attacked by Nazis’ sympathizers because of his origins. The man offered help to him, and Johann finally found a job in his shop, meeting the first person treating him nicely. He fell in love with the man’s daughter, Esther, but when she rejected him, he was fueled with a blind rage, that brought him to beat the girl to death and flee. He went in and out of jail for minor crimes, until he eventually became a killer for hire, often on the payroll of Emil Beckert, a local crime boss who was an enemy of both Nazis and Communists. When Beckert ordered Shmidt to kill an old friend from the orphanage, Dieter Lehmann, Shmidt refused, and killed Beckert instead. A few days later, however, he left Dieter to be captured by Nazis and brought to Dachau, while he fled and, some months later, became a Brown Shirt himself. He made himself a name for being a young but pitiless recruit, characterized by unborn cruelty and brutality. When Dieter was freed from the concentration camp, he came back to Munich, pretending to be a Brown Shirt. Seeing how Johann was often object of ill-treating and abuses by his superiors, Dieter easily convinced him to join his conspiracy to kill Hitler himself. When the two boys, pretending to be bellhops, arrived close to the newly elected High Chancellor, however, Johann remembered all the lessons he learnt during his years on the streets, about the struggle for survival and the essential cruel nature of the world: spotting an opportunity, he grabbed the gun from his only friend’s hands, and killed him with a head shot. Hitler, impressed, offered him a position as his right-hand man, to be molded by him into one of the worst monsters the world would have ever seen.

Trained at first as a regular SS officer, Shmidt was later taken into custody by Hitler himself, who wanted to make something more out of him: he gave him a red-skull-shaped mask and named him the Rote Schädel (the Red Skull), an agent second only to himself. The Red Skull received an intensive physical training, became an expert tactician, and received a deep brainwashing, that made him the “perfect Nazi”. He was mainly entrusted the task of spreading fear and terror between Germany’s enemies, and the atrocities committed by him during war brought the United States to create a costumed response to him, Captain America. The Skull was granted by Hitler, proud of his creature, anything he wanted, and fought his destined nemesis with an array of highly-technological weapons and a number of men at his disposal. When it became clear that, even if he admired Hitler’s ideology, the Red Skull was planning to replace him, even the Führer started to fear him, but was unable to control him. The Skull, meanwhile, suffered some major defeat by the hands of Captain America and his team, the Invaders, and developed a personal grudge against the American hero. When Germany’s defeat seemed to be inevitable, the Skull built for his Führer, who preferred to destroy the world rather than to leave it to his enemies, six powerful robots, the Sleepers, programmed to destroy everything in their path. He also received a pill for suspended reanimation by Arnim Zola, the Third Reich‘s main scientist: in his final days of the war, the Red Skull faced Cap once again in Berlin, and he tried to kill him with a grenade. The Captain sent the explosive back to the Skull, and he was presumed dead in the following explosion, but he was only disfigured by it, with his new face grimly resembling his mask: the bunker he was fighting him later collapsed, and only Zola’s pill allowed the Skull to survive. He was found decades later by THEM, a team of HYDRA, the Nazi-inspired association founded by Baron Von Strucker: revived, with his mind in a new, stronger cloned body, the Red Skull was ready to bring to the pacified world a bit of the terror the old one learnt to know.

Johann Shmidt is a deranged and sadistic man, who internalized the violence he suffered during his youth and turned it into a weapon to hurt the outside world. Feared by both enemies and allies, Shmidt became so cruel and ambitious that even Hitler was afraid of him. He’s one of the best hand-to-hand fighters in the world, an expert swordsman, a skilled marksman, and a genius tactician; in his new, cloned body, he also possesses superhuman physical attributes equal to Captain America’s. Over the years, he has gained new weapons, such as the all-powerful Cosmic Cube, and new abilities: recently he has fused part of Charles Xavier‘s brain with his own, gaining telepathic powers. Unstoppable, pitiless, determined and intelligent, the Red Skull is the ultimate incarnation of evil, one of the most dreadful men history has ever known.