CHARACTER PROFILES

THE RED SKULL

When Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were creating their American icon, they new that the ultimate patriotic hero would need the ultimate arch-nemesis. They found their villain, in the epitome of Hitler's twisted dream, the Red Skull.

Johann Schmidt was an orphan, who grew to maturity in war-torn Germany. His parents were not much better off before him. Hermann beat his wife Martha regularly, and when she died in child birth, he was more then willing to take out his frustrations on his newborn son. Fortunately for young Johann, the doctor who delivered him also rescued him, before unceremoniously dropping him at an orphanage. The nest day Hermann killed himself, his troubles finally got the best of him. Johann would not get off so easily. He grew up in a harsh post-World War One Germany, beaten by his fellow countrymen, and tossed aside by the world. After an adolescence of stealing and begging, he was finally taken in by an old shopkeeper and his daughter. Johann finally felt contentment with the young girl, unfortunately, although she was a nice person, she could not return the love Johann felt for her, so he killed her. She was Jewish, and in the environment of 1930's Germany, that just added some personal fuel for a national cultural division. He became a bellboy by the time Adolph Hitler. Der Fuhrer came to stay at the hotel where the angry young man worked, and he made an off hand bet to another member of the Third Reich that he could turn even the lowliest of bellboys into the personification of the German dream. And, unfortunately for the world he was right. In young Johann, Hitler saw a little of his own evil, and he made it his mission to bring out that evil, and magnify it. Johann Schmidt became the Red Skull, adorned in a masked chosen by Hitler himself, he became Hitler's right hand man, and one of the most powerful men in Germany. When Captain America appeared, the Skull saw in him both his equal and his opposite, and spent the remaining years of the wars, and the half century afterward, trying to vanquish his foe. Soon the Red Skull's reputation grew around the world, he was feared almost as much as his master, and Hitler soon grew to fear the Skull's growing influence himself. To consolidate his might outside of Hitler's power, the Skull helped another of Germany's high-ranking officers that had fallen from grace, Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker, who was founding what would one day become Hydra in Japan. Knowing the Skull planned some treachery, Hitler decided that should he fail to win the world, then no one should have it. He created his "Sleeper" robots to destroy the world in the event of Germany's failure. Captain America found out about the Sleepers, and traced the Red Skull to their lair. There both the Skull and the Sleepers were lost, seemingly forever.

In the decade that fallowed, another Red Skull surfaced in communist Russia, he faced another Captain America and another Bucky. Years later, after the true Captain had been revived by the heroes known as the Avengers, the true Red Skull was revived himself, free to wreck his own evil on the world once more.