Adolf Hitler

CHARACTER
Adolf Hitler
Gender	Male
Birth	April 20, 1889 Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary
Death	April 30, 1945 Berlin, Germany
Nationality	Austrian (birth) German
Profession(s)	Soldier Politician Dictator
Allegiance(s)	German Empire Weimar Republic Nazis

"The guy is like a hypnotist – a madman who can make a whole country nuts."

―Indiana Jones

Adolf Hitler (also known as the "Führer") was a German politician who became Chancellor of Germany after serving in the First World War and subsequently the leader of Nazi Germany, ruling from 1933 to 1945. As dictator of the German Reich, Hitler's attempts at global expansion led to the Second World War with the invasion of Poland.

Hitler was described by Major Eaton as being "obsessed with the occult", hence his initiating a worldwide search for artifacts that included the Ark of the Covenant in 1936 and the Holy Grail in 1938. For these goals, Hitler sent his fiercest men, like Herman Dietrich or Ernst Vogel, and hired several people, like René Emile Belloq or Walter Donovan, in order to find them, but his attempts ended in failure.

Biography

Early life

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary. Growing up, Hitler became an admirer of Germany. By the 1910s, Hitler was an impoverished watercolor painter who lived in Vienna, but despite so, was able to read Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parcival and watch Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal, which left tremendous impressions on him. One day while living there, Hitler came across an ancient spear on display at the Hofburg Treasure House Museum, which was said to be the infamous Lance of Longinus, so Hitler vowed to himself to one day eventually own it, the Lance becoming Hitler's complete obsession due to his supernatural interests. He at one pointed worked as a little house painter, so he eventually made himself a mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, Bavaria as his inner shrine, representing his dreams about the spirit of history whose truth he failed to understand.

For four years, Corporal Hitler was courier during World War I as part of the Bavarian army, including the same period when future American archaeologist Indiana Jones was a courier for the French Army. Germany lost in the conflict, however, forcing the country to enact a capitulation that formally ended the Great War, though several patriots, like Hitler, saw this as a betrayal from their politicians, feeling that democracy was a failure and that the Parliamentary system was the one responsible for all the hardships the country had to endure. For Hitler, nothing was achieved with the war, instead it sowed the seeds of the hatred, destruction and creation he would brought later on, shaping the history of the modern world. He also scaptegoated Jews and Communists, as part the Education and Propaganda Department of the Reichsweher group, for the conflict and their defeat, painting them in a negative light in his propagada messages. As the Germans were devastated by their loss and thus suffering from a psychological and economical fallout, they gave their way to the rise of Hitler's party, putting General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck against him in the process and eventually causing him to resign from his military post and see his pension cut in half.

In 1919, the Reichswar assigned Hitler to infiltrate the German Workers' Party, but he instead took it over, became its leader and renamed the party to the National Socialist German Workers, later known as the Nazis, in 1921. Hitler's storm troopers proceeded to begin terrorizing his political opponents. Inspired by 1917's Russian Revolution and seeking to oppose Bolshevism, Hitler and his fellow Nazis attempted to overthrow the German Weimar government in 1923, sending his militia to surround all government officials in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and force them to pledge their loyalty to his coup d'etat. The Beer Hall Putsch failed and Hitler was arrested, sentenced to serve nine months in a prison of Landsberg for high treason.

Hitler holding a rally for the supporters of his Nazi ideology.

While in prison, Hitler gained recognition through the publication of his autobiographical work Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which he dedicated to Dietrich Eckhart and also expounded on his views of National Socialist ideology, anti-Semitism and Aryan racial superiority, all part of his extremistic propaganda. His views attracted many other Germans who had felt betrayed by the weakening of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, with their national pride further sinking down once the Great Depression reached Germany in 1930. Because of this, Mein Kampf virtually became a "bible" for the Nazi party and, by the late 1930s, a copy of the book could be found in every German house, with Hitler gaining popular and political support. His book's first volume was published around the time the Schutzstaffel (SS) was formed to protect his party. It would also be around this time that Magnus Völler, a German archaeologist and a disgraced University of Chicago former student, started running errands for Hitler.

In 1928, upon being given the last Alicorn staff by Indiana Jones, the Navajo Indian Aguila warned him that had he stored the staff in a museum like originally intended, it could have been captured and misused by Hitler, who had already turned the swastika, the symbol of the four winds, into an enblem of hate. One year later in 1929, the Wayua leader Maleiwa from the Interior world sought to entice Hitler into an alliance over the power of the Alicorn, hoping that Hitler's loyal scientists could produce a synthetic nalca substitute to enable Hitler to rise to power and the two to take over the world with their combined forces later on, secretly planning to later betray the Nazi leader in place of his own ambitions of global supremacy over the interior and superior worlds. To do so, Hans Beitelheimer became the messenger between the two individuals, but fled into the forests of Chiloé Island instead of bringing Hitler to the Interior world nor delivering him the staff. While Indiana Jones didn't think the Nazis would become a threat long-term and Hitler would end up in a mental asylum as very few were concerned, Princess Salandra warned him that they had foreseen Hitler would become the most feared man in the exterior world. If Maleiwa succeeded, Hitler would gain power at home, expand his base, consider the Wayua warriors perfect and fearsome and command Germans to breed with them while becoming invincible with the Alicorn and Maleiwa's forces at least until he outlived his usefulness. Thus, Maleiwa was stopped by Jones at the Statue of Liberty before the meeting could take place. Indy himself would later theorize that because of the Interior world's parallels with the Earth, Maleiwa may have been Hitler's double in his dimension.

Rise to power

"The Ark belongs in the Reich. Something of such antiquity belongs in Germany."

―Adolf Hitler

The 1930s saw the National Socialist German Workers' Party gain political power, becoming the largest political organization in the country by 1932, forcing a pressured President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor of Germany to replace Franz Von Papen and Kurt Von Schleicher after a narrow defeat in the elections, proving Hitler's supporters weren't a force that could be ignored anymore. In 1933, the Weimar Republic finally collapsed due its poor economic decisions and Germany was taken over by Hitler and the Nazi Party. Street violence grew and several Germans such as Rudolf Reingold took part in the Reichstag fire that led to Hitler's installation as Germany's Chancellor. Coming into power, Hitler let an orgy of destruction happen by organizing book-burning rallies that destroyed the wisdom and beauty of ages often attended by uniformed officers in Nuremberg. He was named dictator on March 23 as rumors emerged he was part of one of the Black Lodges to solidify his dream of a world-conquering Aryan nation as well that Hungarian baron Joseph Dygar, whom the Coptic Christians accused of posessing the Judas Silver that Hitler craved and the Baron may have been intending to present to Hitler as a esteem token before those were stolen and its robbers pursued by Hitler's SS and Dygar's men, was supporting Hitler's rise with his vast fortune. Upon rising to power, some of Hitler's changes were the promotion of Gestapo agent Unger to director of special operations like searching occult objects for persecuting minorities and the transference of Abwehr field agent Helmut Schmidt to his Occult Affairs Office for occult forces, due to the Nazi leader's particular awareness of the occult's power, commissioning a number of officers and special agents to acquire great mystical items from around the world.

Though Hitler had a lust to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant, Hitler's men grew interested early on the decade in an unknown archaeologist's research about the mysterious wish-maker artifact known as Aladdin's Lamp in hopes of acquiring its legendy power for their leader's grandest schemes and journeyed to Ireland to seek the Celtic mythological Cauldron of Regeneration to provide their leader with an unbeatable military force, while Hitler himself was rumored to be searching for the Mjolnir, the Viking hammer wield by the Norwegian god Thor, due to Richard Wagner's mention of secret clues to the weapon's location within his Der Ring des Nibelungen opera cycle for which he had his cryptographers listen to Wagner's music day in and out not to mention his beliefs that Wagner's last work (whose existence he verified with three scholars he had shipped later to a concentration camp to not expose their findings) could summon a phantom army loyal to Germany if its music was played in a certain way on a certain day, expressed an interest in acquiring Alexander the Great's armor presumably hidden in Alexandria to inspire his forces, the Lock of Frederick Barbarossa's Hair (though the Kock slightly less than casual despite a Stuttgart industrialist sympathetic to the Nazis being willing to supply him with the Lock once Germany annexed to Austria) and the Philosopher's Stone to be a source of limitless wealth for his war chests as well as sending agents under his command to scour for the Fourth Nail in Romania and the Silver Hand of Nuada. He was filled with visions of the Tyrfing as well that made him see the blade carried in the vanguard of German assaults leaving nothing but a bloody swath on its wake, prompting him to hire teams of archaeologists to look for the blade in Norway under the pretext that his forces were doing historical research of the land surrounding Trondheim, which didn't fully convince the Norwegian government. Coincidentally, unknown to Hitler, his Nazi right-hands Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels also planned an artifact-seeking operation behind his back when they, assisted by their SS soldiers, tried to acquire an Imperial Fasces from Julius Caesar's time at Messina, Sicily to keep it out from Benito Mussolini's clutches.

During this period, apparently with the Hitler's permission, Colonel Albrecht Von Beck teamed up with the Chinese crime lord Kai Ti Chang to find Emperor Qin Shi Huang's tomb in the hopes of obtaining the Heart of the Dragon, which could control all men's will and Von Beck moved to collect for Hitler to use to conquer the world, though the expedition faced several delays. It was also around this time that Hitler personally sent SS officer Franz Kroeger, a colonel from his newly assembled SS branch of the Leibstandarte as his personal guard, to Forteresse Malevil in order to buy the Crystal Skull of Cozan from the French archaeologist and mercenary René Emile Belloq, as his men had launched a desperate effort to locate arcane treasures with supposed supernatural powers since his election as Chancellor, the Crystal Skull being high on the list, but it was lost to Hitler when the U-357, the U-boat he dispatched to take Kroeger back to Germany, sunk and killed everyone aboard, allowing Indiana Jones to retrieve the skull and start hating Hitler's supporters due to his encounter with Kroeger. Before recovering it, Jones was subjected to an illusion from the False Lama by General Tzi, who taking the form of Alecia Dunstin, insisted him to not make a difference as the world didn't want to be saved due to having people like Hitler by that point, but Jones prevailed. Starting from this year, Hitler's fascination with the occult led the Germans to launch a global search for arcane artifacts, with rumors about Hitler wishing to find artifacts capable of divining the future, turning lead into gold or looking for elixirs following up.

Back in Germany, Hitler gained dictatorial powers by playing on with the fears of the German population about a potential Communist takeover until he proclaimed himself the "Führer", a combination of his Chancellor position with that of the President, when von Hindenburg died in 1934, shaping Germany into the Third Reich. To consolidate his power, Hitler had all the Brownshirts, his earliest Nazi members inspired by the Italian militia of the Blackshirts, purged in a series of assassinations that came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives. One of the few survivors from these purges was a career diplomat who went on to serve as Ambassador at the German Embassy of Cairo, Egypt. During all this time, however, Hitler claimed he and his men were peaceful. Ignoring the Treaty of Versailles by the following year for its limitations on the German military's size and withdrawing the country from the failing League of Nations, Hitler's regime underwent large scale efforts to rapidly rebuild the country's industrial and military fields to the point of he built up his military force dramatically during the decade, bringing the world closer to war as he took control of Germany. Countries like England complacently ignored Hitler's violations by breaking those peace arrangements, having their own troubles and assuming that if Germany could recover from the Great War, it should be allowed to do it. Hitler took advantage of widespread media such as film, print and radio to promote a radical image of Aryan superiority which preceded unspeakable atrocities during the Holocaust, a genocidal purge on Europe's Jewish population which applied the newfound industrial efficiencies to claim the lives of eleven million people, among them six million Jews. Hitler targeted the gypsies too, rounding them up before placing them in concentration camps.

Around these two years in the mid-1930s, the now Nazi officer and Leibstandarte member Reingold would go with his SS troops under the Thule Society's orders in search of the location of the Ultima Thule, a realm populated by an underground civilization beneath the planet's crust whose entrance was through a portal in the Arctic, which the Nazis demed key to Hitler's plans for world domination under the impression that the so-cacelled master race originated from there, but regardless of Indiana Jones' presence there, Reingold and his men were killed by magical booby traps at Iceland. Later on, the combined efforts of Von Beck and Chang through Von Beck's Nazi troops and Chang's Black Dragon Triad were able to proceed with their expedition and locate the Emperor's Tomb, both men unaware of the other's intent to get rid of him. However, Von Beck's plans for his Führer ultimately amounted to nothing, as Jones, assisted by the Chinese intelligence agent Mei Ying, interfered with the expedition that by the end of the quest, the Heart was lost forever and Von Beck was dead.

In 1936, Hitler presided over and opened the Olympic Games in Germany's capital Berlin, with the way it was orchestrated doing nothing but amplifying his racist message. In July of that year, Hitler took advantage of the Spanish Civil War to test his forces and combat tactics by supporting General Francisco Franco, unleashing his air forces on the town of Guernica, Spain to bomb it down, showing off the deadly potential of the Luftwaffe. Shortly afterwards, Italy would ally with Germany, becoming two of the Axis powers. Mussolini's Italy had initially not allowed Hitler's Germany to expand onto Austria, but Mussolini became one more of Hitler's lackeys over time. Hitler's influence had by this point expanded enough to ensure he could have "eyes and ears" in every port, something that permitted Friedrich von Hassell and his Ahnenerbe agents to buy a whole ship originally hired by Indiana Jones as it sailed the North Pacific Ocean during the latter's search with the Key to the Tomb of the Gods for the legendary eponymous tomb. von Hassell aspired to uncover the Tomb's secrets for Hitler's power and glory, allowing him to create a new world in spite of Alex Beresford-Hope's cryptic warnings. However, Jones killed von Hassell and made sure to make the Tomb innaccessible for Hitler by dynamiting it. Shortly afterwards, Hitler personally selected Von Meert to look for the Philosopher's Stone to pursue the application of alchemy to turn lead into gold for the Third Reich, whose formula was in possession of Professor Dunikowski, but Dunikowski mailed the Lost Book of the Cabal to Jones, who memorized Canches' copy of the formula but supplied Von Meert with a wrong one that claimed their lives in a volcanic explosion.

Indiana Jones: "According to legend, the Ark will be recovered at the time of the coming of the true Messiah."

Eaton: "Which is what Hitler probably imagines himself to be."

―The U.S. Government enlists Indiana Jones to find the Ark before the Nazis.

That same year, at the behest of his inner circle, Hitler met with René Belloq at his mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden to hire his services in acquiring the lost Ark of the Covenant, having set his mind on acquiring the artifact for its symbolic meaning and claiming that such an antiquity belonged to his country. During the meeting, Hitler praised Belloq's expertise by insisting he wanted the best suited individual for the job. If what the Bible described of the Ark of the Covenant was right, by carrying the Ark, Hitler would have an invincible army which could use the relic to level mountains and lay waste to entire regions. Hitler thus sent his soldiers after the artifact. On his behalf, the Third Reich Special Antiquities Collection also dispatched Major Arnold Ernst Toht to retrieve the headpiece to the Staff of Ra from the Ark expert Abner Ravenwood at his The Raven bar in Nepal, unaware that Ravenwood had died in an avalanche earlier that year. Although the Ark was recovered in Tanis, Egypt thanks to the efforts of opposing interests led by Indiana Jones and Abner's daughter Marion, who managed take the Ark from the Nazis for a while, Belloq and Colonel Herman Dietrich's Nazi forces stole it back from Jones and Ravenwood aboard the Bantu Wind. Concurrently, Hitler dispatched Captain Oskar Schomburg aboard the Wurrfler to offer support to his covert operations in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, with Schomburg being informed about offering any assistance to Dietrich's men in transporting the Ark to the Führer. Intent on opening the Ark before handing it over to Hitler, Belloq convinced Dietrich that viewing the relic's contents at a tabernacle on Geheimhaven, a Nazi-controlled Mediterranean island base, would be preferable to presenting a potentially empty artifact to Berlin. Ironically, Belloq's treachery likely spared Hitler's life, as the Ark's ghosts brought God's lethal wrath down upon Belloq and all the gathered Nazi soldiers present before sealing themselves back into the Ark, leaving Jones and Ravenwood as the sole survivors due to showing proper respect.

After the failure to obtain the Ark, now known as the "Ark of the Covenant fiasco" nationally, Hitler became aware of Indiana Jones' participation in the whole affair, so he sent Captain Emil Loeb of the Gestapo and Arnold Smith to both retrieve the Crystal Cylinder of Stonehenge to invoke otherwordly monsters before the American archaeologist could and prevent with his plans again just as advances of his Nazi ideology started concerning Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom. Sometime afterwards, Hitler would send Colonel Curt Johan Vogel of the SS to the Congo to look for the Shintay crystal shards in hopes to find some kind of power within them to power the Nazi cause's war machine, teaming up with Indy's rival Doctor Ian McIver to retrieve them, but the Shintay people, led by Vyperion Rex, captured them all and Vogel's refusal to let the crystals go ultimately triggered a chain reaction that caused all of the Shintay and Nazis to be crushed by fallen debris, with only Jones, Ravenwood and McIver surviving. Sometime afterwards, on October 16, Hitler would request his Commissioner Friederich Berger to forward the funds for McIver, alongside Andre LaFonte, in their Nepal expedition to secure the invencible healing powers of Ra-Lundi for the Reich, but such search was for naught once Jones and Ravenwood discovered it first in the Tibet, leading to a chain of events that concluded with Ra-Lundi destroyed and McIver and LaFonte left at the mercy of the hairy guardians of the Ra-Lundi population. Over the year, Hitler had a meeting with King Edward VIII, who planned to abdicate from England's throne and had found out about Hitler's occult obsession, his conviction on Arthur's legend making him reconsider his doubts surrounding the sword, so Edward deported arrested Nazi agents at Dorset back to their country and agreed to let other teams scour for the Excalibur on the condition it would be given to him to restore his rule before passing it over to the Nazis, though though each other's promises weren't any more sincere. On his part, Hitler sent Unger to find Excalibur for him to conquer and sit on a throne as the "once and future" king, but Unger and his men were all killed by enchanted knights.

As Indiana Jones had thwarted Hitler's plans on numerous occasions, including his pursuit of the Ark, the Führer personally assigned Hans Degen to assassinate Jones, whom Degen tracked down to the Welsh mountains near Merthyr Tydfil. However, the attempt also ended in failure: when Jones accidentally saved Degen's life from an enemy, the indebted Degen felt honor bound to spare Jones on that occasion but later sacrificed himself to save the archaeologist and his friends from Ben Ali Ayoob. Later on, Hitler and his government started German-Russian relationships with the Bolsheviks to the point that the State Department started to feel concerned, though Count Alexander Salkovich secretly planned to take care of Hitler and his "huns" once the Bolsheviks finished off the Cossacks.

On May 17, 1937, Hitler had become aware of the otherwordly mystery surrounding the Great Circle, so the Third Reich Special Antiquities Collection dispatched psychologist/archaeologist Emmerich Voss, the leader of Hitler's occult research program, to uncover such mystery for Hitler's interests, even getting Mussolini's permission to go to Vatican City and check on the stored antiquities of the Treasury of Esoteric Artifacts guarded by Father Cesare Ventura, under the promise that Italy would benefit from their collaboration with the Nazis. To assist Voss, Hitler signed a permission to supply Voss with a Special Class airship Z-30 with its crew while forgiving him due to the loss of a battleship in a Machu Picchu, Peru expedition from March and personally sent his close friend Colonel Viktor Gantz to supervise the special expeditionary excavations for the operation, reassigning him and his troops to Gizeh, Egypt on July 15, with Voss reminding Gantz that his help would gain the admiration of Hitler himself upon success to motivate him.

Note: The following section draws from an Indiana Jones medium with a branching narrative.
Details may be contradicted by another storyline yet equally canon within the wider continuity.

By August, according to a comunique hidden inside a new phony bible that contained the Eye of the Fates on an orthodox German-Greek order monastery, Hitler and his German High Command were interested in acquiring the Eye to outflank and outguess their enemy nations, even sending a Nazi to pose as the abbey's new abbot to trick the monks and steal the Eye so it could become Hitler's secret weapon.

Branching information ends here.

The Nazi effort to discover the Great Circle's mistery led Voss to discover the resting place of Noah's Ark in Ziggurat of Ur, Iraq in November, intending to use its stones to transport Hitler's forces to any country they would like to invade to take them over, but Voss' unworthiness compared to Noah's worthiness nearly triggered a second Great Flood in Lake Hammar, which Jones, Gina Lombardi and Locus were barely able to stop, with the latter disposing of Voss and taking the Ark to parts unknown to mankind.

In March 1938, Hitler expanded Germany's borders by annexing the country to his native Austria and pushed into the Sudetenland district, Czechoslovakia. To do so, Hitler took advantage of Czechoslovakia's undermining by its German and Magyar minorities to dissolve the nation and make Bohemia and Moravia protectorates. Being this his first step in his plans for European contest, Hitler resorted to bully Austria into submission through agents of his promoting civil unrest until Austria's chancellor met with Hitler in Berlin and, in the name of embracing a "former countryman", Austria was annexed bloodlessly. However, Sudentenland's population didn't want to rejoin Germany and set up a defensive barrier to force Hitler to negotiate, prompting Neville Chamberlain to met with both countries until Czechoslovakia accepted to cede Sudetenland back to Germany for the sake of avoiding a full-scale European war.

Note: The following section draws from an Indiana Jones medium with a branching narrative.
Details may be contradicted by another storyline yet equally canon within the wider continuity.

Later in June, Commander Ruch sailed with the Goethe to London to deliver weapons to Austria and Czechoslovakia when he came across Indiana Jones and his Chinese companion Lo Chong, the former revealing he was looking for the Fishhead Vessel of King Khataam, something Ruch thought Hitler could find very useful for his cause, leading him to offer Jones their help and the opportunity to meet Hitler, who was right then at an enormous Italian villa as Mussolini's guest. An artifact like King Khataam's could be useful for Hitler's plans to invade Poland. However, Indy and Chong managed to escape.

Branching information ends here.

At some point during the year, Jones got word that Hitler was searching after the Lance of Longinus, as its status as an ancient mystical object made Hitler believe it could enhance his power and expand his empire. Later that year, Hitler would sign the Munich Pact with Mussolini, Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier. However, with Austria and Sudetenland secured, Hitler moved further westward, violating the recently-signed treaties, prompting the British and the French to protect Poland at all costs, to which Hitler retaliated by dissolving the naval treaties signed with the formers, expecting Great Britain to be less anxious to help Poland with a threat to their naval dominance.

Hitler recruited the American businessman Walter Donovan later that year to find the Holy Grail, which could allow the Nazis to be granted with eternal life. Hitler had just come to possess the supposed Lance of Longinus he saw in his youth at Vienna, so feeling now totally invincible, he was sending his SS members to search throughout Europe for the Grail. By this point, Hitler had come to believe that the Grail was indeed an actual relic like several myths of the holy vessel of immortality claimed, hence why did he send his dreaded SS troops to the ancient ruins of Renne-Le-Chateau in the South of France due to 4th century legends assuring that Mary Magdalene had taken the Grail to Marseilles after fleeing the Holy Land. Among the many places to look, however, there were no records of Hitler sending his troops to sneak into Great Britain due to the Pyrenees location being more popular.

Not wanting the mission to become public knowledge to have a chance of success; upon being informed that Indiana Jones and his father had been captured at Castle Brunwald, which had been occupied by Nazi forces, Hitler sent a telegram to his operatives there with the command to eliminate the so-called American conspirators and a request for Donovan to come to Berlin. Once notified that the Joneses had escaped, Hitler personally assigned Colonel Ernst Vogel to hunt down and kill father and son. Following their escape, the elder Jones would convince his son to find the Holy Grail first before rescuing their friend Marcus Brody to prevent Hitler from claiming the Cup of Christ, as, in Henry's words, it was a race against evil because Hitler's armies of darkness would march all over the Earth if they captured the Holy Grail.

Adolf Hitler unknowingly signs for Indiana Jones.

Shortly afterwards, Hitler presided over a bookburning rally in Berlin outside the Institute of Aryan Culture, which Goebbels had partially organized by blackslisting the works of authors like Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway to fill German bookshelfs with Hitler's Mein Kampf. Dr. Elsa Schneider attended the rally too to give a speech, intending to show the Grail Diary to Hitler as a proof of progress to guarantee his continued support for the Grail expedition, hence why Hitler was seen patting her approvingly on the shoulder during the event. As he was being escorted from the forum, just after struggling to hear to the instructions of a film director trying to film his appearance because of the German High Command's confusion making him barely visible, Hitler came face to face with a man in a Nazi officer's uniform who held a book in his hands as he signed autographs for his supporters. Ironically unaware the man was a disguised Indiana Jones or that the book was the diary his agents needed to use to find the Grail, assuming that the diary was an autographed book and apparently unable to read English nor spot mentions to the Grail or the diary's author, Hitler took the book, motioned one of his aides for a pencil, signed the book and returned it to the startled 'officer' before continuing on his way towards the back seat of his waiting limousine.

The Nazi effort to find the Cup of Christ still proceeded, with the authorities about the D-138 zeppelin alerting everyone about the Joneses so anyone loyal to Hitler could assist in the search and Donovan, Schneider and Vogel leading the expedition to the Republic of Hatay, where they would be assisted by the Sultan with reinforcements on their way to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, the location of the Temple of the Sun. However, Donovan actually planned to use the Holy Grail himself so that he could live forever while Hitler would just go "the way of the dodo". Likewise, Schneider intended to keep the Grail away for herself. However, Jones interfered yet again, so by the end of the quest, the Holy Grail was lost forever and the Nazi leaders in charge of the expedition were all dead.

In November of the same year, Hitler began the Holocaust, his genocidal campaign against all Jews. Between November 9-November 10, Hitler had their businesses broken into and destroyed in what became known as the Night of Broken Glass, erasing any last vestiges of hope for Jews to stay in the country. In the wake of the inhuman tragedy of Hitler's persectuons, which dealt another blow to the dream of a united Arab state, drawing another line in the Middle East and causing Palestine to be partioned and create the new state of Israel to protect the Jews, which created a new category of refugees through Palestine's own population.

World War II

By 1939, Adolf Hitler started preparing the forces of his Third Reich for war by organizing marchs, bringing in heavy machinery and parading with car. All of this was reported on by Lucas-Tone News, who felt that Hitler's military might seemed unstoppable by this point. Proceeding with the Holocaust, Hitler also stripped the possibility for Jews to hold professions or own lands, even restricting them from interacting with non-Jews. Jews would be either sent to concentration camps or relocated to ghettos where they were victims of violence frequently.

Note: The following section is cut content.
It contains information cut from the final release of an Indiana Jones medium, or otherwise unpublished. Everything said in this section and not elsewhere did not happen in the "proper" Indiana Jones continuity.

Due to Belloq and Donovan failing to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, Hitler allowed Völler, who had been a fascinated loyal supporter to his cause and his search to accumulate biblical religious artifacts to cement the Third Reich's power, to be appointed by Himmler as director of the Verteidigung Germanisches Altertum departament within the SS by January, leading Völler to set his sights on the Staff of Kings, a truly sacred artifact that could give Germany the power of the oceans as Moses once did in the Red Sea, a prospect that Professor Charles Jacob Kingston deemed the "most grim" for the world's future if the Staff were to be claimed by Hitler's "dark forces".

Cut content information ends here.

However, Völler was unable to claim Moses' staff for Germany, as Indiana Jones and British Intelligence agent Margaret Grace O'Malley foiled Völler's plans and the staff turned into a snake that slithered away never to be seen again in a Bay of Bengal beach. That agency, by this point in the decade, had grown concerned over Hitler's potential interest in the Knights Templar's secrets as the Thames Circle charged Doctor Cecil Kelemen to find the means to difuse the Head of the Morrigan's power to protect the British Isles from Hitler's devastating bombers, intending to take down the Parliament to cripple England's military coordinating abilities so the Circle could take over the country for themselves, unaware Kelemen and his cohorts intended to not honor their deal with the Druids, but Indiana Jones' friends foiled their plot. Across March to April, as Hitler's Germany prevailed having a tense situation with the United States of America, Hitler was informed about Doctor Von Hesling's survival within the Odinsland iceberg, so he sent half of his Northern Sea Fleet of ships and submarines to Greenland's coast to find the Nagelfahr, which turned its occupants into berserkers, which Hitler could use to form invicible and invulnerable legions of madness-driven warriors and human fighting machines to roll over Europe and not stop even at its borders, so the President of the United States offered his country's assistrance through sending Jones, Doctor Browning and his men to "assist" Hitler's men. However, while Majors Von Ludolf and Loben kept an eye on Indy for his reputation to oppose them before being arrested by Captain Lestrade aboard the POSEIDON for supposedly killing Hesling, the traitorous SS officer Klaus Erich ultimately turned on them and claimed the Mjolnir to turn against the Third Reich, prompting Von Ludolf and Jones to make peace and leave with the empty hands after Mabel Rosenseld sacrificed herself to take Erich, herself and the ship to Valhalla. On August 20, Hitler spent some time at his Prinzregentenplatz 16 residence in Munich, waiting for an update on the V-1 rocket.

Seeking to still expand Germany and avenge its defeat in the Great War, Hitler first used diplomatic means to gain territories in building a greater German state, then invaded Poland on September 1, initiating World War II, unraveling the promise of the world's leaders to bring peace following the Great War and catapulting the world towards the very tragedy that the world's leaders had wanted to prevent which the late US president Woodrow Wilson had predicted would sweep across the globe, effectively dissolving the coalition government formed by James Hertzog and Jan Christiaan Smuts in South Africa, prompting Hertzog to insist the country to stay neutral while Smuts challenged him and spoke out in favour of the things Hitler denied: global freedom and democracy. Any Poles not massacred under his orders were enslaved and he shipped their country's resources to his own, filling Germany with concentration camps. Until then, most people had lived in denial of Hitler's true intentions, casting fearful eyes to his Nazi Germany. Even months before, Hitler's threat had been leading several world leaders such as Joseph Stalin to grow paranoid at him, with Stalin prohibiting his country's authorities from interferring in any Nazi affairs, such as when Klaus Kerner stole a copy of the Hermocrates from a Leningrad library in the Nazi effort to find Atlantis with zero consequences. Unknown to Hitler, though, assisted by Dr. Hans Ubermann and his own Nazi unit, Kerner tried to use the Lost City's God Machine to become a deity that could overthrow Hitler with the powers of the Atlantean "gods". However, Kerner's transformation led to his death and Ubermann's too when he tried to do the same, resulting in their takeover plans going nowhere. Eventually, Hitler and Stalin met on August 23 and signed together a joint non-aggression pact, securing a powerful ally in the Soviet Union's form. As Hitler prepared invasions for Belgium and France, the invasion to Poland was the last straw for England and France, who felt pressured by Hitler's threat and lost no time in declaring war on Germany, starting the war.

Early on the conflict, Hitler was successful in the Nazi campaigns spreading over most of Europe, starting to send Luftwaffe to "accidentally drop bombs over Great Britain in late 1940 until the British retaliated due to London's bombing, striking back with a raid to Berlin. Furious, Hitler ordered daily bombing runs over London starting on September 7, initiating The Blitz, a series of attacks that did nothing to greatly hurt the British but not the Scottish due to not believing Hitler's planes would fly to their country and thus didn't take seriously the blackouts until the bombing raids started on the British Isles, with Great Britain overall being threatened by Hitler, with Indiana Jones suspecting he would send his "search dogs" after the Excalibur to rule over Britain, those specifically being Colonel Kielmann and the late René Emille Belloq's twin, the latter who thought Jones could find the Excalibur and Lancelot du Lac for Hitler, but the Excalibur claimed Belloq's twin andd Kielmann and his forces retreated back to Germany with empty hands to be imprisoned for their failure. Turning his sights to the unprovoked French waiting behind the Maginot Line with hundreds to thousands Jew refugees who had escaped from his grasp, Hitler ordered his forces to invade France in revenge of the Battle of Verdun, causing national hero Henri Philippe Pétain to convince his country to give up and become subject nation to Hitler's Germany, letting Hitler flood Paris with his minions after Hitler offered them an armistice to sign in the same railroad Germany previously admitted defeat to France so they could sit out of the war while he could freed up more troops for further conquest and split the country in two as Pétain tried to get on his good graces to smooth France's path to no avail, but five days earlier prior to Pétain's surrender, Charles de Gaulle had proclaimed himself France's leader to oppose Hitler, leading him to flee to England and inspire his people through the radio. Similarly, Hitler failed to connect the Third Reich with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and drove himself to his eventual doom by declaring war against the United States of America in 1941. As Hitler's armies threatened to consume all of Europe, Lowell Thomas saw himself force to change his style of storytelling to satisfy audiences with more in-depth reporting and hard news about European battlefields like those of Edward R. Murrow.

Between Winter 1940-1941, Hitler's interest in the Lock of Frederick Barbarossa's Hair fanatically increased, intending to employ it to launch Operation: Barbarossa, consisting on the Soviet Union's invasion, with the Lock likely going to assure his victory. Around these period, Pétain and his administration would order material for Hitler like aircraft, trucks and tanks for his forces and create a series of laws and sensuses for Hitler that banned Jews from professions in France like teachers, doctors, lawyers, civil servants and university students, keeping those French by birth there albeit discriminated while sending the others, around 76,000, to concentration camps like Auschwitz from where only 2,000 would survive Hitler's Final Solution. By 1941's April, Hitler's forces had advanced to Greece, orchestrating raids at some archaeological sites. Sometime afterwards, when told by Tamara Jaglova about the Soviet Union's discovery of the Sword of Genghis Khan, Indy expected a re-established Mongolian Empire to go against Hitler's troops, who would be nothing but "tin soldiers" compared to them, though Genghis Khan's Sword ended up being targeted by Moshiro Moto and General Tzo-Din, so Jones and Jaglova saved the weapon from their hands and stored it at the Moscow Museum for everyone's safety. That same year, Hitler and his inner circle became interested in the stories about incredible machines of destruction being hidden inside Mount Sinai, prompting State Department to send Indiana Jones to find the machines before Helmut von Mephisto. Later on in the year, Hitler had a phone call with Mussolini while the latter was visiting the Vatican City, engaging in a conversation that, as noted by a spying Jones, ended with Hitler berating Mussolini over the phone due to a discussion about the invasion on Greece. After Indiana stopped von Mephisto, Colonel Musgrove noted that they could stop worrying about him and his crones for a while. Germany invaded the Soviet Union later on, and upon that invasion, Hitler's mass murder on the Jewish population of Germany began: nearly 1.4 million Jews, both European or Soviet, would be slaughtered by the end of the year.

Having gained several enemies, Hitler's party suffered serious defeats in El Alamein, Egypt and in Stalingrad, Russia the following years. In Spring 1942, Hitler had his forces mount a major offensive against Stalingrad, refusing to allow his troops to retreat despite the Soviet counteroffensive, a decision that ended in a Nazi defeat. Meanwhile, devising his "Final Solution" in Berlin, Hitler sent all his Jewish prisoners, in addition to non-Jews like homosexuals, prostitutes, gypsies, political opponents, the handicapped and the mentally and physically disabled, to concentration camps in Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka among others, trips that costed some of their lives and determined if they would be healthy enough for labor or "cleased" at the gas chambers. His Brownshirts terrorized not only his political opponents, but also dissidents and minority groups. In 1943, Hitler personally sent Colonel Doctor Edwin Gruber, one of his veteran SS men, to investigate rumors of people impervious to bullets in Zile Muri-yo, Haiti and recover the formula if possible. Indiana Jones and his British friend George McHale were similarly sent there to retrieve the Heart of Darkness before the forces of Hitler or Emperor Hirohito could find it, with Mac fearing Hitler would use it to buy jackboots. Gruber and his fellow SS soldiers teamed up with Colonel Yamada Hajime and his Japanese Imperial Army forces to find the Heart, though they intended to backstab them so Hirohito would never see the artifact they would claim for Hitler. The Vodoun bokor Boukman wiped out Hitler's forces and Gruber barely escaped with the Heart, killing Hajime in the process, but Gruber was subsequently killed by a monstruous beast afterwards and zombiefied by Marie Arnoux shortly thereafter as Jones and McHale departed the island.

In 1944, the Nazi Germany's possibility of losing the war was apparently inevitable after the Allied forces landed in northern France on the D-Day, contrasting Hitler's early promises of an empire that would last for a thousand years. Around this time, SS Colonel Weber oversaw Hitler's operations to loot artifacts and art from Nazi-occupied territories like at a stronghold in the French Alps to ship them back to Germany, among them the supposed Lance of Longinus, retrieved by Doctor Jürgen Voller, though once again, Indiana Jones would disrupt the Führer's operations by infiltrating Weber's train with his friend Basil Shaw as part of a war mission, yet the Spear turned out to be a fifty years old fake. On July 20 of that year, some German generals would try to kill Hitler by orchestrating a bomb plot, but they failed. In September, Hitler launched the so-called "vengeance rocket" he had demanded since his rise to power in the form of the V-2 rocket designed and tested by Wernher von Braun and his team of scientists in their secret Peenemünde facility, developed to hit targets over 150 miles away, so Hitler employed them to terrorize London and Antwerp in a way National Geographic and Robert Goddard felt he had stolen the latter's peaceful efforts to turn rockets into fiendish war weapons. Also on December 16, under Hitler's direct orders, the Third Reich army launched a brutal surprise attack that caught most of the Allied generals off guard except George Smith Patton, Jr., starting the Battle of the Bulge.

Circa mid-late March 1945, a cloaked Hitler appeared in a vision to Jones, where he attacked the American in a lush forest while deminding the ownership of the actual Lance of Longinus, which, according to the subsequent apparition of a Mysterious Blond Woman, would lead to the world to drown in blood if Hitler were to wield it and decipher its mystery. Indy and his father would come across the Nazi colonel Dieterhoffmann and his son Seigfried, two of several agents Hitler had desperately sent to Ireland and Great Britain in one last ditch effort to make his forces invincible. However, the former had no intentions to claim the Spear for Hitler but for the latter due to their leader's "failures", hoping that Siegried would restore Germany's glory the way Hitler failed to. Later next month, with the defeat of Germany likely, and Berlin near invasion, Hitler committed suicide on April 30.

Legacy

"The world's seen enough dictators, don't you think?"

―Indiana Jones to Simon Turner

Admiral Karl Doenitz succeeded Adolf Hitler as head of state following his suicide. However, Germany had already lost the war and surrendered on May 28's V-E Day. After the war, the world and its psychologists struggled to come to terms with the Holocaust and the cruel and painful things Hitler's lieutenants claimed to have done just uneer the pretext of obeying orders when tried for their crimes, with how Hitler came to power, held it and how he got innocents to harm others by following his dictates through psychology intriguing Yale University doctor Stanley Millman enough to eventually carry out disturbing experiments by the late 1960s to find out why. However, the biggest threat to democracy suddenly went from Hitler's Nazism to Stalin's Communism, leading to yet another (albeit unarmed) global conflict: the Cold War.

Hitler was cremated after his death. By 1947, Doctor Matthias Jäger's accomplice Dunkelvolk tried to steal Hitler's ashes, but his attempt was unsuccessful and he became a person of interest to the Soviet Union which sought his capture. Later that year, while trying to stop the delusional CIA agent Simon Turner from using the Infernal Machine to annihilate the Soviet Union through bringing Marduk from the Aetherium with Sophia Hapgood's unwilling assistance only to be accused of planning to take over the world once all "Commies" were gone, Jones asked Turner if he didn't think that the world had seen enough dictators by that point, clearly referencing Hitler as an example of that, forcing Jones to put an end to Turner's threat and save the world from Marduk's coming.

By 1969, the now NASA-employed Voller looked for the legendary Antikythera of Archimedes to correct the mistakes Hitler committed in the war, thinking he lost to the Allies. This put Voller at odds with Jones, but upon retrieving the artifact, revealed his intentions to actually time travel back to 1939 prior to the Poland invasion to assassinate Hitler and insert himself as the architect of a Third Reich victory. However, Voller's attempts to meddle in time were ultimately his undoing, as he didn't account for Archimedes' ignorance of continental drift and sent himself and his forces aboard a Heinkel 111 back to the 214 BC's Siege of Syracuse. Consequently, unlike Jones and his goddaughter Helena Shaw, Voller and his men died in the past while Hitler's historical fate was left untouched.

Personality and traits

"The Führer is not a patient man."

―Herman Dietrich

A savage and racist dictator, Adolf Hitler ruled Germany with an iron fist. As described by Indiana Jones, Hitler was like a "crackpot" who allowed his men to do whatever they wanted and an "hypnotist", a madman who could make a whole country nuts, thanks to his persuasion, bringing his own country the sense of hope in the form of nationalism and his idea of Germany's place in the world order, making promises to make their nation great again after their economic and social losses, with the Austrians being more than willing to listen to his claims of "great betrayal" and Hitler's own soldiers committing themselves to his cause to the point they would give their lives to help in the Third Reich's ascendancy. All Hitler sought as a supreme egotist, much like Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo, was to carve an empire of his own, even basing his own operation methods on Mussolini's before surpassing him as a threat. Hitler's eyes aglowed with what some called genius and what others called madness. Both Indy and his father Henry Walton Jones, Senior considered Hitler a "human devil" who could spout hatred, a malevolent comparition similarly shared with the Mysterious Blond Woman, who deemed Hitler as a "demon" due to his stained hands with the blood of millions, whom the elder Jones felt didn't fully satisfy his bloodlust and whose existence made the younger Jones once feel that the world didn't want to be saved nor someone like him could make a difference. Whereas the United States of America sought ways to improve human behaviour, Hitler promoted a new extreme form of eugenics. All in all, in Jones' words, Hitler was the enemy of everything the Holy Grail stood up for and a nightmare to be stopped, as while ruthless, he wasn't stupid despite Jones thinking initially he wouldn't go anywhere with his goals. Inspiring his country with his hateful ideas, Hitler was able to rise up as Germany's leader by carefully maneuvering his moves and manipulating his people, disposing of any political opponents through methods like intrigue, planned scandal or murder. His charisma pulled people to his side, but it was frightening due to his regime's horror, the devastation and suffering he could cause and his potential for worldwide chaos. He was cautious enough to not accept alliances with people who couldn't offer him something he wanted, hence why Maleiwa needed the Alicorn staff to approach him, making sure as well to change his face to appeal to Hitler's superior man image, with pale skin and blond hair. He was capable of making friendships, though, given his close relationship with Viktor Gantz, resulting in Gantz's absolute loyalty to him and accepting the job to supervise an expedition which Hitler insisted it wasn't a punishment but a step to their future while calling him distinguished and requesting his trust. He had little regard for the time of others, as evidenced by how much time it took for him to see René Emile Belloq, who regarded him as a lunatic who had impossible dreams and employed false flattery, despite being at the same mountain lodge. However, as noted by Colonel Herman Dietrich, Hitler lacked patience and demanded progress, with Colonel Doctor Edwin Gruber feeling that if Hitler deemed it necessary, he would "march through Hell" unquestioned and Colonel Dieterhoffmann opining that Hitler would drag his country into the mud with his obsessions, sins and corruption. Hitler did know fear as well, as Jones realized he would pale at the threat of Klaus Erich holding the Mjolnir if Erich hadn't been stopped. As World War II came to close, instead of fighting alongside his men, Hitler would stay hidden in a bunker, leading Jones to dismiss him as a coward and Jürgen Voller to grow disillusioned with him.

A patriot to his country, upon Germany's defeat in World War I, Hitler believed that the politicians from the Parliamentary system betrayed their country by formally ending the war, seeing the system's failures as scapegoats for Germany's hardships after the conflict, personally feeling that democracy was unpredictable and flawed. He liked to humiliate his enemies for the sake of vengeance, offering France an armistice to survive World War II but demand it be signed on the same railroad where Germany surrendered to France in World War I just to rub on their noses, not even giving an inch to Henri Philippe Pétain's attempts to appease him for both serving in the Great War out of hatred to Pétain's people, whom he pettily regarded as decadent and corrupt just for winning that war, something he didn't for give them for so his idea of a collaboration merely consisting on having access to the French economy for the German war effort and taking their agricultural production away to leave them with nothing to eat. Deeming Communism a danger to his ideals, Hitler would use numerous "impure" conspiracies and threats from within to inspire his people to recover from the economic hardships and disgraces inflicted by their enemies, thinking they lived in "degenerate times" and it was Germany's duty to drag the world into an age of purity. He wasn't particularly fond of nobility either, but Gruber expected him to not abolish the social class as the idea could be useful. Always having a liking for myth, magical and the occult, his interest in the latter and in archaeological artifacts prompted Nazi research and recovery expeditions into artifacts to either support his views of Aryan racial superiority, to be used as weapons against Nazi enemies or advance his mad dreams, being deemed by Indiana Jones as someone who thought like the Wicked Witch of the West for his master race concepts and by Major Eaton as "obsessed with the occult" and a "nut" who thought himself the "true Messiah" while "mentally deranged". He would thus sent several of his Ahnenerbe agents to scour the Earth in search of proof for Aryan syperiority as the mere idea of the power of belief attracted his like much like how magical powers fascinated him, having the intent to pervert them for his selfish purposes. Despite this interest, Hitler couldn't care any less that artifacts like the Ark of the Covenant were of Jewish origin, but prioritized the religious significance and symbolism the artifact had the potential to represent his government, feeling anything like the Fishhead Vessel of King Khataam could only belong to Germany because only the "master race" had the right to possess such artifact and anyone interested in looking for it had to do it on behalf of "homeland" Germany. He was interested in attatining as much European works of art and primitive artifacts solely for their value as ancient treasures, interested in obtaining mystical objects he believed that could enhance his power and expand his empire. As Colonel Musgrove supposed, Hitler's main interest was in weapons, no matter how archaic as long as they were technically advanced, hence his interest on the Hall of Records. Even if the artifacts he sought like the Crystal Skull of Cozan weren't really supernatural, Hitler was nonetheless satisfied with using such relics to inspire those who sworn fidelity to him due to being an unparaleled work of art capable of inspiring others to the point of death and beyond. His ideology overall mandated that, in the search for power (as Curt Johan Vogel reprimanded to Ian McIver while trying to uncover the Shintay relics), there was no place for timidity in Hitler's new order, only for the bold in his future, asking Emmerich Voss to not be weak for an instance while forgiving him for the loss of machinery just because his experiments surrounding the Great Circle's mystery instilled him with hope, with Doctor Cecil Kelemen knowing failure's price, with Hitler likely willing to punish his men if they brought fake artifacts to him, which was why Dietrich didn't want to risk presenting him an empty Ark and why Weber bitterly resigned himself upon realizing he had a fake Lance of Longinus, such as by reassigning them to more dangerous environments if they failed him as Captain Mohler feared. Hitler's inclinations for the esoteric made rounds through the Wehrmacht and became the subject for jokes, but these could be deadly if heard by the wrong ears, being likewise willing to send all of the Gestapo after a unit with escaped prisoners and imprison all of them for their failure at retrieving the Excalibur. Ultimately, all the Nazis lived very badly in fear for Hitler. He highly regarded Dietrich Eckhart for being the spiritual founder of his ideology, hence why he added a dedication to Eckhart in Mein Kampf. For all his eccentrities, even Hitler recognized Elsa Schneider's intellectual capabilities unlike most of the men she had come across at her job. Another thing Hitler was interested with was the development of technology like rockets, counting with scientists like Hermann Oberth and Wernher von Braun to achieve so.

Hitler was quite vengeful, even against people who hadn't come across him merely for disrupting his plans through his men. Once Indiana Jones stole the Ark of the Covenant from his forces, Hitler merely "bristtled" at the memory of the failed operation, dispatching his men to get rid of Jones and ensure he didn't interfere again. His hatred for the American archaeologist would grow more and more to the point Hitler went as far to hire an assassin to take out Indiana's life instead of settling with a severe reprimand or even personally task one of his right-hands to kill Jones and his father. If an enemy of his dared to mock him even for his moustache, Hitler was capable of ordering such individual's imprisonment on the spot. He could be even hypocritical when having grudges, as the moment Great Britain retaliated to Hitler sending bombs to be dropped on their territory by doing the same to Hitler's own, he reacted in rage despite having done the same beforehand.

Behind the scenes

Adolf Hitler was portrayed uncredited by the late Michael Sheard in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Sheard had previously played Oskar Schomburg in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Although Last Crusade marked Hitler's first physical appearance in the Indiana Jones films, Hitler's first physical appearance in the franchise was actually in Campbell Black's novelization of Raiders in an original fourth chapter fleshing out how René Emile Belloq was hired by him. Sheard had previously worked with George Lucas by appearing as Admiral Kendal Ozzel in his 1980 film Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back with Harrison Ford and Julian Glover.

Selected for the role the moment director Steven Spielberg received the Last Crusade script, Sheard's casting as Hitler was a way from Spielberg to compensate him for his brief Raiders role as Schomburg, as Sheard had most of his role cut thanks to a change of weather precluding the filming of most of his scenes due to scheduling conflicts he had already with a television product in Scotland. Sheard had reservations upon being first offered the part despite playing the role in other productions beforehand, as he was married to a woman of Jewish descent, but she encouraged him to play the role anyway. In a 2004 interview, Sheard acknowledged that he was never asked for interviews or DVD commentaries of the original trilogy due to his minor role, but didn't care given how memorable his scene was for the audience.

Sheard had already played Hitler several times before playing him in Last Crusade - in the TV movie Rogue Male (1976); in a two-part episode of the TV series The Tomorrow People (1978), entitled "Hitler's Last Secret"; and in the TV movie The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission (1985) - and would go on to play him one more time, in the documentary Hitler of the Andes (2003). He also played Heinrich Himmler (who was portrayed by his late friend Ronald Lacey in Last Crusade) three times in his career.

During the development of the film's script, written by Jeffrey Boam, Indiana Jones was not to have a face to face encounter with Hitler originally, instead viewing him from afar. He would also trap Elsa Schneider inside Hitler's car trunk so that she could not raise the alarm. Though these concepts had changed by the finished version of the production, Indy only views Hitler from a distance in Randy Thornton's Read-Along Adventure adaptation.

Contrary to popular thought, the real Adolf Hitler was never a huge fanatic of the occult. While his close ally Heinrich Himmler was indeed a great supporter of occultism and neo-pagan mysticism, Hitler disapproved such views and his regime cracked down on occult movements and sects.

Another possible anachronism is that it's said by some that Hitler was left-handed but he can be seen signing Henry Walton Jones, Senior's Grail Diary with his right hand. However, evidence has shown with the real Hitler signing, writing and even bowling with his right hand. In playing the role, Sheard didn't do any research but equally played Hitler just like he had done with previous roles, but while he does admit that the wrong signing was overlooked, Sheard admitted in a 2005 interview that he never filmed himself signing the diary and it was instead filmed by an stand-in with gloves long after Sheard had left the production.

The scene with Indy's meeting with Hitler is reproduced in the video game Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure where the player has the option to give him any document to sign. Contrary to the canonicity of the film, the player can give him to sign a copy of Mein Kampf or a travel pass, which he can use to bypass Nazi guards later in the game. The player also has the opportunity to punch Hitler, which will evidently result in a game over by having a soldier shoot Indy dead for his insolence, but the game will reward the action with 10 IQ points.

Matthias Jäger from Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix.

LucasArts had planned to resurrect Hitler for the plot of Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix, their intended follow-up to the popular Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis video game, but the game was cancelled. In the Iron Phoenix story, former Nazi scientist Doctor Matthias Jäger revives Hitler with the Philosopher's Stone two years after World War II. However, the Führer returns from the grave malformed and kills Jäger for bringing him back with no military to fight with. Indiana Jones later tricks Hitler into destroying himself with the Philosopher's Stone. Dark Horse Comics adapted its story as a comic book series but Hitler does not appear. Instead, a disfigured Jäger bears a strong resemblance to him and receives Hitler's fate from the game.

During the development of the fourth Indiana Jones film, Frank Darabont's script Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods included an appearance by Hitler as part of an alien vision to German doctor Felix Von Grauen, who seeks the return of the "glory" created by the Nazis. Summoned by the Crystal Skull of Destiny, Hitler's form grants Von Grauen's wish by draining his life away. Although Hitler didn't appear in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he is briefly visible in one the teaser trailers for the film (when the narration points out that Indiana Jones faced the armies of evil) as some footage of the Berlin bookburning rally scene from Last Crusade was included.

Appearances

• Field of Death (Historical Note)
• The Day of Destiny (Historical Note)
• Indiana Jones and the Unicorn's Legacy (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Interior World (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Sphinx (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Gods (Mentioned only) (As "Führer")
• Indiana Jones et le Grimoire Maudit (Mentioned only)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark novel (First appearance) (Flashback)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (Mentioned only)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark comic (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark junior novel (Mentioned only)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark Storybook (Mentioned only)
•  The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones – "Gateway to Infinity!" (Mentioned only)
•  The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones – "Africa Screams!" (Mentioned only)
•  The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones – "The Cuban Connection!" (Mentioned only)
•  The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones – "Trail of the Golden Guns" (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Eye of the Fates (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Dragon of Vengeance
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade novel
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade junior novel 1989
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade junior novel 2008
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade comic
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Read-Along Adventure
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure
• Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings teaser trailer
• Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings novel (Mentioned only) (Cancelled)
• Indiana Jones und das Schiff der Götter (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis comic (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones und das Erbe von Avalon (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Golden Fleece (Mentioned only) (As "Fuehrer")
• Indiana Jones und das Schwert des Dschingis Khan (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Mystery of Mount Sinai (On telephone)
• Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny (Vision)
• Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (Indirect mention)
• Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods (Vision) (Cancelled)
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Mentioned only)

Sources

• "Lost in the Mists of Time: The Muddled Myths of the Holy Grail" – The Lucasfilm Fan Club Magazine 8
• From Star Wars To Indiana Jones - The Best of the Lucasfilm Archives
• The World of Indiana Jones
• Raiders of the Lost Ark Sourcebook
• Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Templars
• Indiana Jones and the Lands of Adventure
• Indiana Jones Artifacts
• Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates and Other Tales
•  Chapter 10: Phantom Train of Doom on The Complete Adventures of Indiana Jones (backup link on Archive.org)
•  The Last Crusade: Twist of fate on IndianaJones.com (backup link on Archive.org)
•  Around the World with Indiana Jones on IndianaJones.com (backup link on Archive.org)
•  Adolf Hitler on IndianaJones.com (backup link on Archive.org)
•  Game Info: History on LucasArts.com (backup link on Archive.org)
• Psychology - Charting the Human Mind (Non-fiction source)
• Powder Keg - Europe 1900 to 1914 (Non-fiction source)
• George S. Patton - American Achilles (Non-fiction source)
• Winston Churchill - The Lion's Roar (Non-fiction source)
• I Am France - The Myth of Charles de Gaulle (Non-fiction source)
• Marshal Pétain's Fall from Grace (Non-fiction source)
• Into the Furnace - The Battle of Verdun (Non-fiction source)
• Chasing the Phantom - Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (Non-fiction source)
• At Home and Abroad - The Two Faces of Jan Smuts (Non-fiction source)
• Lines in the Sand - The Middle East and the Great War (Non-fiction source)
• Lowell Thomas - American Storyteller (Non-fiction source)
• Ho Chi Minh - The Price of Freedom (Non-fiction source)
• Robert Goddard - Mr. Rocket Science (Non-fiction source)
• Woodrow Wilson - American Idealist (Non-fiction source)
• The Best Intentions - The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles (Non-fiction source)
• New Gods for Old (Non-fiction source)
• Indiana Jones: The Ultimate Guide
• Indiana Jones Masterpieces
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Annual 2009
• Sideshow Collectibles (Pack: Arnold Toht 1:6 Scale Figure)
• Hot Toys (Pack: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark)
• Grail Diary (prop replica)

External links

• Adolf Hitler on Wikipedia