Emmerich Voss

CHARACTER
Emmerich Voss
Gender	Male
Birth	c. 1895 Germany
Death	c. November 15, 1937 Aboard Noah's Ark, Lake Hammar, Iraq
Nationality	German
Profession(s)	Archaeologist SS-Sturmbannführer
Allegiance(s)	Nazis Third Reich Special Antiquities Collection

"Let me tell you what are you missing, Dr. Jones. While you were playing your pointless game, I was playing you."

―Emmerich Voss to Indiana Jones

Sturmbannführer Emmerich Voss was a German archaeologist for the Third Reich Special Antiquities Collection and a Schutzstaffel officer within the ranks of the Nazi Party.

An old rival of his American counterpart Indiana Jones, by the time the two reunited around October 1937, Voss' pre-existing narcissism and obsession with psychoanalysis had coalesced around a dangerous and total dedication to the "power" of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

He sought the combined teleportation ability of seventeen sacred stones linked via a Great Circle so that the Nazis could launch instantaneous blitzkrieg attacks anywhere in the world, but he overreached and his actions invited divine judgment while on board an ancient vessel, initiating a second Great Flood that became his undoing at Locus' hands.

Biography

Early life

"Remember: Emmerich Voss - with two M's and two S's. Like SS."

―Emmerich Voss

Born in Germany around 1895, Emmerich Voss was a student of Austrian physician Sigmund Freud's work and eventually applied the neurologist's observations to his own methodology.

He was acquainted enough with his American counterpart Indiana Jones that the pair had conversed more than once which Voss had found useful but there was no love lost between them. Where Jones saw a sloppy amateur, Voss dismissed his opposite as a fraud, the gulf between them only widening when Voss embraced Nazism.

Voss became an archaeologist and Nazi officer with the rank of major within the Schutzstaffel (SS) for the Third Reich Special Antiquities Collection and, around 1936, Voss learned that Jones had recovered the Ark of the Covenant.

The Great Circle

By the end of 1936, Emmerich Voss learned of a power connected to the Great Circle, accessed through the abilities of seventeen stone artifacts hidden around the world. With Adolf Hitler's backing, Voss launched Operation Große Kreis, an extensive series of excavations on a global scale to acquire them. By that point, however, the majority of the pieces had been unearthed by agents of the Vatican and stored away within the Holy See's secret archive. Nevertheless, he was confident that the modern Nazi military machine could efficiently and quickly secure the remaining artifacts where the Vatican had taken centuries to establish their incomplete collection.

In March 1937, Voss' expedition to Machu Picchu in Cuzco, Peru was funded and the Nazi archaeologist enlisted, whether by coercion or voluntarily, the help of Doctor Laura Lombardi for her expertise in ancient languages. The excavation uncovered the Earthsplitter Relic and a top secret experiment took place in May on board the KMS Kummetz off the Peruvian coast to tap into the stone's power. Observing from a safe distance, Voss watched as the entire battleship and its crew disappeared. Teleported with the Kummetz and lost among the frozen peaks of the Himalayas, Lombardi realized that the Third Reich needed to be kept from reuniting the Great Circle artifacts and refused the recreate the experiment, perishing with the other survivors in the process around May.

Around July, Voss formed an uneasy alliance with Wehrmacht colonel Viktor Gantz, assigned to protect the operation from outside interference (though it would later be suspected that the Führer had actually tasked him with keeping Voss in check). While Gantz was skeptical of occultism, Voss was able to manipulate him into being a useful ally while tolerating Gantz's "stunning incompetence" out of respect for their Führer.

That summer, Indiana Jones found a Cat Mummy in Siwa, unaware that it held the Bearer Relic within and returned with it to Marshall College. Meanwhile, as his worldwide expedition continued, Voss wrote to journalist Marya Smirnova requesting an interview. Smirnova, unwilling to entertain a puff piece, responded that even Jones wouldn't get such treatment and laughed off Voss calling her friend a fraud, pointing out that the American archaeologist's achievements were far greater in comparison.

At some point, Voss' operations in Giza uncovered a giant of a man trying to protect the local stone relic from being discovered. However, the Nazis subdued and captured him. Voss realized that the man was wearing a pendant which indicated that he was working for an agency within the Vatican and moved to follow its trail back there.

Around early October, Hitler ally and Fascist Italy's Il Duce Benito Mussolini met with Father Cesare Ventura, a close associate and highly-positioned Vatican City priest. When the Pope suddenly took ill, Ventura occupied the power vacuum among the clergy and, with Mussolini's Blackshirts, launched a purge of supposed Communist materials which was largely an elaborate front to give Voss access to the Vatican Secret Archive.

Emmerich Voss with the Bearer Relic.

Eventually, Laura's sister Gina Lombardi, a resistance journalist and passionate anti-Fascist, investigating the whereabouts of her missing sibling learned enough to connect Voss to the disappearance and began looking into the Nazi archaeologist's activities. She and Indiana Jones—who had gotten involved in the search after the Cat Mummy was taken to Vatican City by Locus—observed Voss meeting with Mussolini and Ventura. When the priest realized that Voss' presence was to loot part of the archive rather than simply view its collection, what little resistance Ventura displayed was neutralized when the Nazi analyzed him and threatened to expose his scandalous, unchaste proclivities to the public. With the Vatican's incomplete set of Great Circle artifacts in hand, Voss departed on board a zeppelin which Jones and Lombardi soon infiltrated.

Things almost came to a head between Voss and Gantz in late October when the archaeologist returned to Giza, only to learn that Gantz had killed their giant prisoner during his interrogation. The colonel exploded into a rage when Voss described his actions as being tantamount to treason but even while pinned down with a gun to his head, Voss was not intimidated by a display that he reduced to being a limp attempt at domination, even mimicking an ape to annoy Gantz. Their priorities changed, however, when an eavesdropping Jones and Gina Lombardi suddenly fell through the ceiling. With Gantz incapacitated, Jones and Lombardi held Voss at gunpoint. Though Voss proceeded to taunt Jones over his issues with women and his father, as well as insisting to Gina that her sister had joined of her own volition, the American archaeologist recognized that Voss was trying to play him but on seeing the ancient tattooed markings on the body of the giant, he unwittingly allowed Voss to steer him through to the realization that the images were Adamic, the legendary first language given to humanity by God. All of which bought enough time for Gantz to recover. In the confusion that followed, Jones broke Voss' nose but when Gina accidentally knocked herself out while aiming at Gantz, the Wehrmacht colonel thought Voss had personally saved his life. Jones and Gina got away in the end yet Gantz, feeling that he was in Voss' debt, quickly became a more useful instrument for the Nazi archaeologist who sent him away on a lethal mission to retrieve the Earthsplitter from Nepal where the Kummetz' distress signal was emanating from.

Voss and his men found Jones buried up to the neck by the Egyptian desert in possession of the Giza stone and taunted him over being outsmarted. Putting himself face to face with the man, Voss assessed the archaeologist to be wondering if he should have built a life of meaning instead of meeting his end in Africa's lands. In response, Jones headbutted the Nazi in his bandaged nose. Voss took the relic but left his rival to fend off the harsh climate and a small cyclone of scorpions.

Eventually, all interested parties who had survived the chase for the remaining Great Circle pieces confronted each other at Ur in Iraq, the resting place of Noah's Ark which had used the relics to collect examples of the planet's creatures to survive the Great Flood and repopulate the Earth in its wake. Out on Lake Hammar aboard the ancient vessel, Voss activated the stones which seemingly brought God's judgment back down upon the Ark when a localized storm engulfed the area. Blaming Jones for interfering, Voss dragged the archaeologist towards him with his own whip and they engaged in a fight while Voss' personal bodyguard, Bertram Bergmann, held Lombardi at bay. Nearly falling into the squall, Voss and Jones continued to brawl and their sudden disappearance over the side took Bergmann's attention off Lombardi long enough to allow her to best Bergmann and rescue Jones. Locus moved to take the vessel out of harm's way, and Jones and Gina abandoned the Ark at the giant's urging but Voss ignored Locus' repeated warnings to get clear and a beam of light fired from the wheel through the Nazi. Unseen by the distracted Jones as he and Gina headed for shore, what was left of Voss' blackened corpse was unceremoniously dumped as the Ark was steered through a distant portal out of mankind's reach to an uninhabited part of the world.

Legacy

Emmerich Voss' assertion of Indiana Jones' issues with his estranged father were challenged the following year, when both Joneses were captured by the Nazis in Walter Donovan and Elsa Schneider's quest to retrieve the Holy Grail from the Temple of the Sun, an experience that enabled them to repair their relationship as they foiled Hitler's forces.

Voss' speculation over Jones' fears around parenthood would ultimately be resolved two decades later when, on a race to prevent Spetsnaz colonel Irina Spalko from taking a Crystal Skull back to Akator, Jones reunited with Marion Ravenwood, who told him he had fathered Mutt Williams, with whom Jones had bonded as his new found family thwarted the Soviet plot.

Personality and traits

"If a man bores him, Voss will make a game of dissecting his psychology and breaking him."

―Meier, to Viktor Gantz

Emmerich Voss was a student of the work of Sigmund Freud and learned karate. He wore round glasses not unlike Third Reich Special Antiquities Collection member Arnold Ernst Toht, albeit with a bandage across his nose once Indiana Jones' elbow smashed the respiratory organ.

A cunning archaeologist, he became known for playing mind games, dissecting a person's psychology and breaking them mentally if bored. In this manner, he learned how to manipulate people, be they friend or foe, into doing what he wanted. However, Voss also displayed arrogance to the point that he believed himself incapable of making an error. When he began to lose control over his machinations, he was quick to lay the blame elsewhere, unable to see that his own judgment could be flawed. His manner of speaking was reminiscent of that of the late French mercenary René Emile Belloq, which echoed in Voss' obsession with one's place in history.

An old rival of Indiana Jones, a respected American archaeologist and university professor, Voss had pieced enough of the man's psychology to deduce his complicated relationships with Marion Ravenwood and his father, observing that Jones' fears of becoming the latter were why his romance had collapsed with the former. For his part, Jones considered Voss a "sloppy amateur" and "nasty piece of work", recognizing that the Nazi's pursuit of power overshadowed any archaeological interest. When he infiltrated Voss' excavation of the Ziggurat of Ur, Jones uncovered a proposal by Voss to dismantle Noah's Ark when it was no longer useful in an effort to understand how the wooden vessel had survived millennia intact.

Behind the scenes

"He is searching for those major mysteries and those things that are unknown to the rest of the world. That's a big part of what's driving him. So when it comes to that obsession, they are very much alike. I think that that's the key element here that makes this a very, very interesting antagonist for Indiana Jones."

―Jerk Gustafsson, on Emmerich Voss' characterization.

Concept art of Emmerich Voss.

Emmerich Voss appears in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, performed by renowned Greek-German dubbing voice actor Marios Gavrilis. As a voice actor, Gavrilis not only voiced Voss in the original English version but also on the German dub. Stunt performer Nicklas Hansson performed Voss for his final scenes due to Gavrilis contracting COVID-19, hence why Gavrillis stayed at home in Stockholm and directed him through Zoom until he recovered, went back to Sweden and performed the scenes himself so his face could be captured for Voss.

The creative team have called Emmerich Voss one of their favorite villains, describing him as an "intensely psychological" and "highly intelligent" man obsessed with the human mind and how to manipulate it, serving as the perfect foil for Indiana Jones due to both being brilliant people compelled by their obsessions and passions albeit driven down two wildly different roads. The aim is for the character to get under the player's skin as he does with Indy. The game's developer direct displayed some concept art of Voss as well. Gavrillis describes Voss as a totally indoctrinated Nazi and Schutzstaffel (SS) member who has his own objectives and agenda, deluding himself into believing he's the hero and "Indy" of his own story, who uses language as a torture tool to humiliate and intimidate his foes. Gravillis 'armed' the character with his talking style as his most menacing and greatest weapon while giving Voss some insecurity and emotions to humanize him to avoid a "soulless cartoonish figure", drawing a line between making Voss a believable and profoundly disturbing antagonist and an over-the-top cringe-worthy clown nobody takes seriously, never acting like the latter for cheap entertainment but to degrade his enemies where it hurts, being so calculating and controlling that when he loses control he lashes out in ways funny to the audience.

An Indiana Jones fan since childhood back when every Christmas all classic movies were played on television like the Indy ones, Gavrillis went up for Great Circle unaware that it was an Indiana Jones title due to codenames being used, assuming the game was a further entry in the Wolfenstein series due to his character being German and it being a MachineGames production. He auditioned with the scene of Voss blackmailing Father Cesare Ventura, which he praised as genius writing, with the developers casting him at the end of 2021 and then informing him of what the game was starring Troy Baker in the lead role. Retrospectively, Gravilis considered that he would have blown his audition had he known what the game was ahead of time, as his ignorance had allowed him to be "freer" with the role having improvised the gestures Voss makes to force Ventura to comply over playing it safe and delivering the lines less involved. He enjoyed working with the cast, particularly with Locus performer Tony Todd, with whom he bonded over drinks at their hotel. He called the experience of being part of an Indy game as a "dream come true".

To prepare for the role, Gavrillis broke down the script, psychologically analyzed Voss to understand why he does what he does and found the right tone for the setting within the franchise, hence he rewatched all the films, particularly Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade which bookend the game, paying special attention to Arnold Ernst Toht and René Emile Belloq while wishing to inject "a bit of Klaus Kinski flavor" for intensity purposes. Unlike his character, however, Gavrillis doesn't know karate, and was thankful that it wasn't a requirement for the game. The character was refined with the assistance of Gavrillis' acting coaches Bernard Hiller and Adrian Gaeta as well as the game's director Tom Keegan whose vision and directions for Voss aligned with Gravillis'. His favorite scenes to shoot were any of those between his character and the protagonist, making sure they felt like a boxing match.

Since the release of Great Circle, Gavrilis has acknowledged players' hatred of his character on his Twitter account as having successfully done his job, signing off the tweet as Voss. He opines that what makes Voss an enticing and standout character, whom he enjoyed playing for being a "baddie" as that type of characters allows actors to bring out their inner darkness, is his unapologetic and radical nature, being trust driven with a constant switch on a razor's edge between deadpan seriousness and clownery, having Joker-like qualities almost like a God-level troll or a schoolyard bully who took his "shithousery" to a whole different level by backing it up with true knowledge and skill.

Continuity

The Lucasfilm.com article "8 New Discoveries in the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Trailer" noted that bandage across Voss' nose was reminiscent of the one worn by Jack Nicholson's J. J. "Jake" Gittes throughout Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown, a classic moody genre picture about the 1930s.

The Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Digital Art Book's cut content section shows an alternative fate for Voss, trapped alive underwater beneath an ice sheet with Noah's Ark.

Appearances

• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (First appearance)

Sources

•  8 New Discoveries in the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Trailer on Lucasfilm.com (backup link on Archive.org)
•  First Look at Playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Lucasfilm.com (backup link on Archive.org) (Pictured only)
• The Faces & Places of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle™ on Bethesda.net
•  Watch the Final Trailer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Lucasfilm.com (backup link on Archive.org)
•  Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Is Here! on Lucasfilm.com (backup link on Archive.org)
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Digital Art Book