Ernst Vogel

CHARACTER
Ernst Vogel
Gender	Male
Death	1938 Canyon of the Crescent Moon, Hatay
Nationality	German
Profession(s)	SS-Standartenführer (Colonel)
Allegiance(s)	Nazis Schutzstaffel

Ernst Vogel: "What is in the book, that miserable little diary of yours? We have the map, the book is useless; yet you come all the way back to Berlin to get it. Why? What are you hiding? What does the diary tell you that it doesn't tell us?"

Henry Jones: "It tells me that goosestepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them!"

―Vogel interrogates Henry Jones in 1938

Standartenführer Ernst Vogel was an imposing and ruthless Nazi officer in the SS-Leibstandarte, the Führer's personal bodyguard detachment who served as the Nazi liaison to find the Holy Grail in order to grant Hitler immortality.

In 1938, Vogel teamed with American industrialist Walter Donovan and Austrian art historian Elsa Schneider to acquire the Grail. During the journey, he developed a rivalry with Indiana Jones and his father Henry when they first met at Castle Brunwald which continued when Jones dumped him out of a zeppelin window while he was trying to arrest them.

In the Republic of Hatay, he broke away from Donovan and Schneider as they traveled towards the Canyon of the Crescent Moon where the Grail Temple lay to face Indiana Jones in one final battle. However, the fight on board his Mark VII tank would be Vogel's undoing when the tank was carried over a cliff, taking the Colonel with it.

Biography

Search for the Holy Grail

Colonel Ernst Vogel was assigned to help recover the Holy Grail in 1938. He and Doctor Elsa Schneider tricked American archaeologist Indiana Jones into releasing his father's Grail diary, rumored to contain a map of the Grail's resting place. When Jones and his father escaped from captivity, it became Vogel's mission to hunt them down and kill them under order of Adolf Hitler himself, a task which he undertook with great zeal.

Vogel and a Gestapo agent halted the takeoff of a zeppelin, believing that the fugitives might be trying to escape on it. Both men were indeed on board and Vogel discovered the elder Jones hidden behind an upside down newspaper and smugly greeted him in German only to be pestered for a ticket by a steward. After said steward lingered behind him, Vogel turned to ask him what he wanted and quickly realized that the man was Indiana Jones in disguise. Before the startled officer could react, Indy punched him across the face and threw him out the window into a large pile of suitcases below. Upon noticing the startled passengers observing him, Indy excused his actions by indicating that the colonel did not have a ticket, prompting them to immediately start brandishing their own tickets in panic. As the zeppelin took off, Vogel declared that they had not seen the last of him.

Leading the Nazi expedition to the Grail Temple and supplied by Hatayan soldiers provided by the Sultan of Hatay, Vogel recaptured Jones Sr. in the desert, locking him inside his tank with the captive Marcus Brody. After Indiana Jones reached the tank to rescue the prisoners, following a failed attempt by Vogel to shoot him with the tank's guns and then manually with his own pistol, three Nazi soldiers reinforced Vogel, but Jones managed to take out them with a single bullet. Vogel took the opportunity to strangle Indy with a chain with the help of another knive-armed soldier.

However, after giving his pistol to his father, Indy freed himself and managed to kill Vogel's aide. They kept thinking, at one point Vogel knocking Indy face-first into the periscope, allowing Indy to knock the periscope viewer in a way his father could neutralize the soldier guarding him. Vogel proceeded to try to push Indy's face into the tank treads as a truck of reinforcements approached him. Due to the ensuing explosion of one of the Nazi trucks at his father's hand, which surprised Vogel, Jones got caught up on one of the side guns at the mercy of Vogel, who hit at his fingers with a shovel and ordered the tank's driver to continue on in order to crush the archaeologist against an incoming stone wall.

Death

Unfortunately for Vogel, the efforts of the elder Jones and Brody caused the death of the driver upon knocking the crewman guarding them out, pulling the tank away from the wall towards a nearby cliff. Indiana took this opportunity to knock Vogel out, but just when Jones' companions emerged from the tank's hatch, Vogel reappeared with the shovel, causing Jones to accidentally knock Brody off the tank as he struggled with Vogel's shovel and Vogel sent Jones Sr. onto the tank's treads, but Indy punched him aside and took hold of his father with his whip. Indy's friend Sallah Mohammed Faisel el-Kahir appeared just in time with a camel to save the older Jones.

Vogel plummets to his death at the bottom of the canyon.

Now just the two of them, after knocking his hat off into the tank's bowels, Indy pinned Vogel's left arm behind his back and hammered his face into the tank's turret repeatedly before the tank carried them both over the precipice. While Jones managed to get away in time, Vogel clutched onto the back of the tank turret, screaming as he fell into the canyon, and was killed when the tank crashed and rolled over several times on the sharp rocks below.

Legacy

Seven years later, while in another Christianity-related adventure with his father to prevent the Nazis from acquiring a powerful religious artifact, upon hearing his companion Rebecca Stein assuring that they would say goodbye to England and got to Wales just after they had escaped from Dieterhoffmann and his Nazis, Jones remembered how Vogel hit him in 1938 and admitted that he really hated Nazis.

Personality and traits

"Put down the gun, Doctor Jones. Put down the gun, or the fraulein dies!"

―Vogel threatens to shoot Elsa

A high-ranking Schutzstaffel (SS) officer, Ernst Vogel was a ruthless and brutal person, sometimes with violent tendencies. Sadistic and ruthless, Vogel would had stopped at nothing for the Führer's prize. However, Vogel cared more about his orders than for the older Jones' Grail Diary or the Holy Grail itself.

Vogel's appearance was also striking, wearing a uniform with medals, leather gloves and boots, and an officer's cap. Vogel was also known to have showed Nazi and Aryan ideology, being a shrewd and merciless officer. He also had a short-fuse, as demonstrated when he got enraged after Henry Jones taunted him due to liking to burn books instead of reading them. His menacing gaze was weapon enough to control his fascist minions.

Vogel nursed a special hatred for both Indiana Jones and his father, and sought to kill them on numerous occasions in Austria and Hatay, grudgingly sparing them while waiting for further notice and relishing at being given the order to do so by Walter Donovan. Immediately, upon realizing the secrets hidden by the Grail Diary that his allies could have possibly imagined, Vogel turned his evil intentions to capturing and interrogating the two Joneses. He carried a swagger stick to note his authority and used a Luger P08 pistol when in combat, also utilizing anything he could fight with that was close to hand, such as a shovel, in the fight that led to his death.

Behind the scenes

Ernst Vogel was portrayed by Michael Byrne in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Vogel's name (which means "bird" in German) is never mentioned in the dialog of the film. The forename "Ernst" was first given in the Marvel Comics adaptation.

Before Byrne was cast in the role of Vogel, British actor Julian Glover had unsuccessfully auditioned for the part but producer Robert Watts called him back in order to be interviewed to play Walter Donovan.

In earlier versions of the film's script, written by Jeffrey Boam, Vogel actually makes it to the Temple of the Sun instead of Donovan, then called Chandler, who was to die aboard the tank, but once at the temple, Vogel is crushed by a rock while trying to steal the Holy Grail from its chamber. His death was later changed to that of being beheaded by the Grail Temple's traps (a death which would later go to a Hatayan soldier) before ultimately finding his fate with the tank on-screen.

Comic panel revealing Vogel's first name as Ernst.

At one point during the film, Elsa Schneider addresses Vogel as "Herr Oberst". Oberst is actually a rank in the Wehrmacht, and Vogel was a member of the SS, which had its own system of ranks. Vogel would have been properly addressed as "Herr Standartenführer". This confusion on the production's part is perhaps because both the Army rank of Oberst and the SS rank of Standartenführer represent the rank of Colonel. It could also be interpreted as an error by Elsa herself. Real-world history allows the possibility that Colonel Vogel was both an SS and an Orpo man thus allowing him to hold the position of Standartenführer and Oberst.

Insignia on Vogel's uniform would indicate that he served with distinction in the Imperial German Army during the Great War and received the Iron Cross, first and second class. In the postwar period, he joined the Nazi Party. By 1932 or after, he had achieved a high rank in the SS-Leibstandarte, Adolf Hitler's own bodyguard formation and the foremost unit of the SS-Verfügungstruppe, the first SS paramilitary formations that predated the establishment of the Waffen-SS in 1940.

In the German dub of Last Crusade, Vogel is always referred to as a Obersturmbannführer (the SS equivalent of a Lieutenant Colonel). Additionally, his taunt towards Indy about hitting the prisoners being the German way to say goodbye was amended to being the Schutzstaffel way instead, likely out of consideration for the German audience.

For the cover of Marvel Comics' comic book adaptation, Vogel (depicted as a younger man with blond hair) and Indy are shown as still fighting aboard the Mark VII Tank as it falls into the Canyon of the Crescent Moon. In the actual comic, both Vogel and Jones move to jump off the tank as it heads towards the cliff, but the Nazi's feet getting caught in the chain he tried to use against Indy, pulling over the edge to his death. In Randy Thornton's Read-Along Adventure adaptation of the film, Vogel's role is reduced solely to that of his presence at Castle Brunwald before vanishing from the narrative without explanation. The zeppelin sequence and the Tank Chase are omitted from the story.

No Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade toyline was made in 1989 following Kenner's closure, but Hasbro later released a 3 3/4" action figure of Vogel for their toyline in 2008.

Vogel in LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures.

In the movie and in LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures, Vogel's desert uniform is khaki and often wears a bazooka during his desert scenes, using it to destroy an excavator Indy and Sallah had built to get into the Canyon. Vogel's fight against the protagonists also ends with him being knocked into his tank's bowels, closing the hacht in the process before it falls off the cliff. By contrast, in the sequel, he wears the same black uniform during the convoy level as he did in Austria. However, in Cannon Canyon in the Wii edition of the game, his uniform is in khaki just like the original game. He is also equipped with an RPG to facilitate gameplay when in the movie the only weapon Vogel carries is a Luger P08. However slight, it's possible that Vogel could have survived in the second game, as he falls after the tank instead of with it.

Appearances

• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (First appearance)
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade novel
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade comic
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Read-Along Adventure
• Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures
• Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny (Flashback)
• LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (Non-canonical appearance)
• LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues (Non-canonical appearance)

Sources

• The Lucasfilm Fan Club Magazine 10
•  The Last Crusade: The diary or the doctor? on IndianaJones.com (backup link on Archive.org)
•  The Last Crusade: A worthy nemesis on IndianaJones.com (backup link on Archive.org)
•  The Last Crusade: Unwelcome passenger on IndianaJones.com (backup link on Archive.org)
• Indiana Jones: The Ultimate Guide
• "You Call This Archeology?" - Indiana Jones: The Official Magazine 3
• "The Thrill of the Chase!" - Indiana Jones: The Official Magazine 4
• "Indy's Top 10 Funniest Moments" - Indiana Jones: The Official Magazine 6
• Indiana Jones Masterpieces
• Indiana Jones Action Figures
• The Complete Making of Indiana Jones
• Top Trumps: Indiana Jones
•  40 Great Indiana Jones Quotes on Lucasfilm.com (backup link on Archive.org)