Indiana Jones Wiki
Indiana Jones Wiki
Indiana Jones Wiki
8,149
pages
in: Characters appearing in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Colonels, Deceased,
and 4 more
English

Ernst Vogel

Sign in to edit
Vogel redirects here. You may be looking for Curt Vogel.

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[src]

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[]

Operations at Brunwald Castle[]

Colonel Ernst Vogel[2] was assigned to help recover the Holy Grail in 1938.[1] Stationed on Castle Brunwald, Austria, Vogel came to acquaint himself with the building's layout, coming to know it well enough to be aware of its hidden spiral staircase.[3] When American archaeologist Indiana Jones broke into Brunwald to rescue his father Henry Walton Jones, Senior, Vogel and Doctor Elsa Schneider tricked him into releasing his father's Grail diary, rumored to contain a map of the Grail's resting place, under the threat of Vogel shooting Schneider dead, which Indy complied despite Henry's warnings that Schneider was with Vogel.[1]

The Joneses were then taken by Vogel to meet Walter Donovan and restrained to a pair of cheers, as Schneider insisted they should spared for their uses in finding the Grail in case Marcus Brody couldn't be retrieved by the Nazis at Iskenderun. After Schneider kissed Indy goodbye, Indy and Henry were left alone but not before Vogel hit Indy as a way to "say goodbye in Germany" out of spite, to which Indy sarcastically replied that he liked Schneider's Austrian way better.[1] Schneider requested Vogel to spare the Joneses, which Vogel agreed to do, but just to humour her: had the Joneses not set the room on fire moments after Vogel and Schneider left, the former and his men would have certainly killed them.[4] As Donovan prepared to leave with Schneider for a bookburning rally in Berlin, he was notified about Brody's capture and gave his approval for Vogel to gladly kill the Joneses, who by were slipping out of their bonds.[1] As Donovan's car pulled away from the castle, Vogel grinned: he had been looking forward to eliminating the Americans, especially the younger one, and now he could do it on the Fuhrer's orders.[3]

When Jones and his father escaped from captivity under Vogel's nose, fleeing from him and his men in a motorcycle with a sidecar after tricking them with an empty boat, making Vogel and his men realize too late as they prepared to follow the boat with another,[1] it became Vogel's mission to hunt them down and kill them under order of Adolf Hitler himself,[5] a task which he undertook with great zeal.[1]

Skirmish at the Airport[]

Vogel and a Gestapo agent halted the takeoff of the D-138 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[1] over twenty feet below,[3] 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.[1]

Clash in Hatay[]

Vogel alongside in .

Vogel alongside Walter Donovan in Hatay.

Vogel was proud to have the tank lead Donovan's procession across the rocky desert.[3] 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.[1] If Indiana Jones dared to try to board his tank, Vogel intended to shoot Henry in front of his son, but knowing he needed reinforcements, he requested Donovan via radio to send him troopers.[6] After Jones reached the tank to rescue the prisoners and killed its gunner, following a failed attempt by Vogel to shoot him with the tank's guns and then manually with his own pistol before coming face to face after Jones jumped to the vehicle, 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.[1]

Vogel while shooting with a .

Vogel while shooting with a Luger P08.

However, after giving his pistol to his father, Indy freed himself and managed to kill Vogel's aide. They kept fighting, 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 had rolled from the tread just like him but in the opposite direction.[1] While he could have just drawn up his gun and shoot Jones, Vogel felt that would give him little satisfaction.[3] Instead, Vogel stomped at Indy's fingers with his boots, then a shovel and ordered the tank's driver to continue on in order to crush the archaeologist against an incoming stone wall.[1]

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.[1]

Vogel plummets to his death at the bottom of the .

Vogel plummets to his death at the bottom of the Canyon of the Crescent Moon.

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,[1] as he was tangled in the chain and couldn't get off of the tank as a result.[6] He screamed his head off until the tank met the rocks far, far below.[3] The tank crashed and rolled over several times on the sharp rocks, his body still clinging from the broken turret.[1]

Legacy[]

Immediately after Vogel's death, Schneider realized what had happened after seeing with her binoculars a black plume of smoke coming from the fallen tank's gorge. She then informed Donovan about the fate of the tank and its occupants, without specifying Vogel's, to which Donovan asked before Elsa implied maybe Jones had also died. Moving on, Donovan concluded they would be the ones to find the Grail at the Temple of the Sun.[6]

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.[7]

Personality and traits[]

"Put down the gun, Doctor Jones. Put down the gun, or the fraulein dies!"
―Vogel threatens to shoot Elsa[src]

A high-ranking Schutzstaffel (SS) officer, Ernst Vogel was a ruthless[1] and brutish[4] person, sometimes with violent tendencies.[1] Sadistic and ruthless, Vogel would have stopped at nothing for the Führer's prize.[8] However, Vogel cared more about his orders than for the older Jones' Grail Diary or the Holy Grail itself.[9] He was proud of being assigned to lead Walter Donovan's procession over the Canyon of the Crescent Moon with a Mark VII Tank, whose Turkish crew was instructed to follow all of his commands.[3]

Vogel's appearance was also striking, wearing a uniform with medals, leather gloves, boots and an officer's cap.[1] He had muscular arms, was lantern-jawed and counted with insect-like small dark eyes, redefining the word 'brute'.[6] 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.[1] His menacing gaze was weapon enough to control his fascist minions.[10] He implied to have a code of honor mixed with patriotism, assuring Elsa Schneider he was a German soldier and that he didn't murder helpless captives, though that may have been a lie.[11]

Vogel nursed a special hatred for both Indiana Jones and his father, so he 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.[1] 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.[8] Indy could even see Vogel's beady eyes emanating hate waves, intent to win a contest of wills. Despite being concerned with punishing the Joneses over the deaths of three SS soldiers under his command,[6] Vogel prioritized killing Jones when he got a truck with two soldiers stuck in his tank over making sure his men evacuated safely before ordering to shoot the vehicle and crush it for good measure. He did know Jones was a better shot than him so he ducked back down into his tank's turret fearing for his life.[3] 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.[1]

Behind the scenes[]

Ernst Vogel was portrayed by Michael Byrne in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.[1] He was voiced by Richard Doyle in the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Read-Along Adventure, who also voiced Marcus Brody.[12] Archival recordings of Byrne were used to have Vogel speak in Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure.[13] 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.[2]

Before Byrne was cast in the role of Vogel, British actor Julian Glover had unsuccessfully auditioned for the part in a screen test, being terribly jealous when Byrne got cast instead, but producer Robert Watts called Glover back in order to be interviewed to play Walter Donovan.[14][15][16]

In the third revision of Jeffrey Boam's original script, 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)[17] before ultimately finding his fate with the tank on-screen in Tom Stoppard's rewrites.[18]

Comic panel revealing Vogel's first name as Ernst.

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.[1] 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. Ryder Windham's 2008 junior novelization mentions that Elsa adressed Vogel for his Army rank.[19]

Byrne was told by the film's production team that the Nazi khaki suit Vogel wears was a design from Joseph Goebbels, created to be filmic from any angle, leading the actor to wonder if it was one of the first costumes created purely for the purposes of propaganda.[20] 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.[1]

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.[2] 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.[12]

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.[21]

Vogel in LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures.

Vogel in LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures.

In the movie[1] 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.[22] 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.[23]

Appearances[]

Sources[]

Notes and references[]

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28 1.29 1.30 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade comic
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade junior novel (2008)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Storybook
  5. ↑ Indiana Jones Masterpieces
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade novel
  7. ↑ Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Top Trumps Specials: Indiana Jones (Card: Vogel)
  9. ↑ Indiana Jones: The Ultimate Guide
  10. ↑ IndianaJones.com The Last Crusade: A worthy nemesis on IndianaJones.com (backup link on Archive.org)
  11. ↑ Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade junior novel (1989)
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Read-Along Adventure
  13. ↑ Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure
  14. ↑ IndyCast: Episode 256 at IndyCast
  15. ↑ Indiana Jones: Making the Trilogy
  16. ↑ Indymag, March 2015
  17. ↑ Indy III
  18. ↑ The Complete Making of Indiana Jones
  19. ↑ Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 2008 junior novel
  20. ↑ IndianaJones.com Evil Threads on IndianaJones.com (backup link on Archive.org)
  21. ↑ Indiana Jones action figures
  22. ↑ LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures
  23. ↑ LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues
Deutsch 日本語 Русский
Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.
More Fandoms