- "Yesterday belongs to us, Dr. Jones."
- ―Jürgen Voller[src]
Oberarzt Jürgen Voller,[2] alias Schmidt, was a Nazi official who was brought to the United States and involved in the Apollo program as a rocket scientist and mathematician for NASA.
While the US government indulged Voller's interest in the fourth dimension to gain access to his expertise, the man's Nazi ideology was never truly sidelined. When space travel was achieved in 1969, Voller then led an audacious plot to conquer time itself with the Antikythera and return to 1939 as the architect of a Third Reich victory in World War II and beyond.
His efforts brought him into conflict with Indiana Jones, an old enemy, and his goddaughter, Helena Shaw. Chasing the two of them across the world in order to obtain both pieces of the dial, Voller accessed a fissure in time but ended up two thousand years in the past instead. Left with nothing but his own miscalculations, the Nazi could only watch as his aircraft lost control and crashed during the Siege of Syracuse, leaving Voller's lifeless, charred body on the beach where it was found by Archimedes.
Biography[]
World War II[]
By the mid-1940s, Dr. Jürgen Voller had worked on the German V1 rocket. Although Voller was aligned with Nazi goals, over the course of World War II, he grew disillusioned with Adolf Hitler's leadership having kept track of the Führer's mistakes and couldn't come to terms with the man's obsession with the occult.[1]
Voller and Weber discover the fake Lance of Longinus.
In 1944, within a Nazi Stronghold which horded plundered antiquities, Voller answered to Colonel Weber who was keen to appease Hitler's interest in supernatural relics and thought that he had found one in the Lance of Longinus included among the occupied castle's items. However, Voller uncovered the real prize—one half of the Antikythera which was thought to be capable of locating fissures in time—but was unable to convince Weber to see value in an incomplete mechanism tied to theoretical science.[1]
Pursuing the Holy Lance themselves only to realize that it was just a fake, Indiana Jones and Basil Shaw encountered Voller on board a plunder train evacuating relics back to Berlin. The initial meeting between the American archaeologist and German physicist was largely between Jones's fist and the Nazi's face, and Basil retrieved the Antikythera. Voller recovered just before an out of control anti-aircraft gun shot up the fast-moving vehicle, knocking the scientist back down. He caught up to Jones and Basil on the roof of the train, demanding that the men drop their weapons and to give him the Antikythera, but ended up violently ejected from the train by an outstretched water tower.[1]
Having survived the ordeal,[1] Voller was brought to America by US forces after the war,[3] where he was given a new identity as "Professor Schmidt" of Alabama University.[1]
Search for the Antikythera[]
- "Mathematics works. As it conquered space, it will conquer time."
- ―Jürgen Voller[src]
By 1969, Voller had joined NASA and was celebrated as part of the team responsible for the Apollo 11 moon landing, his expertise developing rockets for Nazi Germany helping greatly in the Space Race against the Soviet Union. He had also formed a secret collective of ostensibly former Nazi forces and sympathetic Americans that searched for Jones' half of the Antikythera alongside the CIA. On the day of the Apollo 11 ticker tape parade in New York City, he waited for information on the device's whereabouts in a hotel room. As his men awaited information from the CIA and Agent Mason he was delivered breakfast by an attendant. Menacingly, he questioned the hotel attendant about his racial identity and asked him on his military service during World War II, to which the man responded he served in D-Day. Voller claimed that America didn't win the war, but Hitler merely lost it, making the man uncomfortable. Voller was later interviewed by a journalist and asked of his ambitions now that he had conquered space, he was also noted to soon be awarded a medal from the President for his services to NASA. After making a disparaging remark about the President, the journalist asked him if he could keep that in the interview, something Voller encouraged him to do. When Jones escaped from Klaber, and Helena Shaw left with the dial, Voller ordered his men to make for the auction in Morocco.[1]
At Hotel L'Atlantique, Voller and Jones almost came to the blows after arguing over who had stolen the item first, with Voller threatening that Jones should have stayed in New York City while Jones countered that Voller shouldn't have invaded Poland to begin with.[1]
Afterwards, Voller tried to escape in his Mercedes with the dial while Jones chased him through Arabian streets in a tuk-tuk, but was forced to break off from the pursuit when armed men following his goddaughter Helena Shaw and her friend Teddy Kumar caught up to them, causing Voller to lose sight of his American foe. Shaw attempted to retrieve the dial from Voller during the chase, nearly strangling the Nazi in an attempt to take it. He and his men would be captured by agent Mason and taken on board a helicopter. Frustrated by the collateral damage in his search and the civilian casualties, and having gotten what they wanted from the man, the US government decided to let Voller go and to send him back to Alabama University. Klaber and Hauke, Voller's enforcers, retaliated by killing Mason and all CIA personnel on board, hijacking the helicopter but not before the doctor revealed to a dying Mason his name was not actually "Schmidt" but Jürgen Voller.[1]
He would later catch up to Jones and Shaw whilst diving a Roman shipwreck in the Aegean Sea. Like them he was looking for the Grafikos tablet which was located in the lower half of a sunken trireme. His men took over Renaldo's boat and killed the crew. When he finally gained possession of the Grafikos, he was unable to read the code it was written in. Shaw, in an attempt to deceive the Nazi, volunteered to decipher it, leading Voller to believe that Archimedes' tomb was located in the city of Alexandria. She then asked for the cigarette he had lit, using it to secretly ignite a stick of dynamite and causing a distraction to help her, Jones and Kumar escape aboard the Nazi's boat. Voller watched them sail away noting that they had "gone west" instead of east, using this to follow the crew to Sicily.[1]
Kumar encountered Voller and his crew having arrived at the docks. After a polite greeting, they kidnapped the boy and followed Jones and Shaw as they made their way to the Ear of Dionysius, Voller's men killing several people before entering the caves. Noticing where Jones had gone, they followed them deeper into the tomb bringing Kumar as a hostage. The boy escaped when he and Hauke fell into the underground river. Wanting to waste no time, Voller directed that the two be left behind and carried on inside, allowing Teddy to drown Hauke by handcuffing him to an underwater broken gate.[1]
Voller tells Jones to fasten his seatbelt.
After reassembling the dial inside the tomb of Archimedes, when Jürgen Voller reached Jones at the grave, he asked what he was fighting for in a world that didn't care about men like them, taunting the man through the loss of his son and the estrangement from his wife, Marion Ravenwood. As Teddy appeared, Voller shot Jones and captured him, bringing him to an airfield where he and his men readied a Heinkel 111 plane for flight, during which he changed into a Schutzstaffel uniform. The archaeologist having deduced that Voller was going to take out an influencial figure, he asked Voller if his plan involved assassinating Churchill or Ike, but Voller told Jones that his plan was actually to kill Adolf Hitler in 1939, allowing him to take over and fix all of Hitler's mistakes in World War II to steer the Third Reich to victory against the Allies. The plane took off during a storm in which a fissure in time opened in the skies directly above them. Unbeknownst to him, Shaw, who had followed them to the airstrip alongside Kumar, had sneaked aboard inside one of the landing gears. Whilst approaching the anomaly, Jones questioned Voller on the accuracy of his predictions, noting that Archimedes would never have been able to take continental drift into account. After debating back and forth, Voller decided not to take the chance and the plane was ordered to turn around but was too late to avoid getting dragged into the fissure.[1]
Out of time[]
- "Hitler lit a fire that could have burned a thousand years. I saw every mistake. Every blunder. And I will correct them all. History is a long list of losses, Dr. Jones. It's just a question of whose."
- ―Jürgen Voller[src]
The plane emerged in 214 BC above the island of Sicily, only barely able to correct itself after the anomaly shorted out its engines. At first, Voller and his men celebrated, believing themselves to have successfully traveled to 1939 and the physicist told his pilots to set a course for Munich. However, they slowly began to realize that they were in a different time period entirely, as the historical Siege of Syracuse was happening right below them. The plane was then fired upon by the Romans who mistook the unfamiliar aircraft for a dragon. Voller desperately ordered a retreat back through the portal but, to his horror, damage from the battle was sending the plane downwards. Shaw by this point re-emerged and set about rescuing Jones, the two of them throwing some of the Nazis out of the plane in the process. Voller attempted to escape the plane by taking their parachute but Shaw shot him. The godparent and child duo then jumped out of the plane and safely descended onto the island below, leaving Voller and his men to their fate.[1]
Voller's body was found by Archimedes after his plane crashed in the past.
Voller would die when his plane crashed onto the beach. His last moments spent simply watching as his demise quickly approached him. His body among the wreckage would later be found by Archimedes and his watch would be taken by the man. Two thousand years later, Jones and Shaw would later find the same timepiece in Archimedes' tomb alongside depictions of a phoenix with propellers.[1]
Personality and traits[]
- "What kind of Nazi kills the Führer?"
"The kind that believes in victory, Dr. Jones." - ―Indiana Jones and Jürgen Voller[src]
Although a devoted Nazi, Jürgen Voller's experiences during World War II caused him to become disillusioned with Adolf Hitler. The string of German defeats made him realize Hitler was an incompetent leader. After the war, he claimed the Allies did not win the war, but that Hitler simply lost it.[1]
Following the war, Voller was recruited by NASA and used his knowledge of advanced rocketry to build himself a high and respected position among the scientists who worked on the Apollo 11 program. However, his allegiance to the US government was just a cover that Voller used to continue his Nazi schemes under American protection. He openly displayed racist tendencies when talking to an African-American bellhop in a hotel.[1]
Voller was rather cold and taciturn with everyone. He treated most people with barely concealed disdain and not even his men were immune to his ruthlessness, abandoning Hauke to his fate when the man became inconvenient to Voller's endgame, and yet he consistently addressed Indiana Jones by his title. He killed Renaldo to prove to the archaeologist that he was willing to use any means necessary to accomplish his goals. While genuinely competent and intelligent, Voller was still overconfident, and he failed to account for Archimedes' lack of knowledge about continental drift while calculating the position of the fissure in time.[1]
Behind the scenes[]
- "He's a man who would like to correct some of the mistakes of the past. There is something that could make the world a much better place to live in. He would love to get his hands on it. Indiana Jones wants to get his hands on it as well. And so, we have a story."
- ―Mads Mikkelsen on Jürgen Voller[src]
Jürgen Voller was portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.[4]
Mads Mikkelsen and director James Mangold on the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny set.
The character was partly inspired by the real-life Nazi and later NASA engineer Wernher von Braun,[5] a notable German scientist among the hundreds taken across to the US as part of Operation Paperclip.[6] While familiar with Operation Paperclip, Mikkelsen didn't base his performance on any particular scientist from the program. He had conversations with director James Mangold on how Voller should sound, with the two choosing to not have Voller speak in a stereotypical German accent like most Nazis of the Indiana Jones films. Mikkelsen personally feels Voller is similar to Indiana Jones in that they are both "dreamer[s]" who are "stuck in time" yet still have a notable goal in their lives.[7]
While the Soviets were the primary antagonists throughout the development of what became Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,[8] a Cold War-era former Nazi character was used in Frank Darabont's Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods screenplay where Felix von Grauen, a German doctor who rescues Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood from a plane crash in the Peruvian jungle, is revealed in the climax to be trying to use the Crystal Skull of Destiny to restore the Third Reich, suggesting but not outright stating that he fled to South America.[9]
Appearances[]
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (First appearance)
Sources[]
- Indiana Jones Worlds of Adventure (Pack: Doctor Jürgen Voller with Plane)
- Indiana Jones Adventure Series (Pack: Doctor Jürgen Voller)
- The Making of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Notes and references[]
- ↑ 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 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
- ↑ The Walt Disney Studios All Access - PLT-000721 R. Getty Images. Walt Disney Studios (2022-11-25). Archived from the original on 2022-11-25.
- ↑ The Making of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
- ↑ ‘Indiana Jones 5’: Mads Mikkelsen Joins Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Sequel at Deadline
- ↑ Indiana Jones 5 Will Pit Indy Against Nazis Again, In 1969 – Exclusive at Empire
- ↑ What Was Operation Paperclip? at History.com
- ↑ Meet Voller: Mads Mikkelsen on what to expect from the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny villain at Entertainment Weekly
- ↑ The Complete Making of Indiana Jones
- ↑ Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods
