Jürgen Voller

CHARACTER
Jürgen Voller
Gender	Male
Death	214 BC (time displaced from August 18, 1969) Aboard Heinkel 111, Syracuse, Sicily, Italy
Nationality	German American
Profession(s)	Soldier Physicist Mathematician Professor (Cover)
Allegiance(s)	Nazis Schutzstaffel NASA (formerly) Alabama University (Cover)

"Yesterday belongs to us, Dr. Jones."

―Jürgen Voller

Oberarzt Jürgen Voller, alias Professor Schmidt of Alabama University, was a Nazi official who was brought to the United States of America 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 August 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 August 20, 1939, Doctor Jürgen Voller had worked on the V-1 rocket and met with Adolf Hitler at 16 Prinzregentenplatz in Munich, Germany. Although Voller was aligned with Nazi goals, over the course of World War II, he grew disillusioned with the Führer's leadership, having kept track of Hitler's mistakes and couldn't come to terms with the man's obsession with the occult.

Voller and Weber discover the fake Lance of Longinus.

In 1944, within a Nazi Stronghold in the French Alps which hoarded 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 French castle's items. However, as the Nazis prepared to transport it, 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.

Pursuing the Holy Lance themselves only to realize that it was just a fifty year old 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' fist and the Nazi's face, while 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 right after the two dispatched Weber, 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.

Having survived the ordeal, Voller was brought to America by US forces after the war. and given a new identity as "Professor Schmidt" of Alabama University.

Search for the Antikythera

Celebrity

"Mathematics works. As it conquered space, it will conquer time."

―Jürgen Voller

By August 16, 1969, Jürgen Voller had joined NASA and was celebrated as part of the team responsible for Apollo 11 landing on the moon, his expertise developing rockets for Nazi Germany helping greatly in the Space Race against the Soviet Union. Voller had also fostered 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 New York City ticker tape parade for astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, Voller was present at a private suite in the St Regis hotel in Manhattan. As his men awaited an update from the CIA and Agent Mason, he was delivered breakfast by an attendant. Menacingly, he questioned the porter about his racial identity and asked him of his military service during World War II, to which the man responded that he had served during D-Day. Voller claimed that America hadn't won the war, but Hitler merely lost it, making the man uncomfortable.

Voller was later interviewed by a journalist and was asked of his ambitions with space conquered. He was also noted to soon be awarded a medal from the President of the United States for his services to NASA. After the physicist made a disparaging offhand remark about the President, the reporter asked if he could use it for his piece, something Voller encouraged him to do. Meanwhile, international antiquities thief Helena Shaw had left Hunter College with the dial and Indiana Jones was forced to evade Klaber and Hauke, Voller's enforcers, during the parade having been framed for deaths of his colleagues. Informed of Jones' involvement, Voller ordered his men to make for Morocco where Shaw offloaded contraband at an annual black market auction.

Cut loose

At Hotel L'Atlantique the following day, Voller and Jones almost came to the blows arguing over who had stolen the Antikythera first, with Voller threatening that the archaeologist should have stayed in New York while Jones countered that Voller shouldn't have invaded Poland to begin with which led to a brawl among the auction's attendees.

Leaving the hotel, Voller tried to escape in his Mercedes with the dial while Jones chased him through Arabian streets in a tuk-tuk, but the archaeologist was forced to break off from the pursuit when armed men following his wayward 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 her effort to take it. However, the chase culminated when Voller and his men were detained by Agent Mason and taken on board an American helicopter. Frustrated by the collateral damage in his search and having gotten what they wanted from the man, the US government decided to let Voller go and to send him back to Alabama. Klaber and Hauke retaliated by killing Mason and all CIA personnel on board, hijacking the helicopter but not before the doctor revealed to a dying Mason that his name was not actually "Schmidt" but Jürgen Voller.

He would later catch up to Jones, Shaw and Kumar the next day as they were exploring a Roman shipwreck in the Aegean Sea. Like them, he too was looking for the Grafikos tablet which was located in the lower half of a sunken trireme and pointed the way to the rest of the Antikythera. His men took over Renaldo's boat and murdered the crew while Jones and his godchild were diving. When he gained possession of the Grafikos, Voller was unable to read the code it was written in so Shaw, in an attempt to deceive the Nazi, volunteered to decipher it, tricking the Nazi into believing 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 concealed stick of dynamite which caused a distraction to help her, Jones and Kumar escape aboard the Nazi's boat. However, as Voller watched them speed away, he noted that they had "gone west" instead of east, using this to follow the crew to Sicily.

Some hours later, Kumar encountered Voller and his crew having arrived at the docks. After a polite greeting, they abducted 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 an underground river while crossing an unstable bridge. 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 a broken underwater gate.

Voller tells Jones to fasten his seatbelt.

When Jürgen Voller reached Jones at the Tomb of Archimedes, he questioned the archaeologist on what he was fighting for in a world that didn't care about men like them, taunting his rival over the loss of his son and the resulting estrangement from his wife. As Teddy reappeared, 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 use the dial's abilities to take out an influential figure in the past, asked Voller if his plan involved assassinating Winston Churchill or Dwight D. Eisenhower. However, the Nazi surprised Jones by revealing that he was actually going to kill Adolf Hitler in 1939, allowing him to course correct 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 everyone, Helena Shaw had sneaked aboard inside one of the landing gears. Approaching the anomaly, Jones undermined the accuracy of Voller's calculations by pointing out that Archimedes would never have been able to take continental drift into account due to his points of reference having moved over two thousand years. 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.

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

The plane emerged above the island of Sicily, only barely able to correct itself after the anomaly shorted out its engines. At first, Jürgen 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, demanding that Jones give it to him, 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 few remaining men to their fate.

Voller's body was found by Archimedes after his plane crashed in the past.

Out of options, Voller died when his plane crashed onto the beach, his last moments spent simply watching as his demise quickly approached. His carbonized and mangled corpse was found among the wreckage by Archimedes, who took Voller's wristwatch to complete the dial, and his servants. They proceeded to save Jones and Shaw from a Roman soldier before the two returned to their own time, abandoning Voller's remains in the past to be forgotten.

Legacy

Two thousand years later, Voller's wristwatch went on to become the same timepiece Jones and Shaw found in Archimedes' tomb, now an ancient relic, alongside depictions of a phoenix with propellers. The sight of Voller's Heinkel 111 during the Siege of Syracuse led Romans to mistake the plane for a dragon and the encounter survived as a story put on as a puppet show watched by children in 1960s Sicily.

As for Jones, his wife Marion ultimately reconciled with him as he recovered at his apartment back in New York, proving Voller wrong in that Jones had nothing left in his present.

Personality and traits

"What kind of Nazi kills the Führer?"
"The kind that believes in victory, Dr. Jones."

―Indiana Jones and Jürgen Voller

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. Afterwards, he claimed the Allies did not win the war, but that Hitler simply lost it.

Following the war, Voller was recruited by NASA and used his knowledge of advanced rocketry to build himself a highly 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.

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.

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

Jürgen Voller was portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

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, a notable German scientist among the hundreds taken across to the US as part of Operation Paperclip who also exists in-universe. 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.

While the Soviets were the primary antagonists throughout the development of what became Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 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.

Voller's dressing style was noted to bear a resemblance to that of Ronald Lacey's Major Arnold Ernst Toht, one of the villains from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Comparing Voller to Toht, Mikkelsen expressed his liking for Toht, noting he was "part of making" Voller by dressing him with a black coat, hat and glasses, all three garments Lacey's character made iconic, but he noted there's no far connection with the character even though it could have been interesting, arguing Toht was more of a henchman whereas Voller is the "brain" behind a lot of things, so the filmmakers made sure to avoid copying Lacey's perfect performance.

Hasbro released an action figure of Voller as part of their Indiana Jones Adventure Series toyline for the release of Dial of Destiny in 2023. Particularly, Voller came packaged with a piece of the altar from at the Grail Knight's chamber from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, for which other action figures from that film were required to complete it.

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)
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny magazine
•  Harrison Ford Says Goodbye to the Man With the Hat in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny on Lucasfilm.com (backup link on Archive.org)
•  Phoebe Waller-Bridge Shares Harrison Ford’s Advice For Taking a Punch On Screen on Lucasfilm.com (backup link on Archive.org) (Pictured only)
•  Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Is Here! on Lucasfilm.com (backup link on Archive.org)
• The Making of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

External links

• Operation Paperclip on Wikipedia