The Tough Sergeant was one of the Nazi soldiers serving under Colonel Herman Dietrich in 1936 during the Nazi effort to send the Ark of the Covenant to Berlin, German.
Biography
The Tough Sergeant and a group of soldiers rode in the cargo truck carrying the Ark of the Covenant to Cairo. After Indiana Jones hurled the driver out the door and got behind the wheel, the Tough Sergeant ordered his men to climb into the cab and shoot him. They all fell off the side of the truck, much to the Tough Sergeant's annoyance, although Indy did get shot in the arm.
The Tough Sergeant climbs over the speeding truck.
The Tough Sergeant decided to take things into his own hands and climbed over the top of the truck and swung into the cab, overpowered Jones by punching his bullet wound, and threw the American through the windshield. At the behest of Dietrich, he attempted to crush Jones, who was clinging to the truck's grille, between his vehicle and Belloq's staff car. Jones had other ideas and crawled underneath the moving truck, climbed into the back and swung into the driver's seat, kicking the Nazi in the face. Infuriated, Jones started smashing the man's face into the dashboard before throwing him through the windshield. Finding himself in a situation much like Indy's, the Tough Sergeant tried to follow the same steps, but the truck's grille had been damaged by this time and couldn't hold his weight. The Tough Sergeant eventually lost his grip on the grille and the truck ran him over.
Behind the scenes
The Tough Sergeant was portrayed by the late and uncredited Sergio Mioni in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In the third draft of the film's script, his fate wasn't the same that of the film. Instead of taking control of the truck he is actually shot by an armed guard in the staff car on the orders of Shliemann (Dietrich in the final film), who is afraid that if the Sergeant kills Jones, the truck will crash, damaging the Ark.[1][2]
The film's novelization doesn't feature him, but includes a scene similar to his. Two soldiers climb on top of the truck, but the aforementioned armed guard in the staff car (that does not exist in the film because Toht rides in his place) blows the scheme allowing Indy to stop the truck sending the two soldiers flying off the car. This scene also derives from a scene originally planned for the film that was present in the film's original script.[3]