Red Skull

• 1. Introduction

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  The Red Skull was dead by the final page of his first appearance, in Captain America Comics #1, cover-dated March 1941. The man under the mask, a businessman named George Maxon, rolled onto his own hypodermic needle in what looked like suicide. That should have been the end of the villain. Instead, Red Skull became the alias of several supervillains and the archenemy of the superhero Captain America. This documentary asks who really made him, since more than one creator claimed the idea. It asks how one character could die and return so many times. And it asks who is under the mask, because the answer changes depending on which Red Skull you mean.

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• 2. Disputed Creation

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  At the 1970 San Diego Comic Con, Jack Kirby told the crowd that France Herron had created the Red Skull. Yet the first issue of Captain America Comics, published by Timely Comics, was written and drawn by the team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. On separate occasions, both Kirby and Simon claimed to have had the original idea for the character. Simon later credited both Kirby and Herron with a role in creating him. Today the creator credit lists all three men: France Herron, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. Within two issues, the character they shared would be back from the dead.

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• 3. Returns From The Dead

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  In Captain America Comics #3, the Red Skull reappeared and organized bank robberies to raise money for a plot against the United States government. He declared, "Of course you realize the main item in overthrowing the government is money!" The issue ended with his apparent death when Captain America returned a thrown bomb.

  Captain America Comics #7, dated October 1941, brought him back again, this time planning crimes built around music. He also turned up in other Timely titles during the forties. Young Allies #1 and #4 showed him without his mask, once getting up from bed and once riding in a fighter jet. He was also due to appear in All-Select Comics #2 in December 1943, Captain America Comics #37 in February 1944, and All Winners Comics #12 in April 1944. Each of those plots aimed to overthrow the United States.

  The last Golden Age issue of the series had been retitled Captain America's Weird Tales. In it, the Red Skull appears in a dream of Captain America, and the two fight in Hell for the damnation of each other's soul. Horror comics were growing popular at the time. Timely ended the Captain America run afterward to focus on mystery, humor, and horror.

  Young Men Comics #24 in 1954 revived both hero and villain in a story called "Back From The Dead". Here the Red Skull believes Captain America is dead, has left politics, and runs a large criminal enterprise in the United States. In issue #27, he is again left for dead, this time after a truck crash.

  Tales of Suspense #65, dated May 1965, ended an absence of more than a decade. Marvel used retroactive continuity to explain the old stories. The real George John Maxon had been killed and replaced by a lookalike who worked for the real Red Skull. Captain America travels to Germany and finally meets Johann Shmidt face to face. Marvel has since revealed that Shmidt also first appeared in issue #1, and that the two skulls worked together in the Golden Age.

  In 1976, Jack Kirby returned to Marvel and both wrote and penciled a run of Captain America. The Red Skull was the only villain he brought back, since those stories stood apart from the rest of the Marvel Universe. The character was also an antagonist in the Invaders series, which told stories set in the forties.

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• 4. Orphan To Protege

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  Johann Shmidt was born in a village in Germany to Hermann and Martha Shmidt. His mother died in childbirth, and his father blamed the baby. Hermann tried to drown the infant, but the attending doctor stopped him. The father later killed himself, and the doctor took the orphan to an orphanage, where the child lived a lonely existence.

  At 7 years old, Johann ran away and lived on the streets as a beggar and thief. As he grew older he held menial jobs, but he spent most of his time in prison for crimes ranging from vagrancy to theft. His real name stayed hidden throughout the Golden Age and Silver Age appearances.

  A Jewish shopkeeper sometimes employed the young Shmidt. The shopkeeper's daughter Esther was the only person who had treated him kindly. When she rejected his attempt to force himself on her, Shmidt murdered her in a burst of fury. He fled in terror, yet he also felt ecstatic joy. The killing had released a rage that had built up through his whole young life.

  According to the official version told by the Red Skull and the Nazis, Shmidt met Hitler while working as a bellhop in a hotel. He was in his late teens, around the time the Nazi Party gained power. By chance, he brought refreshments while Hitler was furiously scolding an officer for letting a spy escape. Hitler declared he could make a better National Socialist out of the bellhop, then recruited him after sensing his dark inner nature.

  Red Skull: Incarnate reveals a different account. In it, Shmidt engineered the meeting himself, disguised as a bellhop. He tricked a fellow orphan named Dieter into trying to kill Hitler, then seized the chance to save the Führer's life.

  Hitler found the standard drill instruction given to Shmidt unsatisfactory, so he took over personally. He trained the young man as his right-hand man after Heinrich Himmler. Hitler then gave him a unique uniform with a grotesque red skull mask. Shmidt emerged as the Red Skull, in German Roter Totenkopf. His role was to embody Nazi intimidation, while Hitler remained the popular leader of Germany.

  The propaganda effect was so great that the United States government decided to answer it. It chose Steve Rogers, the one recipient of the lost Project Rebirth, and made him Captain America.

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• 5. Terror And Treachery

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  Across Europe in the early stages of World War II, the Red Skull headed Nazi terrorist activities. He also held a large role in external espionage and sabotage. He took personal command of many military actions and supervised the takeovers and lootings of many cities and towns. He organized a Wolf Pack of U-boats that preyed on shipping across the world.

  At first, Hitler took great pride in his protégé and let him have anything he wanted. Hitler financed secret bases in various locations throughout the world. Many were equipped with advanced experimental weapons developed by Nazi scientists.

  The Red Skull wanted technology for subversion and warfare. He stole plans for the nullatron, a device that could control human minds. He adapted a space-warping device developed by a cyborg scientist code-named Brain Drain. He also commissioned a projector that could suspend sections of cities inside spheres of energy.

  He admired Hitler's ideological vision but was never content as a subordinate. He kidnapped and killed many of Hitler's closest advisers and rose to become the second-most-powerful man in Nazi Germany. He made no secret of his ambition to supplant Hitler someday. Hitler could no longer control him and came to fear him.

  Captain America, often with the teenage partner Bucky Barnes, thwarted him many times. On one occasion the Red Skull captured, drugged, and brainwashed Captain America and sent him to kill a high-ranking officer. With Bucky's help, the hero broke free. The Red Skull later brainwashed three of the Invaders for a time.

  Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, a renowned military officer, had a falling-out with Hitler. The Red Skull sent him to Japan to found an organization that would prepare takeovers in the Far East. Strucker instead joined a subversive group that became known as Hydra. He cut his ties to the Red Skull and made Hydra a major threat to world peace.

  Hitler vowed that if he could not conquer the world, he would destroy it. The Red Skull proposed five gigantic war machines called the Sleepers. They would stay hidden while they stored power, then be released on a day called "Der Tag", which means "The Day" in German. Hitler enthusiastically approved. He did not know that the Red Skull meant to use them himself if Nazi Germany fell.

  In the closing days of the war in Europe, Allied intelligence heard of a doomsday plan code-named Der Tag but had no idea what it involved. The Red Skull sent a group of subordinates called the Exiles to a secret island base. A large contingent of loyal German soldiers and their wives went with them to build an army for the future.

  The Red Skull then sent Baron Heinrich Zemo to England to capture or kill Captain America and Bucky. Zemo's cover was the theft of an experimental Allied drone plane. The Red Skull did not know that the Allies had just parachuted Captain America into beleaguered Berlin to investigate Der Tag. The hero tracked him to a hidden bunker. As the Red Skull prepared to hurl an armed grenade, Captain America threw his shield. The grenade exploded, but body armor saved the villain, who was badly hurt and partly buried.

  Thinking he was dying, he told his enemy that the Sleepers would avenge the Nazis. Then an Allied plane dropped a huge blockbuster bomb on the bunker. The cave-in nearly killed Captain America, who escaped only barely. Back in England, the hero fell into Zemo's trap. It led to Bucky's supposed death and to Captain America's suspended animation for decades. Support pillars saved the Red Skull from the rubble, and gas from experimental canisters in the bunker also put him into suspended animation while his wounds slowly healed.

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• 6. Reinventions In Washington

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  The terrorist organization A.I.M. eventually rescued Johann Shmidt from suspended animation in modern times. He quickly turned one of its cells to his own ambitions of world conquest. He stole the Cosmic Cube after controlling the mind of its Keeper with a device he planted during a handshake. He also revealed that he had ordered Baron Zemo to steal the bomb plane that led to Bucky's death.

  Later the gas that had preserved him wore off, and his body rapidly aged to its true years. Weak and feeble in his mid-80s, he planned a final showdown. He kidnapped Captain America's closest allies and forced the hero to accept a medical treatment that aged his body to its rightful age. The two ancient men fought to the death. When Captain America refused to kill him, the Red Skull died in the hero's arms, cursing his enemy.

  The Nazi geneticist Arnim Zola had obtained samples of Captain America's DNA years earlier. He arranged for the Red Skull's mind to be moved into a cloned body of Captain America at the moment of death. Using the name "John Smith", the English equivalent of his real name, the Red Skull reinvented himself. He dropped his belief in National Socialism and Hitler because it made him look like a relic. He turned toward American ideology instead and saw potential in the American dream of capitalism and self-determination.

  He built a foothold in Washington, D.C., and gained control of the Commission on Superhuman Activities, a body that monitors and regulates superhero activities. The Commission removed Steve Rogers from the role of Captain America and replaced him with the jingoist John Walker. The Red Skull then arranged the murders of Walker's parents. That drove Walker insane and into a spiral of murder, all to blacken the name of Captain America.

  When his plot neared exposure, the Red Skull appeared to gloat. He tried to kill Rogers with a cigarette holding a lethal dose of the dust of death, his favorite poison. Walker hit him from behind with a shield, and the Red Skull inhaled the dust himself. His head lost its hair and the skin shrivelled and turned red. His face now matched his name. The Super-Soldier Formula let him survive.

  Other enemies came for him. Magneto, a Holocaust survivor, buried him alive with enough water to last a few months. His henchman Crossbones rescued him. Upon seeing Captain America's face, he felt a sudden burst of hatred that reignited his will to live. The Kingpin refused an alliance, fought a drug war with him, and defeated him in hand-to-hand combat. Hauptmann Deutschland later captured him and took him to Germany to stand trial for crimes against humanity. He narrowly escaped.

  A Nazi cult worshiping Hitler as a god found a Cosmic Cube that held Hitler's soul, which the Red Skull himself had placed there. He tried to send Captain America into the cube to kill Hitler. The hero escaped and severed one of the Red Skull's arms with his shield. The Cube became unstable and destroyed him.

  He then found himself in a hellish nightmare dimension, forced to serve as a bellhop to a world of non-European immigrants. His will was so great that he escaped, and he gained limited reality-warping powers. Korvac ambushed him, stole those powers, and banished him back to Earth.

  Later he took the form of the US Secretary of Defense, Dell Rusk, a name that is an anagram of "Red Skull". He developed a biological weapon called "Project Bloodwash" and tested it at Mount Rushmore. The Avengers exposed him, and Black Panther beat him so badly that he broke the villain's jaw in half.

  After the Winter Soldier assassinated him on orders from the renegade Soviet general Aleksander Lukin, he tried to switch bodies with Lukin using a new Cosmic Cube. The cube was still weak, so his mind moved into Lukin's body and the two shared it, battling for dominance. In the aftermath of the Civil War, he had Crossbones shoot Captain America outside a courthouse in New York City. Sharon Carter, acting under Doctor Faustus's mental directive, then assassinated the hero. He used the Kronas Corporation's holdings to try to cripple the United States economically.

  Sharon rebelled and shot Lukin dead, but Zola had moved the Red Skull's mind into a spare robotic body. Later Steve Rogers's body, kept drifting through time and space, was returned by a machine completed by Doctor Doom and Zola. Rogers's eyes opened red, showing the Red Skull in control. Rogers fought him inside his own mind and forced him out. Sharon made the Red Skull grow to a massive size with Pym particles, and a missile barrage from a hijacked A.I.M. battleship destroyed him.

  After another revival, he tried to rebuild his empire and hid in Latveria. The Thunderbolts attacked him there, and Doctor Doom killed him.

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• 7. Rival Skulls

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  After the disappearance of Johann Schmidt in 1945, the Red Skull's reputation remained formidable enough to be useful. In 1953, the Soviet KGB agent Albert Malik set up a spy and criminal organization in Algeria and took the Red Skull identity. He pretended to be the original in Captain America Comics #61, while actually serving Soviet interests. During the 1950s he faced the then-active Captain America, who was also pretending to be the original. Malik's flawed copy of the Super-Soldier Formula affected the minds of that Captain America and Bucky, who was Jack Monroe. Both were placed in suspended animation.

  Malik was also responsible for the deaths of Richard and Mary Parker, the parents of Peter Parker. The supercriminal Gustav Fiers had tipped him off to their spy status. A Scourge of the Underworld later killed Malik, acting for the original Red Skull, who was disguised as a pilot.

  Sinthea "Sin" Shmidt, the daughter of Johann Shmidt, briefly took the Red Skull moniker after being scarred like her father.

  After the Avengers vs. X-Men storyline, a Red Skull returned and assembled a team called the S-Men. They attacked Rogue and the Scarlet Witch at Professor X's grave and stole his body. This Red Skull was revealed to be a clone made by Arnim Zola in 1942 and held in cryogenic stasis in case Germany lost World War II. He removed Professor X's brain and fused part of it with his own. He then brainwashed the Scarlet Witch as part of a plot to wipe out the world's mutant population. Using Professor X's telepathy, he provoked ordinary New Yorkers into a mass assault against mutants.

  During the AXIS storyline, Magneto killed this clone, who returned as a giant called Red Onslaught. A spell by the Scarlet Witch inverted the morality of nearby heroes and villains. Captain America had to protect the Red Skull, now calling himself the White Skull, from the evil Avengers. In the Avengers: Standoff! storyline, the clone infiltrated the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility Pleasant Hill disguised as a priest named Father Patrick. He later founded his own version of Hydra with Sin and Crossbones.

  Rogue eventually knocked him out by wearing Magneto's old helmet, which blocked his telepathy. Beast operated to extract the brain fragment, and Rogue and Johnny Storm incinerated it. Rogers then pushed the clone over a cliff outside his mansion. During the Secret Empire storyline, another encounter ended with the clone and a man claiming to be Steve Rogers both plunging off a cliff into the water below.

  The original Red Skull has no superhuman abilities. He relies on a high intellect, inventive genius, and talent as a subversive strategist and political operative. German athletes appointed by Hitler first trained him as a martial artist, though he was never on par with Captain America. He is a skilled marksman and is well versed in firearms and explosives. In the cloned body of Captain America, his strength, speed and endurance exceeded that of an Olympic athlete.

  His trademark weapon is a trick cigarette that fires poison gas. The "dust of death" is a red powder that kills a victim within seconds of skin contact. After fusing his brain with Charles Xavier's, the clone gained powerful telepathic abilities. He grew frustrated with this power, realizing that he wanted people to grovel before him of their own free will rather than submit mindlessly.

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• 8. Screen Skulls

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  Scott Paulin played the Red Skull in the 1990 direct-to-video film Captain America. This original version is an Italian officer, later a Mafioso, named Tadzio de Santis. Axis soldiers killed his family and subjected him to the super-soldier formula, which left him deformed. They erased his memory to make him loyal to the Axis Powers. Years later he formed a criminal organization with his daughter Valentina de Santis. Captain America slammed him off a cliff.

  Hugo Weaving played Johann Schmidt in Captain America: The First Avenger, released in 2011. This version leads Hydra, which began as the Nazis' deep-science division. Schmidt ordered Dr. Abraham Erskine to use an experimental formula on him. It enhanced him physically but permanently disfigured him. Adolf Hitler nicknamed him the Red Skull and exiled him. During an incursion into Norway in 1942, Schmidt recovered the Tesseract, and his chief scientist Arnim Zola built weapons powered by it. Steve Rogers defeated him in 1945, and the Tesseract seemingly disintegrated him.

  Ross Marquand replaced Weaving in Avengers: Infinity War in 2018 and appeared again in Avengers: Endgame in 2019. In Infinity War, Schmidt has been transported to the planet Vormir and forced to serve as a stonekeeper. He guides those who seek the Soul Stone, which requires the sacrifice of a loved one. Having none, he cannot claim it himself. In 2018, Thanos and Gamora arrive. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo stated that Schmidt was freed from his curse after Thanos claimed the stone.

  The voice cast across animation and video games is long. Paul Kligman voiced him in The Marvel Super Heroes, and Peter Cullen voiced him in Spider-Man in 1981. Mark Hamill voiced him in The Super Hero Squad Show. Steve Blum voiced him in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, where he returns as Dell Rusk and unleashes the Sleepers. Liam O'Brien voiced him in Avengers Assemble, where he becomes the Iron Skull and later the Cosmic Skull. In Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H., gamma energy briefly turns him into the Green Skull.

  Alternate versions stretch further. In Old Man Logan, he is the self-proclaimed President of the United States until Old Man Logan kills him. In the Ultimate Marvel universe, he is the unnamed illegitimate son of Steve Rogers and Gail Richards. He cuts off his own face in rejection of his father. In Heroes Reborn in 2021, a Symbiote possesses him and he re-dubs himself the Black Skull.

  In 2006, Wizard ranked the Red Skull 21st on its list of the top 100 greatest villains. In 2013, Complex placed him 16th, and in 2014, IGN placed him 14th. In 2022, Newsarama ranked him third among the best Marvel supervillains. That same year, CBR.com ranked him second among 13 most important Marvel villains and sixth among 10 most charismatic Marvel supervillains.

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