Baron Heinrich Zemo: Nazi Nobleman, Mad Scientist, extremely evil
"Whenever, a city was levelled, a town was sacked, the Red Skull was there!...Wherever there was injustice, tyranny, ruthlessness, the Red Skull was there leading the attack on the weak and helpless!"
— Johann Schmidt telling his backstory to Steve Rogers, "The Fantastic Origin of the Red Skull" (from Tales of Suspense Vol. 1 issue #66)
The First Avenger has been fighting Nazis, Hydra, and other enemies of America since 1941. Some of the Sentinel of Liberty's foes, however, have gone above and beyond in terms of sheer evilness.
- Examples from the Ultimate Marvel and What If? series can be found here.
- Examples from animated works (including related comics) can be found here.
- Examples from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (including tie-in comics) can be found here.
- The 1979 TV movie can be found here.
- Examples from literature can be found here.
- Examples from video games (and tie-in comics) can be found here.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
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Recurring Villains
- Red Skull, real name Johann Schmidt, is Cap's Arch-Enemy, and a protégé of Adolf Hitler himself. Once a bitter, psychotic street kid, Schmidt was originally a petty criminal with a violent streak. Convincing a friend to try and assassinate Hitler, Schmidt stepped in and saved Der Fuhrer's life. He then donned a Skull-shaped mask and took on the role of a grateful Hitler's spymaster. Trapped in suspended animation by Cap, Schmidt awakened in the modern era and resumed his old ways. Firmly convinced that Dystopia Justifies the Means and that everyone needs somebody to bully, Schmidt has committed every crime in the proverbial book, from the petty to the grandiose. He made several attempts at taking over the world through the use of the Cosmic Cube, killing thousands of people every time; attempted to transplant Adolf Hitler's brain into Captain America's body; tried to bodyjack Cap himself on several occasions; and fought The Kingpin for control of the New York drug trade. He has manipulated the Scarlet Witch as part of a plan to exterminate the world's mutant population; used his Dust of Death to gruesomely kill any subordinate who fails him or looks at him funny; and has been the mover and shaker behind countless Neo-Nazi movements, fascist governments, and terrorist cells, most notably Hydra and AIM. In an alternate future, he spent his time triggering natural disasters, then showing up to inform people that he would not be saving them. When his daughter, Sin, was born, Schmidt planned to kill her for the crime of being a girl; he continuously abuses her. While in a relationship with Mother Night, he brutalized her constantly. With an end goal of reducing society to its most primitive, dog-eat-dog levels, Schmidt is universally despised in both the superhero and supervillain communities.
- Baron Heinrich Zemo is a vile Nazi who designed countless superweapons for their cause, on top of attempting to prematurely start World War II by kidnapping Franklin D. Roosevelt and nearly murdering thousands in a False Flag Operation to secure American support for the Nazi cause. Heinrich has committed several war crimes, such as strangling the Polish hero Citizen V to death and testing a Death Ray on a concentration camp inmate. He also captured and flayed the original Human Torch, recreating his powers to build an army while incinerating one of his own minions just for kicks. When Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos tried to steal his death ray, Heinrich rigged it to explode, destroying a nearby German town. Heinrich was once a loving father and husband, but a fight with Captain America left him disfigured and consumed with hatred, leading him to beat his son and wife. Heinrich has even tried to shoot through his son Helmut to kill Captain America, and was willing to kill his wife when she opposed him. Near the end of the war, Heinrich tried to steal an experimental plane and rigged it to explode, seemingly killing Bucky Barnes and trapping Cap in suspended animation. After the war, Heinrich fled to South America and enslaved a remote South American native tribe. Once, when hundreds from the tribe rebelled, Heinrich violently put down the rebellion. When Captain America returned in modern times, Heinrich enacted several revenge schemes, including creating Wonder Man in order to infiltrate the Avengers and stating that his powers would destroy him if Heinrich didn't give him an injection every week. Heinrich also kidnapped Cap's young friend Rick Jones and stuck him in a trap designed so that Captain America would kill him if he tried to free him.
- Arnim Zola was a Nazi biochemist in his human years. To escape mortality, Zola used his cybernetic brilliance to digitize himself and survive inside robotic shells to continue his experiments. One of his worst acts was to create the monstrous Hate-Monger, and afterwards he continued to complete multiple experiments for the Red Skull, his usual employer and master. When he and Captain America were lost in Dimension Z, Zola becomes its dictator and its god. He inflicts horrible experiments among the people, overwriting their minds to be loyal to him alone, and turns others into horrible mutants that he sics on those who don't accept his rule. Zola tried to forcibly impregnate his wife Mary to give him heirs, and when she refused, Zola engineered a car crash that left her a paralyzed victim for him to artificially inseminate and use to give him children that he sees as nothing but pawns, his affection to them fake to manipulate them, and he is more than willing to kill them if they do not conform to his wishes. In one notable outing, Zola turned many orphan children into mutated beasts that had to be put down. Zola, to end his long war with Captain America, created a way to get back to Earth, with a bomb that would kill countless innocents before Zola sent his mutants, with the intent of overwriting the minds of the people of Earth and mutating others, a process that would kill billions.
- Doctor Deirdre Wentworth, alias Superia, is a misandrist determined to create a female dominated world ruled by her. Abducting 10,000 female super villains, Superia attempts to sterilize every other woman on Earth, making only her minions capable of producing following generations. Although this plan of hers was thwarted, Superia goes on to manipulate and brainwash Cathy Webster into becoming the unstable man-hating super woman, Free Spirit, under her command. After seemingly be killed by the Red Skull, Superia gifts her younger self knowledge of the future and uses a Cosmic Cube, removing the frozen Captain America from several timelines, leading to the whole multiverse being destabilized and threatening reality. Inserting herself in the Avengers while posing as a superhero called Broad Stripe, Superia causes their disbanding and replaces them with her own minions, the AmeriCommand. Eliminating anyone who stands against her, Superia turns America into a police state; has any superhumans not loyal to her imprisoned and tortured; keeps Tony Stark's disembodied brain in a jar; traps the Fantastic Four in the Negative Zone except for Susan Storm, whom she is implied to have caused a miscarriage. When confronted by Captain America for her evil deeds, Superia refuses to admit any guilt and has the gall to tell him he could destabilize reality by merging with another version of himself, even as he does it to undo the damage she caused to the multiverse.
Others
- Captain America Comics:
- Issue #1's "The Riddle of the Red Skull" & issue #3's "The Return of the Red Skull": The original incarnation of George Maxon, before he was retconned into a Nazi impersonator of industrialist John Maxon, is the first to bear the visage of the Red Skull and a despicably worthy precursor to Johann Schmidt's cruelty. An American agent of Schmidt's who agreed to betray his own country, Maxon sabotages planes that he then sells to the American military, callously brushing off the resulting deaths of innocent soldiers. In his spare time, Maxon assassinates military officials; threatens his goons while sending them to rob banks; and viciously hangs two thugs he believes to be Captain America and Bucky. After surviving his first confrontation with Captain America, Maxon steals plans for a drill superweapon and uses it to kill thousands in a rampage throughout New York, intent on bringing America to ruin and even cowing the Führer himself into submission.
- Issue #5's "The Terror That Was Devil's Island": Pepo Laroc is an obese Frenchman who sold out his home country to the Nazis. Taking control over Devil's Island to torture the prisoners in his special torture chamber, Laroc has Steve and Bucky's friend Tom imprisoned, starving and abusing him for over a year. Upon getting caught by the heroes, Laroc has Steve sent to his pet sharks while he attempts to kill the young Bucky himself.
- Issue #23's "The Mystery of the One Hundred Corpses": Dr. Izan is an evil Nazi spy who convinces Americans to turn over their sick and dying to him for the hope of a miracle cure. Izan kills his "patients", dumps their bodies in a quarry, and swaps them with a Nazi doppelgänger with American citizenship. Having repeated this scheme nearly 100 times, clogging the quarry with bodies, Izan plans to use all these doppelgängers to facilitate a Nazi takeover of the nation.
- Issue #37's "The Chambers of Dr. Agony": Dr. Conrad Meer, better known by his preferred appellation "Dr. Agony", is one of the most sadistic Golden Age Nazis on record. Devising ways to push human pain to the utmost limit to create Super Soldiers for Hitler, Dr. Agony kidnaps innocents and drags them into his torture chamber to work them down, hours at a time, until they expire, gleefully using everything from red-hot cages to spiked boards to make his prey suffer.
- Captain America Vol. 1 issues #206-208: Hector Santiago, better known by his hated nickname "the Swine", rules over the prison camp of Rio de Muerte with an iron fist. A man with a sense of humor "only Satan himself could match", the Swine introduces himself by allowing a starving inmate access to all the food he wants, feeding the man until he's full, then continuing to force-feed him until his stomach ruptures. The Swine shoots men dead and sentences them to torture even merely at the rumor that they use his derogatory nickname. Among his many tortures, the Swine cooks prisoners alive by the dozen and forces them to roll boulders with nothing but their nose. Even his own cousin isn't safe from his evil; when she tries to stop him from maiming Captain America with a flamethrower, the Swine decides to burn her to death.
- Punisher/Captain America: Blood & Glory: US Attorney General Roger Mollech and his aide Angela Stone scheme to turn Medisuela into their puppet regime for profit. Helping the ruthless General Miguel Alfredo "Tony" Navatilas turn Medisuela into a dictatorship, Mollech and Stone funnel lethal drugs from his country into America and flood the streets with it, uncaring of the countless lives lost. Arming Navatilas's military with powerful guns, Mollech and Stone coach him to invade multiple nearby countries; they actually have sabotaged the weapons so that they will wipe out Navatilas's own army and pave the way for the US to invade Medisuela. To further along the invasion, Mollech and Stone order a PMC group to use army helicopters to slaughter streets of Medisuelan citizens. Having Navatilas assassinated, Mollech and Stone torture and kill anyone in their way to power.
- Theater of War: Operation Zero-Point, by Charles & Daniel Knauf: Der Metzger, "The Butcher", is an SS officer in charge of the Anti-Gravity experiments in occupied Poland. Forcing a resistance fighter named Lior to lure Steve Rogers into a trap by using her family as bait, Metzger is revealed to be using slaves, many of whom are to be killed, with countless others horribly experimented upon or used as test subjects in "anti-gravity" chambers that are invariably fatal, with Lior's family already dead. Plotting to master the anti-gravity technology, Der Metzger plans to unleash it on the enemies of the Reich, to kill countless civilians.
- "Home of The Brave" & "Out of Time" arcs: King Maximillian Babbington, the ruler of a post-nuclear United States of America, starts out as the leader of the racist militia "Rampart", having previously had his men take a police station containing several children hostage. After Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, prevents Rampart from hijacking a festival, Babbington lures Captain America into a trap before using hundreds of nuclear warheads to decimate the USA to 10% of its former population—with many survivors being disfigured—and encasing Captain America in ice to put him on display. Succeeding on an alternate Earth, when Captain America is freed from his icy prison by resistance members as of 2025, the USA under Babbington has become a fascist regime, where allegedly inferior people are branded as such, and people are killed for so much as gathering together.
Other Earth-616 Characters
- Young Allies Vol. 1 issue #14's "The Monster of the Maniac Murders": Dr. Wilton Wilkes is a traitor to his country and a genius doctor who invents a ray that can make people go homicidally insane. Using this ray to turn test subjects into raving beasts that kill those in their path, Wilkes has a man kill a general and unleashes the machine on an entire town, intending to give it to the Japanese Army to utilize against the US.
- Avengers Spotlight issues #31-34's "The Xenophobic Man" arc (feat. U.S. Agent): The Xenophobic Man, real name Fred Bouting, is a white supremacist and nationalist who wants to kill as many foreigners as possible. Having slain over a dozen Mexicans by the start of his arc, the Xenophobic Man guns down a large family of immigrants in his introductory scene, then tracks down the surviving children to a hospital, where he finishes them off and kills a nurse as well. Then trying to massacre the entirety of the Sanctuary Movement and its dozens of occupants for trying to protect the rights of immigrants, the Xenophobic Man reacts to mercy from U.S. Agent by trying to shoot him In the Back, proudly proclaiming his own self-righteous nationalism to his final breath.
Other Continuities
- Red Skull is just as bad in other continuities:
- Batman & Captain America (Earth-3839): Red Skull, here a high-ranking member of the Nazi regime, allies himself with The Joker in his latest plot for expanding the Third Reich. Having the Joker murder several innocents to assist in his own theft of an atomic bomb dubbed "Fat Boy," Red Skull casually poisons one of his own soldiers for questioning his orders, and later has the Joker slaughter a path into a military base. Betraying the Joker at this juncture, Red Skull boasts his plans to parade the Joker's broken body around as a trophy, and reveals his true master plan to drop Fat Boy onto Washington, D.C., then use the ensuing millions of casualties to pave the way for the Nazis to invade America. Even when his original plan is thwarted, Red Skull still attempts to drop Fat Boy miles out of Washington, gleefully proclaiming that the fallout will still kill countless innocents.
- Captain America Vol. 4 issues #17-20—"Cap Lives" arc (Earth-31117): In 1964, Captain America awakens to a United States where the Nazis won World War II and, once Adolf Hitler died, Red Skull became the leader of the Nazis (Herr Reichsfuehrer), and is thus dictator of the US. Skull shows Cap several television clips, including how the Nazis nuked Detroit and then killed "non-Aryan races and other deviants". Skull offers Cap a deal: Pledge allegiance to the new Reich (so the people will follow his example), and he can get anything—including "boys in costumes"; otherwise, Skull and the Nazis will use him for breeding purposes and medical experiments, before hanging him in Times Square. Cap escapes, and when one of Skull's soldiers isn't able to recapture him, Skull orders said colonel to shoot himself. Later on, there is the planned execution of a spy in Times Square. Cap saves the spy, but has to surrender, otherwise Skull will have his snipers kill hundreds of innocent people; the spy and a couple of Cap's allies seemingly escape, but Skull had wired the spy with explosives, which he then detonates, killing all three. Skull's ultimate plan is to use a Time Machine to conquer the entire world, across all time periods.
