Indiana Jones film baddies can be nearly as memorable the franchise’s namesake swashbuckling archeologist. The creepy, bespectacled Gestapo agent and that scimitar-swinging dude in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The human-sacrificing high-priest from “Temple of Doom.” And, oh yeah, an immortality-chasing tycoon in “The Last Crusade.”
The franchise’s fifth installment arrives June 30 with the gameshow-evoking title of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” It will be actor Harrison Ford’s final adventure wearing Indy’s trademark fedora. Set in 1969, the film finds Ford facing a foe whose description will sound familiar to spaceflight enthusiasts and longtime Huntsville residents: A former Nazi turned U.S. aerospace engineer.
Named Jürgen Voller and portrayed by actor Mads Mikkelsen, the character was partially inspired by Wernher von Braun. The brilliant, pioneering and revered late director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, von Braun guided America’s Apollo 11 spaceflight mission to the moon. In the process Huntsville transformed from cotton town to “The Rocket City.”
But von Braun’s legacy is complicated. Earlier in his life, he’d been a member of the Nazi party and developed a World War II weapon for German dictator Adolf Hitler that killed tens of thousands of people.
This Indiana Jones 5 villain rumor’s been on movie blogs for a while. But recently more established media outlets have reported on the character’s inspiration.
In late 2022, the film’s cowriter Jez Butterworth told entertainment news website Empire, “The simple fact is that the moon-landing program was run by a bunch of ex-Nazis. How ‘ex’ they are is the question. And it gets up Indy’s nose.”
Butterworth added, “The people that are behind it are, you know, his sworn enemies.” Nazis have been recurring adversaries in the Indiana Jones franchise. The original 1981 “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and 1984 follow up “Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom” were set in the mid-1930s, while 1989′s “The Last Crusade” was set mostly in the late ‘30s.
The Indiana Jones character was created by George Lucas, the auteur whose “Star Wars” franchise launched Ford into being one of the biggest movie stars in the world. “Jaws” mastermind Steven Spielberg directed the franchise’s first four films, including 2008′s “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” James Mangold — known for “Walk the Line,” “Logan” and “Ford v Ferrari” — directed and cowrote “Dial of Destiny.”
Mikkelsen is known for roles like James Bond “Casino Royale” antagonist Le Chiffre and cannibalistic sociopath Dr. Hannibal Lecter in the “Hannibal” TV series. The Danish actor described Indy 5 villain Voller to Empire as, “a man who would like to correct some of the mistakes of the past.”
A story published Jan. 18 on Yahoo described Voller as “a Nazi scientist who’s found a new vocation in the American space program but still has designs on changing the world.
In real life, von Braun was born into Prussian aristocracy in 1912 and died of pancreatic cancer in 1977 at age 64 in Virginia. Growing up, it had been his dream to build rockets that went to the moon.
After becoming a member of the Nazi party circa 1937 he developed the V-2 missile for Hitler’s Germany. That V-2 missile was deadly, in more ways than one.
As Time magazine’s Alejandro de la Garza wrote in a 2019 story, “Before he [von Braun] was building rockets for America, he was building them for Hitler. Germany launched more than 3,000 missiles of his design against Britain and other countries, indiscriminately killing approximately 5,000 people, while as many as 20,000 concentration camp prisoners died assembling the weapons.”
De la Garza also wrote of von Braun, “Some have portrayed his time working for the Nazis as a survival strategy, but others have gone so far as to frame him as a war criminal, or something close to it.” Since von Braun died before full details of his Nazi past reached mainstream, he never really got to tell his side of the story.
A bio on NASA’s website reads, “Von Braun was a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer, yet was also arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 for careless remarks he made about the war and the rocket. His responsibility for the crimes connected to rocket production is controversial.”
AL.com reached out to NASA for comment regarding von Braun being the partial inspiration for the new Indiana Jones villain, how von Braun’s Nazi past impacts his and NASA’s legacy going forward and other related questions. As of publishing of this story, we hadn’t received responses to our questions.
AL.com also reached out to “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” production company Lucasfilm Ltd. regarding von Braun’s inspiration of the film’s villain. As of publishing, we have not yet received a reply.
During a 2019 speaking engagement at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, von Braun’s daughter Margrit von Braun faced questions about her father’s role in Hitler’s space program. “It’s really hard to revisit what people had to do in times of war,” Margrit von Braun said. “I think he was born into a horrible situation, in terms of his work career and was forced to do things.…. It’s hard to go back and look at the kind of decisions he was confronted with.”
Like many veterans, Margrit’s father never spoke of his war experiences, she said. “I knew him as my father, and I knew him as a person. And I knew the kind of heart and soul he had. He had to do things that you have to do when you’re working under a dictator.”
In 1945 with both Russian and American forces closing in and Allied Forces nearing a World War II victory, von Braun and his staff of German scientists elected to surrender to the American troops instead of the Russians. After initially being sent to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, in 1950 at the onset of the Korean War, von Braun and his German scientists were transferred to Huntsville. In Huntsville, von Braun and his team developed technology for the U.S.’s first satellite, thereby also igniting this country’s space program.
In the early ‘60s, U.S. President John F. Kennedy initiated America’s lunar program and tasked von Braun with getting American astronauts to the moon by the end of the decade. There’s a famous photography of Kennedy and von Braun shaking hands during a meeting in Huntsville, home to Redstone Arsenal, just months before Kennedy was assassinated while riding in an open-air limousine in Dallas.
In Huntsville, von Braun’s team of rocketeers knew him as a charismatic, fair and super-intelligent boss. The von Braun family resided in a home on McClung Avenue. On weekends, Wernher would take the family Lake Guntersville, about an hour’s drive away, to go waterskiing. “He loved water,” Margrit said in 2019.
Besides transforming Huntsville’s economics and industry, von Braun’s left a mark on the city’s culture too. He proposed the idea of building the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, which has been the city’s signature tourist attraction for more than half a century now.
In the mid ‘70s, the entertainment complex Von Braun Civic Center, later shortened to Von Braun Center, was built in downtown Huntsville and named in his honor. Since then, the VBC has hosted concerts by many legendary musicians including Elvis Presley, Van Halen, Tina Turner and Prince. This spring, the VBC will host a star-studded tribute to late country music legend George Jones.
The German/U.S. engineers factored in the mid ‘50s formation of the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, Alabama’s longest continuously operating professional orchestra.
In the decades after von Braun’s death, his Nazi past has become common knowledge to historically-aware Huntsville residents. Periodically, that past also surfaces in popular culture. The 2020 Amazon series “Hunters” starred Al Pacino as the leader of a late-70s vigilante group tracking down escaped Nazis living new lives in the U.S.
Episode five of “Hunters” depicted the assassination of a fictionalized version of von Braun, laying low after faking his cancer death. That episode included surreal satirical sequence proclaiming, “Come to Huntsville, Alabama, home of the Space and Rocket Center, staffed by Nazi scientists, smuggled here by your government. Oh yeah. It really happened. Huntsville, Alabama, it’s some f—ed up s—. But hey, we got to the moon!”
Being a one-episode storyline in a streaming series that most people have already forgotten is one thing. Serving as the personification of evil in a blockbuster franchise film released during the social media/social justice era is another. “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is one of 2023′s most highly anticipated films.
“Dial of Destiny” will make more people aware of von Braun’s complicated legacy than ever have been before. And from there, it’s a short jump to thinking how that makes the legacy of Huntsville, currently booming with development and now Alabama’s most populous city, complicated too.
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