Baron Wolfgang von Strucker
Baron Wolfgang von Strucker is a major supporting antagonist in the Kingdom Hearts Unlimited Saga, first appearing in "Birth of A New Era" as one of several bosses in the War-Torn America campaign. He later returns in "An Empire of Dreams", having stepped out of the shadows after a very long absence from the public's eye to join the ranks of the Galactic Empire and bring forth a new world order for the universe.
One of the main leaders of HYDRA, he led the organization for decades alongside Arnim Zola until he was captured by S.H.I.E.L.D.. He was locked up in The Vault in a secure prison cell for many years in his old age. However, he managed to secretly escape thanks to the machinations of several of his loyal sleeper agents, and, with the Left Hand of Osiris, also known as the Infernal Gauntlet, pumping Jiaying's Inhuman blood into his bloodstream, became young and strong again. Thereafter, he disguised himself as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent named George Maxon with Alexander Pierce's help, and integrated himself into the science division of the organization. Around the time of the Battle at the Triskelion, he openly revealed his treachery to S.H.I.E.L.D., and resumed the throne of HYDRA's leadership after Pierce's death, intending to use the captured members of the Brotherhood of Mutants as his puppets in the war against the High Council.
The Crew of the Highwind and the Avengers eventually confronted Strucker in his fortified castle base in Sokovia and defeated him after a long battle, where he demonstrated his truly enhanced might with the power of the Left Hand of Osiris. However, following his arrest, he ended up becoming a puppet for the reactivated Dominion XIII android Ultron, and used to help the Dominion XIII's plans for what little use he had left until finally being executed by the genocidal tyrant for having outlived his usefulness to the Grand Plot.
Nonetheless, Wolfgang's legacy would endure and cause further problems for the Avengers and Coulson's Team in the form of his youngest son, Werner, and great great grandson & daughter, Andreas and Lauren.
Story[]
Backstory[]
Baron Wolfgang von Strucker was born in the 1890s into a prominent Prussian noble family, growing up in the lap of luxury. As a young man, he passed his time indulging his loves of fencing, horseback riding, and target shooting. Strucker was educated at a high-end preparatory academy, where he befriended fellow students Abraham Erskine and Werner Reinhardt. Unknown to Strucker at the time, the academy was actually run by the Brotherhood of the Spear, who used it to keep an eye on students who could potentially be of use to the cult.
When the first World War broke out in 1914, Strucker joined the army in search of military glory. What he found instead was suffering and death - nearly all of Strucker's regiment was wiped out at the battle of the Somme, with the only other two survivors being a fellow German named Johann Schmidt and an Austrian corporal named Adolf Hitler. In the wake of the tragedy, Strucker and Hitler were convinced by Schmidt that a Jewish conspiracy had undermined the army and was responsible of their suffering.
In 1918, Strucker was stationed in Cambrai when he encountered Pocahontas, an accidental time traveler, assisting the Allied forces. Fighting her, Strucker accidentally touched her Garnet Rod's orb in the struggle, being given a vision of the future. Strucker was shown the outcomes of not only the first World War but also the second, also seeing the roles that the Brotherhood and their soon-to-be-returning "god" Alveus Hive would play in future events. However, Strucker's face was badly scarred by the energy unleashed.
Though he knew the Nazi Party was doomed to failure, Strucker decided to play along with the organization when Hitler and Schmidt created it after the end of the war, knowing that a position in the Party would put him in a position of great power. As he had foreseen, Strucker was approached at a Party meeting by Sokovian nobleman Baron Heinrich Zemo, who offered him a position in the new incarnation of the Brotherhood, namely HYDRA-Abteilung, supposedly a research division of the National Socialistic Party, but in truth a new means for the Brotherhood to continue devising means for global control under their rule. Due in part to his natural militaristic talent, Strucker soon rose through the ranks to become one of HYDRA's top military commanders as head of the Death's Head Squadron. In time, Strucker hoped that he would help assist HYDRA into ushering in a glorious future of totalitarianism and despotism, one grander than any vision he experienced beforehand.
Birth of A New Era[]
However, Strucker's ambitions were curtailed by a recent development in the form of Abraham Erskine's defection and subsequent role in the creation of the SSR's best soldier, Captain America, who would go on to foil many of HYDRA and the Nazi Party's schemes throughout most of the Second World War.
During one of Captain Rogers' missions across Europe, in particular an infiltration of Strucker's personal base in the Bavarian Mountains, Rogers discovered that Strucker and a fellow HYDRA agent, Madame Elisa Sinclair, were in charge of developing a massive cannon powered by Tesseract fuel cells, intended for long range usage against Allied bases. When Rogers confronted Strucker, the commander was hardly impressed by the captain's appearance and remained convinced that due to his superior military training, noble heritage, advanced Tesseract-fueled weaponry, and legions of Wraithling warriors lent to him by HYDRA's off-world allies, he would be the victor of their ensuing duel. Needless to say, Strucker was swiftly overcome by Captain America, much to the baron's shame.
However, in the midst of the battle between Rogers and Strucker, the cannon lost control after its stabilizing radio dish was destroyed by the Howling Commandos' aircraft carrier, causing it to collapse into the fortress and forcing the two combatants to flee for their lives. In a last ditch effort to destroy the Captain by knocking him off the base's tallest tower, Strucker charged at Rogers and they both went free-falling off as the tower collapsed beneath them. Due to the Super Soldier Serum coursing through his veins, Captain Rogers was merely left slightly weakened and unconscious by the fall, but the purely human Strucker was not so lucky, the tower's collapsed rubble having crushed his right arm and broken most of his bones. Rogers would manage to escape some time afterwards from HYDRA's clutches thanks to the Howling Commandos' help, while Strucker would live to survive his encounter as well, though his recovery would take months due to the severity of his wounds.
But the following sequence events that were to occur as he lay in bed recovering, however, were far more permanently damaging to Strucker's psyche. Schmidt was furiously disappointed with Strucker's incompetence, and for a time considered executing the baron as punishment, which more than terrified Strucker internally, dreading the possibility that his future could be changed for the worse. However, Schmidt was convinced otherwise by his secret ally Hades, the Olympian Lord of the Underworld, to spare Strucker's life as he had potential for unlocking a great darkness within his heart to better serve the cause of HYDRA. All he needed was the incentive to further harden his heart and pursue a greater source of power to increase that darkness tenfold under his control. Schmidt was, at first, incredulous as to the god's persuasive argument, believing Strucker to be little more than a spineless, aggravating little toad not worth the effort; but as he gazed down upon Strucker's grimacing face, with eyes so filled with a burning hatred, a desire to prove himself worthy, and a desire to survive at all costs, Schmidt couldn't help but consider that perhaps Hades had a point. Perhaps Strucker could still be of use to him and to HYDRA as a whole...
In Between BoANE and The Journey[]
(Explaining the different portrayals between his bold, brave video game portrayal and his cowardly, smug snake film portrayal)
As soon as Strucker was considered in good enough physical and mental state to return to duty, Schmidt was quick to assign his lieutenant a new mission in mind, one that he believed would more than enough to prove whether Strucker truly was worthy of his dark destiny as Hades had argued. The mission, if Strucker chose to accept if he wanted to redeem himself of his failure, was to embark on an archaeological expedition to the desert sands of Egypt, which at the time was under British Imperial rule. There, Strucker's Death Head Squadron was to meet up with the ruthless fascist-sympathetic crime lord Amahl Farouk, who would provide them with the necessary funds for uncovering an artifact known as the Left Hand of Osiris.
Not found in any of the Egyptian myths due to its infamy, the Left Hand of Osiris was the original left hand that the Egyptian God of the Underworld held in his mortal life before he was betrayed by his brother Set and dismembered into many pieces. Even after Osiris was stitched back together and resurrected by his wife Isis, the left hand alone remained missing, for Set had stolen it to keep his brother from ever returning to full power. Horus would reclaim the left hand years later after deposing Set, but the time it had spent away from the rest of Osiris' body had putrefied and calcified it to a rotten, skeletal armor-like gauntlet, and, even worse, it had also managed to retain some of Osiris' Chthonic deity magic within it. Any mortal who so much as touched the gauntlet would have their life-force drained and wither away into lifeless corpses. So feared was the left hand gauntlet's power that Horus ultimately chose to hide it away in a tomb located deep within the heart of the Libyan Desert so no man would ever take its power for their own.
Which, of course, brings us back to Schmidt and Strucker. Schmidt believed that if the Left Hand of Osiris were to be found and safely merged with the Tesseract's space-warping abilities, it would be able to grant its wielder unfathomable power, power enough that could potentially conquer one of the Allied Powers' colonies and deprive their hated enemies of one of their valued supply locations to tip the scales in HYDRA and the Axis Powers' favor. But of course, certainly no one would be foolish enough to venture into the desert unheeded to obtain an item of great power that may or may not exist... Then if that were the case, Strucker declared that he would be that fool to take on Schmidt's challenge and redeem his honor once and for all!
But what Strucker did not realize was that Schmidt had another ulterior motive for assigning him the mission. It was also to keep Strucker as far away from Berlin and the Swiss Alps Facility as possible so that the lieutenant would somehow not ruin Schmidt's plans for global conquest with his incompetence. Even after all this time, Schmidt still thought so little of Strucker's worthiness to the greater good of HYDRA. And yet, despite all odds against him, Strucker was able to safely navigate his way through the Libyan Desert thanks to the guides under Amahl Farouk's employment, discover the tomb where the Left Hand was hidden, and remove it without suffering any of its fatal side effects. Even more so, Strucker was able to somehow get the Left Hand to bond with his severed left arm by appealing to their shared thirst for death, using it as a deadly and most effective replacement. As hard as it was for him to say it, when Schmidt heard word of Strucker's success from his encrypted message network, he couldn't help but feel proud of his lieutenant...for once. The success of Strucker's mission would lead Schmidt to begin ordering the rest of his lieutenants to search for more ancient artifacts of legendary power, hoping to repeat said earlier success by empowering all of HYDRA's troops to become invincible fighting machines.
Unfortunately, Strucker would not have long to celebrate his success and possible promotion under HYDRA's ranks. After the final battle between Captain America and the Red Skull aboard the Valkyrie, which saw both parties lost across worlds due to the power of the Tesseract, now all of HYDRA's forces were at risk of capture by the Allied Forces and the SSR.
(fled into hiding to avoid SSR capture, though not before using the Left Hand to demonstrate its life-draining capabilities upon a couple hapless Allied soldiers) (got into contact with Arnim Zola through the encrypted message network, which led to their mutual decision to revive HYDRA under their leadership from within SHIELD since both Schmidt and Zola were, at the time, out of commission) (took on a variety of aliases and disguises to keep himself hidden from the public eye, only assuming his true name and face when in the company of fellow HYDRA alumni who knew him best) (aliases over the years included Don Antonio Caballero, Emir Ali-Bey, Will Bronson, Colonel F.T. Strang, and most recently George Maxon) (expansive spy network kept him out of SHIELD's reach and notice throughout the Cold War, leaving him as an urban legend or ghost of legend) (continued to use the Left Hand of Osiris to continually regenerate his lost youth every few years by draining the life out of any unsuspecting soul who got too close to the truth) (kept his rival Reinhardt out of the way by leaving him in jail to prevent him from attempting to regain his full political power from his jail cell)
(eventually restarted the preparatory academy under a government-sponsored false name to help train the next generation of HYDRA's prospective agents from within SHIELD, such as Janna Hale, David Banner Sr., and Ulysses Klaue) (his rivalry with the newly renamed Whitehall reignited after the latter's freedom and rejuvenation thanks to Alexander Pierce's pardon and experimentation upon the unwilling Inhuman Jiaying) (despised his student Janna Hale for daring to upstage him, her teacher, and for being Whitehall's prized pupil)
(eventually decided to father a new heir to keep his bloodline strong in the 90's, leading to the birth of Werner von Strucker, half-brother of "The Gifted" Strucker lineage) (suspected the truth behind the Obelisk and Alveus, but chose not to tell Whitehall so as to keep his old rival in the dark while he stayed two steps ahead in the bid for title of Supreme HYDRA head) (adopted the George Maxon alias to seduce Mrs. Maxon to father Werner Maxon, though he preferred to keep Werner out of the HYDRA business due to thinking he's not good enough for the role) (served as the man behind the man to David Banner Sr. in Hulk 2003, to Alexander Pierce in Winter Soldier, and to N'Jobu & Klaue in the prologue to Black Panther) (also struck a friendship with Gideon Malick of the World Security Council due to their shared personality traits) (deep down continues to fear death because all immortals who gain their long life illegally fear the prospect of final death)
A Year of Misery[]
(A cameo role in discussions with Alexander Pierce, Arnim Zola, and Emperor Zurg)
An Empire of Dreams[]
(An expanded version of his role from Age of Ultron, plus a boss battle with modernized versions of his comic book weaponry)