Baron Blitzkrieg
1915 - Wilhelm Reiter is born in Berlin while his father fights in Russia.
1919 - 4-year-old Wilhelm Reiter's father returns from the front after Armistice. He is one of the earliest members of the nazi party.
1925 - 10-year-old Wilhelm Reiter joins the hitler youth.
1932 - 17-year-old Wilhelm Reiter attends officer training to join the Wehrmacht.
1939 - 24-year-old Wilhelm Reiter serves as a commanding officer in the German invasion of Poland, where he gains a reputation for viciousness and cruelty.
1941 - 26-year-old Wilhelm Reiter is blinded and disfigured when a concentration camp victim attacks him with acid. The ss bring him to Wewelsburg Castle, where he is used as a subject in their experiments with the Siege Perilous.
1943 - 28-year-old Wilhelm Reiter, the only survivor of the Siege Perilous experiments, is subjected to its energy and given vast powers he can wield individually. He is deployed on the battlefront as Baron Blitzkrieg.
1944 - 29-year-old Wilhelm Reiter, under the command of Helmut Streicher, confronts Hippolyta during the Battle of the a bulge. The power of the Siege Perilous is permanently undone using the Amazonian Purple Ray, and he is destroyed.
As a person who enjoys history in general and the history of fiction and folklore in particular, I struggle sometimes with how to process the history of nazi involvement with the subject. One one hand... It is just a fascinating topic. On the other.... I don't want to THINK about nazis. It makes my heart hurt.
But that said, to illustrate how this subject relates to our current character, let me just directly quote from this article from Sky History: "himmler in particular was infected by a virulent strain of spiritualism which fed into his racist, supremacist world view. For him, establishing a new Aryan empire meant resurrecting ancient Germanic myths and iconography. He believed the war against the lesser races required the overturning of traditional Christian morality, replacing it with a new kind of pseudo-religion that drew on chivalry and mysticism.
"The now-notorious insignia of the ss, resembling two lightning bolts, was based on runes devised by an Austrian occultist and pagan called Guido von List. The ss itself was, if himmler’s mind, an elite organization in the tradition of the Teutonic Knights – an order which, like the Templars, came into existence during the Crusades. himmler’s grand scheme was to establish Wewelsburg Castle as the Camelot of his modern-day knights. One of the rooms was even named after King Arthur, while another was designated the ‘Grail Room’."
So... With that in mind, we want to take our one actual superhuman nazi villan, and use these historic ideas to reframe his lore.
But that said, to illustrate how this subject relates to our current character, let me just directly quote from this article from Sky History: "himmler in particular was infected by a virulent strain of spiritualism which fed into his racist, supremacist world view. For him, establishing a new Aryan empire meant resurrecting ancient Germanic myths and iconography. He believed the war against the lesser races required the overturning of traditional Christian morality, replacing it with a new kind of pseudo-religion that drew on chivalry and mysticism.
"The now-notorious insignia of the ss, resembling two lightning bolts, was based on runes devised by an Austrian occultist and pagan called Guido von List. The ss itself was, if himmler’s mind, an elite organization in the tradition of the Teutonic Knights – an order which, like the Templars, came into existence during the Crusades. himmler’s grand scheme was to establish Wewelsburg Castle as the Camelot of his modern-day knights. One of the rooms was even named after King Arthur, while another was designated the ‘Grail Room’."
So... With that in mind, we want to take our one actual superhuman nazi villan, and use these historic ideas to reframe his lore.
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Our Wilhelm Reiter StoryBlitzkrieg was first invented by Gerry Conway in World's Finest #246 in 1977 as a throwback Wonder Woman villain, but he really cut his teeth in Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron, where he managed to cut a very imposing figure; a super-powered high-ranking nazi and a sort of mash-up of the Red Skull and Doctor Doom. He also showed up quite a bit in the 90's series Damage, where he was one of the masterminds behind the experiments that created the titular hero.
I'm kind of adverse to including too much of this sort of thing in the project just as a matter of personal taste, but superhero comics were basically born during World War II, so there are quite a few villains that have nazi theming. We've included a few evil scientist archetypes from this era, and Red Panzer is a good evil lair, sharks-with-laser-beams type baddie, but we do need to have just one major traditional super-powerful axis villain for the heroes to punch. We wanted to give him a more singular origin other than just 'nazi-superscience', so we've dug in and created the idea of him being a subject of experiments with a magical Arthurian artifact. Hopefully we've created a character that feels like he fits into the world and provides a real challenge, without including a bunch of ick content. |