Hugo Drax
Hugo Drax is a male literary character who features in James Bond.
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Biography
Graf Hugo von der Drache
On account of his mother being English, Drache was educated in England until the age of twelve. Afterwards he moved to Berlin and later Leipzig, where he continued and finished his education. After graduating, he joined the Nazi Party and entered the Wehrmacht as a soldier in the Panzer Brigade 150. At the outset of the Second World War he took part in the Blitzkrieg campaigns in Belgium and France, before becoming a Skorzeny Werwolf commando. After the Ardennes offensive he stayed behind Allied lines operating with his commando group.
On one fateful mission, his group planted a vehicle full of explosives at a farmhouse which was being used by the Allies as a rear headquarters. At the same time, Drache was on a separate mission to kill a British dispatch rider. Disguised as a British soldier, he was accidentally attacked by a German aircraft. The wounded Drache was found by allied troops who mistook him for a British serviceman and they brought him to the farmhouse. It is here that he was caught in the explosion and nearly killed. He was then rescued by the British and nursed back to health, claiming to be a "missing soldier" by the name of Hugo Drax. After being discharged from nursing care, he killed a Jewish businessman in London and escaped to Tangier with £15,000 he stole from him.
As revenge for Germany's defeat, he started the Moonraker missile project under the pretence that he would test fire the missile into the North Sea. Instead of doing so, however, he targeted his missile on London and armed it with an atomic bomb he had received through the Soviets and SMERSH. Drax uses his knowledge of the impending disaster to play the stock market, planning to make a huge profit from his own terrorist act. Bond, with the help of female Special Branch agent Gala Brand, sabotaged Drax's Moonraker missile launch and changed the coordinates of the target back to the North Sea. There the missile detonated, destroying the Soviet submarine carrying the escaping Drax killing him and foiling his plan to continue his Führer Adolf Hitler's legacy.
Overview
Personality and attributes
In appearance, Sir Hugo Drax was described as being approximately 6 ft (183 cm) tall, with red hair, a bushy reddish moustache and protruding upper teeth. Half of his face is badly scarred from a German attack during the War, an incident which has also allegedly left him with amnesia.
Hugo Drax was a megalomanic entrepreneur with a god complex who considered himself as perfectly qualified to judge over 99% of humanity as not being worthy of living, and planned to annihilated all of them set aside selected few get to make up a new “master race”/cult that practically worshiped him like a god. Even his subordinates were completely expendable to him; when he talked about replacing the recently deceased Chang on the phone, it was with such a casual tone that we would think he was ordering a replacement for a broken tool or utensil; when a couple of scientists in his employment accidentally got exposed to the nerve gas when a canister of it shattered on the ground and killed them during Bond’s investigation, he simply had their bodies removed and disposed of offscreen when he had the lab moved to another location without any signs of guilt or empathy. In addition, he even outright admitted to Bond before his death that he will eventually have anyone who did not measure up to his standards of “physical perfection” exterminated, which undoubtedly includes those that worked under him, and caused Jaws to turn against him. Drax also took a sadistic pleasure in reasserting his authority over a traitorous enemy or assistant before devising an elaborate way to give them a very unpleasant death.
Drax’s scheme to launch globes full of synthesized, toxic nerve gas into Earth’s atmosphere would have killed billions, with only about several dozen people being spared from this fate, making Drax and his plot far very self-centered, and giving if far very pronounced supremacist overtones. Thus, although he often spent time with young women and liked to impress them, for example by playing the piano in front of them, he did not care about the youth, beauty and hard work of his subordinates, the only thing that really mattered to him was getting his way. Because of his evil nature, Drax clearly had no redeeming qualities and did back down at nothing to make his evil plans a reality. Cold, calm and unquestionably authoritarian, he inspired fear in the lower-ranking employees of his organization and everyone always took him very seriously. Drax was not even bombastic or over the top in the same way some other Bond villains are, including some of the other really bad ones.
Powers and abilities
Drax made a fortune after the war from trading metals in Tangier and was able to start his company, Drax Metals Ltd, which specialises and has a monopoly in the production of a metal called Columbite.
Notes
- Hugo Drax was created by Ian Fleming where he featured in the setting of the James Bond universe.
In other media
Films
- In Moonraker, Hugo Drax appeared in the setting of the live-action film where he was portrayed by actor Michael Lonsdale. Hugo Drax is a billionaire who owns Drax Industries, a private company which constructs Space Shuttles for NASA. Though Drax lives in California, he resides in a fully authentic French chateau that was disassembled at its original site, transported to the United States, and rebuilt stone by stone. Drax also supposedly owns the Eiffel Tower, but has not been able to secure a permit from the French government to export it out of the country. He portrays himself as an accomplished pianist, as evidenced by his recital of Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude in D-flat major on his grand piano; in fact, he poses with a player piano in an attempt to impress his guests. Bond follows a trail around the world to investigate the theft of a space shuttle that Drax had loaned to the UK. He begins his investigation in California at Drax Industries, and follows it to Italy, then to Brazil, then into space. Drax reveals that he seeks to destroy the entire human race except for a small group of carefully selected humans, both male and female, that would leave Earth on six shuttles and have sanctuary on a space station in orbit over Earth. Using chemical weapons created by Drax's scientists—derived from the toxin of a rare South American plant, the Black Orchid—at an installation in Italy, he would wipe out the remainder of humanity. The biological agents were to be dispersed around the Earth from a series of 50 strategically placed globes, each containing enough toxin to kill 100 million people. After a period of time, when the chemical agents had become harmless, Drax and his master race would return to Earth to reinhabit the planet.
Appearances
- Moonraker:
External Links
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