Board Thread:Episode Discussion/@comment-112155-20151117235544/@comment-996391-20151120072826

Whitehall said "Our founder, he had his Tesseract." After Whitehall's death, Octavian Bloom said "Daniel Whitehall has joined our founder in the afterlife." So this is what I think, the ancient HYDRA society was almost extinct by the 1930s (maybe it had only a few members, Johann Schmidt among them), and Schmidt joined the Nazis so he could use their funding to breathe new life into HYDRA. Since most of the later members and leaders knew only about Schmidt's HYDRA branch, they believed he was the founder, and only the selected few knew the truth about HYDRA's origin (Wolfgang von Strucker, Gideon Malick, and now Grant Ward).