Castle Kaufmann was a castle located in the Bavarian Alps previously owned by Ernst Kaufmann and then Johann Schmidt.
History[]
By 1940, Johann Schmidt had moved to Ernst Kaufmann's castle, now abandoned after Kaufmann was murdered by Schmidt during the Night of the Long Knives.
Schmidt tested Abraham Erskine's Super Soldier Serum upon himself, and spent the following two days secluded in a room suffering the side effects of the serum as, according to Erskine, the serum was not ready yet. Schmidt' maiden, Eva, tried to bring food to Schmidt, who angrily threw a wardrobe against the door in a feat of the strength granted by the serum, demanding to be alone to contemplate the meaning of his fate.
In the dungeons, Arnim Zola visited a chained Erskine, to announce that the failure of the "Übermensch" soldier program would grant Zola an opportunity to provide a technological alternative for Schmidt's goals. Erskine answered that it wasn't the serum who failed, as Schmidt was the one who failed at being human. Zola mocked that the disfigurement inflicted upon Schmidt would result in an order of execution against Erskine, and against his family held in Dachau.
Eva came looking for Zola, as the dinner was served, and all the dinner guests fell unconscious, Zola included. Eva seized the opportunity to free Erskine, revealing herself as agent Peggy Carter of the British Secret Intelligence.
Carter cleared the path killing some of the men who were not unconscious. Erskine asked to free his family from the concentration camp in Dachau, but Carter informed him that his family died in 1937, in a typhus outbreak that killed thousands of inmates. Schmidt never informed Erskine of the deaths to continue using the family as leverage.
Erskine, enraged, tried to kill Schmidt in revenge for the deaths of his wife and sons, but Carter convinced him that the best way to get revenge on Schmidt and HYDRA was to take his serum to the Allies, as Schmidt's strength was now unbelievable, and a direct confrontation would result in a meaningless death.
Erskine and Carter ascended to the roof of the castle, where a plane extracted them. Colonel Chester Phillips and Howard Stark greeted Erskine and welcomed him to join the Strategic Scientific Reserve.[1]
Trivia[]
- In Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely's first draft of the Captain America script the flashbacks would have revealed that Johann Schmidt injected himself with Abraham Erskine's Super Soldier Serum in 1938 in Berlin, not in 1940 in Castle Kaufmann.[2]