Captain America: First Vengeance #2

As Captain America fights the Hydra agent in a huge mechanized battle suit, the Red Skull plays a recording of a Wagner opera and taunts Cap about his abilities. The Skull recalls his first meeting with Adolf Hitler in February 1934. At the opera, while Hitler was waxing eloquent over Wagner’s philosophical implications, he was interrupted by physicist Johann Schmidt, who suggested that the old Norse tales were more than myths but could be the key to a new powerful science. Der Fuhrer was interested but moments later Ernst Kaufmann of the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) had him ejected from the building with the threat of death should he approach Hitler again. Outside he met someone who appreciated his ideas: Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS.... On the evening of June 30, the Night of the Long Knives (Hitler’s purge of the SA and its leader Ernst Rohm), gloating SS man Johann Schmidt took great delight in personally killing Ernst Kaufmann…. Back in the present, the Red Skull unleashes a tank that fires lightning bolts against Captain America…

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Story #2

Chapter Four

Writer: Fred Van Lente. Penciler/Inker: Javi Fernandez. Colorist: Veronica Gandini.

Synopsis

July 1934: having purged the Nazi Party of the SA, the SS seized control of one of their weapons labs. Johann Schmidt entered and found Arnim Zola, a scientist working on a mechanical suit. Schmidt enlisted him to work on a means of enhancing the human body itself…. In the present, Captain America is under attack by a Hydra lightning tank, he risks his life to save his enemy from death. The Red Skull scolds him for showing altruism and preventing nature from weeding out the unfit. Cap then takes the brunt of the next electrical blast…. In September 1935, Professor Abraham Erskine was on a train with his wife and children when the train was stopped by Nazis searching fro him. He surrendered to prevent harm to the others and was taken to see Johann Schmidt. The sinister officer forces Erskine to join his project to create a true master race by threatening his family…. A voice in his head exhorts the injured Cap to get up and fight back, the voice being inventor Howard Stark on the other end of a small communicator. Cap readies himself to follow Stark’s instructions on beating the tank….