Nazis

Within Battle Tendency the party is shown as a brutal military machine that tortures captives out of both boredom and scientific curiosity. Its figurehead is Adolf Hitler, while the officer who drives most of the story is Major Rudol von Stroheim, joined by the special-forces agent Donovan and Caesar's ill-fated acquaintance Mark. Around them move an assortment of doctors, gatekeepers, researchers, and spies, along with the many soldiers who fall victim to the Pillar Men. A defining trait of the group is its faith in German science, an arsenal of advanced medicine, weapons, and machinery that later rebuilds a mortally wounded Stroheim into a cyborg.

The organization is defined by extreme nationalism and casual cruelty, convinced that its members stand at the summit of human evolution and entitled to rule both the scientific and the spiritual world. That arrogance leads them to experiment on prisoners and civilians without conscience. Yet their ambition also gives them a strange sense of duty: told that the awakened Pillar Men could wipe out mankind, Stroheim resolves that such creatures can never be allowed to escape, even at the cost of his own life. Hitler's underlying goal is world conquest, and his fixation on the Stone Mask and the Red Stone of Aja stems from his belief that immortality is needed to make German dominion permanent.

Before the events of Battle Tendency, Hitler had already fashioned his banner from an altered swastika, and in 1933 his forces uncovered the Pillar Men buried beneath Rome. Operating from a hidden Mexican base, Stroheim's unit captures Speedwagon, extracts information with a truth serum, and hauls up the being they name Santana. Their experiments backfire when Santana escapes into the air vents, and Joseph, having beaten the agent Donovan in the desert, slips inside and fights the creature alongside Stroheim. They finally petrify Santana with sunlight, though only after Stroheim severs his own leg and detonates a grenade on himself, a sacrifice he improbably survives.

The party's later campaigns against the greater Pillar Men prove disastrous. A team sent to cut Wamuu and the others from their stone is annihilated the moment Wamuu wakes, and Caesar is forced to grant a mercy killing to his friend Mark. A rebuilt Stroheim, now armored with mechanical limbs, a torso-mounted machine gun, and an ultraviolet eye laser, spies on the Ripple users in Venice and later moves to secure the Red Stone of Aja near the Swiss border, where Kars overpowers him in Light Mode. In the final clash Stroheim leads an ultraviolet corps against Kars's vampire minions, but the beams inadvertently trigger the Red Stone and birth the ultimate life-form. Stroheim spends his mechanical legs so that Joseph can land safely, then reports the hero as presumed dead. He never meets Joseph again and falls at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, dying as the proud German soldier he always claimed to be.