Rudol von Stroheim

Stroheim is a tall, powerfully built man with sharply masculine features. At first his blond hair is worn in a short flat-top that lengthens at the neck, later growing into a taller, splayed style. He favors formal Nazi military dress throughout. After his reconstruction he gains elaborate metal prosthetics, including cybernetics around his right eye that carry a monocle-like lens, and a mechanized abdomen housing a heavy machine gun.

When he first appears, Stroheim is a cold and cruel officer willing to experiment on captured civilians, women and children among them, to advance his cause. Yet he is also strikingly brave, unhesitating when trapped in asking Joseph to sever his leg or in blowing himself up to stop Santana, and he keeps that courage right up to his final battle. He respects valor wherever he finds it, regardless of a person's background, once sparing a boy who offered to die for his cellmates.

Above all he is a fervent nationalist, forever trumpeting German science and boasting of his homeland, and especially proud of his cyborg body. That pride curdles into overconfidence more than once, leading him to underestimate the Pillar Men and be bested by them on three separate occasions, whether through Santana's easy escape, Kars cutting his cyborg form in half, or his own haste letting Kars turn the ultraviolet trap back on the humans.

Even as a human, Stroheim commands a Waffen-SS battalion and carries himself with rigid authority, competent with military hardware and blessed with an athletic, agile body. His true arsenal emerges after he is revived with cybernetics, which roughly double his strength, grant partial immortality since damage to his mechanical limbs spares his life force, and let him bend and deflect blows with his metal frame.

His built-in weapons are formidable. An abdominal machine gun fires hundreds of armored rounds a minute able to punch through steel plate, while a laser set in his mechanized eye emits an ultraviolet beam intense enough to bore through Kars' hand. The Speedwagon Foundation adds anti-vampire ultraviolet shoulder cannons, and he can launch his own hand as a projectile, eventually fielding an entire back-mounted array of extra firearms by the time of Stalingrad.

In Battle Tendency he brings a wounded Speedwagon to his Mexican base and reveals the captured Santana, then sacrifices himself trying to halt the creature's rampage. Reappearing as a cyborg near Switzerland, he separates Kars from the Red Stone of Aja with his eye beam, saves Joseph from an oncoming vampire horde, and finally pins Kars to a hijacked plane bound for a volcano, giving up his cybernetic legs to cushion Joseph's fall. He is later reported to have died with honor at Stalingrad in 1943.