Zemo wanted to keep his identity a secret, so he wore a purple-ish hood over his face. His actions soon gained Captain America’s attention. When Cap finally found him, he was ready to release his newest weapon, Adhesive X. This gas was extremely strong and could not be removed by anyone at the time. Zemo wanted to use this gas against the Allied Troops, so Cap set out to destroy the limited supply of Adhesive X. Cap encountered Zemo and while they were fighting he knocked a container containing Adhesive X onto the ground next to Zemo. This resulted in Zemo’s hood being permanently attached to his face and the supply of Adhesive X being destroyed.
With Zemo’s mask now permanently attached to his face, he started to turn to insanity. He soon embraced his new identity and became a powerful member of the Nazi party. Zemo had many more run-ins with Captain America. Wanting to get rid of him once and for all, he tricked Captain America and Bucky Barnes into coming to him and to his lair. He then tied Cap and Bucky to an experimental plane that was set to explode and launched the plane. Captain America was able to escape but while attempting to help Bucky he fell into the Arctic Ocean. Bucky was assumed dead and Cap was frozen in ice until decades later when the Avengers discovered him.
Having thought that he finally defeated Captain America, Baron Zemo retired. His son, Helmut J. Zemo, then revived his legacy. He was the 13th Baron Zemo to be born in Germany. After being taught by his father all his life that the 'Master Race' should rule the world, he was enraged when he found out that his father’s nemesis had returned. Ditching his engineering job to follow in his father’s footsteps, he used his family resources and his intelligence to finish what his father had started. He trained himself to get ready to defeat Captain America.
Like his father, Helmut also fell victim to the dangerous Adhesive X during a battle with Captain America and the Falcon. He fell into an entire tank of it and now wears his father’s iconic mask to hide his dismantled figure. After realizing it was going to take a lot more to take down Cap, he created a group of villains as the team known as the Masters of Evil, who went undercover as the super hero team The Thunderbolts. Baron Zemo was the leader and together the team attempted to fight crime and gain the world’s trust so he could take down Captain America and conquer the world when everyone would least expect it. However, Zemo started to become more good than evil and eventually started working towards actually saving the world. He started expanding his group and even worked for the U.S. government at one point due to a recommendation of Tony Stark after the events of the Civil War comic book series.
Baron Zemo has no powers, but has been known to control powerful artifacts. He is also an expert at karate and hand-to-hand combat. Baron Zemo is confirmed to be a villain in the upcoming film CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR and will be portrayed by actor Daniel Brühl.
Brühl has said that he does not wear his iconic mask (yet?), but according to Entertainment Weekly he has a manipulative villain role in the movie and is a revenge character that will be trying to make the Avengers fight each other. Not much is known about Zemo’s role in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, but he is signed on to be in multiple films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and was once rumored to appear in the upcoming Benedict Cumberbatch film, DOCTOR STRANGE.
Written by James Philbrick, Character Profiles -- Click here to read James' posts
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