SOMETIMES THE IRONIC HAPPENS when it is least expected. That was the case with Hermann Milhausen, a minor mad scientist in Hitler’s diabolical organization. Nothing in that regime was too bizarre to preclude experimentation by the Nazi war machine, and the wild idea of creating a zombie army was no exception. Milhausen, a wiry little man with an unruly shock of white hair and gold framed glasses with Coke bottle lenses, was dispatched to the Congo and the West Indies to research the origins of zombies. He returned to Dachau with vials of serum the bokor had reportedly used to sprinkle on graves to create the living dead. Some of the elixirs actually worked, though not successful for the army’s use. The risen corpses were unruly and unmanageable and tended not to last more than a few days. This was near the end of Nazi Germany and efforts were being made to destroy all evidence of the experimentation that had been going on when the unexpected happened to Milhausen.
The totally evil little doctor, who had no compunction against all sorts of vile and painful experimentation on living prisoners among the Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities incarcerated there, was himself a consummate coward. One evening as he showered in his private quarters, one of the chemically induced zombies appeared in his bathroom causing the mad man to faint from terror. As though looking down from the ceiling above, he saw the zombie examine his naked body in the shower before turning to walk away. That part of Milhausen that had left his body in terror followed the intruder out into the night and never returned.
When he came to with the water showering down on him, Milhausen was disoriented and confused. Almost immediately he recognized that something about himself had changed, though he did not at first realize what it was. He felt the back of his head where he had fallen expecting to see blood on his hands, but his touch revealed that no damage had occurred. He shut off the water and went to the lavatory to look at himself in the mirror. The nick on his cheek where he had cut himself while shaving was completely healed over. There was a boldness about him that he had never felt before. Something made him pick up his razor and slice his arm. To his amazement, there was no blood and the incision healed itself right before his eyes.
At that point Milhausen’s criminal mind took over. Knowing that the Reich was about to fall at any moment, he dressed himself in the only civilian clothes he owned and escaped the compound under the cover of darkness. In Berlin, he met up with a former Nazi officer who was looking for an accomplice in a robbery of a cache of jewels and gold he knew about. Milhausen accompanied the man, helped lift the small fortune from its hiding place, and promptly murdered the mastermind, keeping the entire treasure for himself. From there he slipped into Switzerland where he had been amassing his personal fortune in a Swiss bank account for years. He took a new identity and stayed under the radar of those looking for Nazi war criminals. His criminal activities continued to line his pockets enabling him to set up his laboratory and clinic that he kept incognito and moved around for years until he landed in Los Angeles.
Dr. Milhausen was introduced in THE NAKED ZOMBIE.
As the Page Turns 