Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (James Mangold, 2023) opens in 1944, as the Nazis try to escape the Allied advance with a train full of looted treasures. On board is Jürgen Voller, an astrophysicist who is interested in only one object: half of the Antikythera mechanism, a device attributed to Archimedes that, according to Voller, can locate fissures in time. Indiana and his friend Basil Shaw take it from him. In 1969, Voller is living in the United States under the name Dr. Schmidt and working for NASA on the Apollo program, one of the German scientists brought over after the war by Operation Paperclip. When the other half of the device resurfaces, he sets out to recover it, helped by henchmen and by a CIA agent assigned to protect him. His plan is to travel back to 1939, kill Hitler and lead Germany to victory without repeating his mistakes. The calculation fails because Voller did not account for continental drift. The plane arrives in 214 BC, at the siege of Syracuse, and the armies shoot it down, mistaking it for a dragon. Voller dies in the wreck.
// The theoryPunishment follows the labor market
In 1939 Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, two German scholars linked to the Frankfurt School who had fled Nazism, published Punishment and Social Structure. Their thesis was radical: the history of punishment is not a story of moral progress but of economic adaptation. When labor is scarce, states find ways to use offenders’ bodies—galleys, transportation, forced labor—and punishment becomes less lethal. When labor is plentiful, human life is cheap and punishment becomes harsher and more wasteful. Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini extended the analysis to the birth of the prison as a factory of disciplined workers. The approach has been criticized for its economic determinism, but its central question remains powerful: who is punished, and how, depends on what a society needs from that person. Applied to the end of the Second World War, it suggests an uncomfortable reading. The Allied powers punished thousands of Nazis; they recruited others, because their skills were scarce and strategically valuable.
Operation Paperclip
After the war, the United States brought more than a thousand German scientists, engineers and technicians to work on its military and space programs, in a secret operation later known as Paperclip. Many had been members of the Nazi party or the SS, and some had worked in programs that used forced labor from concentration camps, such as the V-2 rocket factories at Mittelwerk. Their pasts were often softened or hidden in official records. The best known, Wernher von Braun, became the architect of the Saturn V rocket that took Apollo 11 to the Moon. Arthur Rudolph, another member of the rocket team, left the United States in 1984 and gave up his citizenship rather than face proceedings over his role in the use of forced labor. The logic is the one Rusche and Kirchheimer would have predicted: in the Cold War, rocket expertise was scarce, and scarcity bought impunity. Voller is a fictional member of that group.
// The subjectA man who never stopped being what he was
The film is clear about Voller’s loyalties. In 1969 he is not a repentant scientist who has rebuilt his life; he is a Nazi who has been waiting. His work for NASA is a means to stay close to the resources and the protection he needs. The American state, in the form of the CIA agent assigned to him, puts its own people at his service. His plan reveals how he sees history: not as a crime to answer for but as a technical error to correct. He does not want to undo the Nazi project; he wants to perfect it, removing Hitler as an incompetent manager. That is the mind the Paperclip logic protected: brilliant, useful and morally unchanged. His end is a joke at the expense of his arrogance. The scientist who thought he could calculate everything forgot to correct for the movement of the continents.
Jürgen Voller
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// The crackEconomy, or geopolitics?
Rusche and Kirchheimer wrote about the mass punishment of the poor, linked to labor markets. Paperclip is a case of elite impunity, and the economic explanation needs to be stretched to fit it. What made Nazi rocket scientists valuable was not just the labor market but geopolitics: the race with the Soviet Union, which recruited German scientists of its own. A critical criminologist would say both readings point in the same direction (punishment is decided by power and interest, not by the gravity of the crime), but the strict economic version of the theory is too narrow to explain the case on its own. The approach has also been criticized for leaving little room for ideas, culture and moral outrage in the history of punishment.
There is also a risk in making Voller the face of Paperclip. The real recruits were not would-be time travelers planning to save the Reich; most simply built rockets and lived quiet lives. Responsibility here cuts both ways. Voller is responsible for what he did in 1944 and for what he tries to do in 1969. The governments that hid the pasts of real men like him are responsible for something different: for deciding that some crimes were worth forgiving because the criminal was useful.
Selective justice
The Nuremberg trials became the symbol of post-war justice. Paperclip is their shadow: at the same time, and sometimes for the same crimes, some men were tried and others were hired. The case is one of the clearest illustrations of the critical idea that punishment is not a simple response to wrongdoing but a decision shaped by interests. It also explains why the issue keeps returning: as records were declassified from the 1970s onward, journalists and historians documented how much had been hidden. The Dial of Destiny turns that history into an adventure villain. The real story is less spectacular and harder to resolve: justice that depended on how useful the accused could be.
Three key ideas
- The political economy of punishment (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939; Melossi and Pavarini) holds that who is punished, and how harshly, depends on the economic needs of each period, not on the gravity of the crime.
- Jürgen Voller, a Nazi physicist, loses the Antikythera dial in 1944 and in 1969 works for NASA as “Dr. Schmidt”, recruited by Operation Paperclip and protected by the CIA. He tries to travel to 1939 to kill Hitler and win the war, and dies at the siege of Syracuse.
- The crack: Paperclip is elite impunity driven by Cold War geopolitics as much as by the economy, and the strict theory needs stretching. Each answers for its own: Voller for his crimes; real governments for forgiving useful criminals.
Sources · further reading
- Rusche, G. and Kirchheimer, O. (1939). Punishment and Social Structure. Columbia University Press.
- Melossi, D. and Pavarini, M. (1981). The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the Penitentiary System. Macmillan.
- Jacobsen, A. (2014). Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America. Little, Brown and Company.
- Mangold, J. (dir.) (2023). Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Walt Disney Studios / Lucasfilm.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Jürgen Voller?
Jürgen Voller (“Doctor Schmidt”) is a villain from Indiana Jones, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. In 1944 he was loading the Nazis’ plunder onto a train.
Why does Jürgen Voller (Dr. Schmidt) become a villain?
Jürgen Voller and the political economy of punishment: in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a scientist of the Third Reich works for NASA in 1969 under another name, protected by the government he once fought. Rusche and Kirchheimer showed that punishment follows the economy. Operation Paperclip proved it with names.
Which criminological theory explains Jürgen Voller?
Jürgen Voller's case is analysed through Political economy of punishment. The political economy of punishment (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939) holds that the form and severity of punishment are dictated not by the seriousness of crime but by the economic needs of each period: punishment hardens when labor is plentiful and softens or is waived when it is scarce. Jürgen Voller, the Nazi physicist of Dial of Destiny (2023), is a limit case of that idea. His knowledge was worth too much in the space race to put him on trial, and the film places him, like the real scientists of Operation Paperclip, in the service of the country that should have punished him.
