Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel) Heinz Axmann, also known as the Brown Beast, is one of the antagonists of Schwarzesmarken and Bernhard im Schatten. As the ambitious commander of the Stasi TSF Guard Force, Axmann shared an uneasy relationship with his subordinate and mentee, Beatrix Brehmer. Axmann's cruelty and sadism were legendary even by Stasi standards.
Bernhard im Schatten[]
An ambitious Captain in the Stasi, Axmann was key in coordinating the development of the Stasi TSF corps.
Axmann had an antagonistic relationship with Jürgen Bernhard. Digging up dirt on Jürgen, Axmann was eventually able to build a case against the NVA ace. During the Moonlit Night incident, where Strachwitz's faction was purged, Axmann personally oversaw Jürgen's execution. In a cruel stroke, he'd have Irisdina do the deed as a loyalty test to East Germany.
Schwarzesmarken[]
Apart from having over all command of Stasi TSF operations, Axmann was responsible for the persecution of spies and dissidents.
Axmann enjoyed breaking people and bending them to the Stasi's needs. He had a particular talent for finding a person's weakness and exploiting it. Axmann would often impress broken individuals into the Stasi as informants, sex slaves or foot-soldiers.
Heinz Axmann took particular pleasure from breaking others. Here, he's forced Lise to execute 20 DDR emigrants.
A particular example of this was with Theodor's and Lise's family. Three years before the start of Schwarzemarken, Axmann caught the Eberbachs attempting to cross illegally into West Germany. Axmann inflicted a variety of torture upon them to get them to confess. The worse was saved for Lise, who he had gangraped on top of everything else. After breaking her and obtaining a confession, Axmann forced her into becoming a Swallow (a Stasi prostitute who informs on clients) and used threats against her brother and blackmail over the rape to keep her in line. Axmann would continue to mentally torture Lise over the next couple of years, not only forcing her to trade her body for secrets, but later forcing her to murder countless individuals, sometimes even children and infants with nothing but her hands. It was only with Beatrix Brehmer's intervention that Lise was saved from further predation by Axmann.
Visual Novel[]
Axmann's appearance has changed greatly transitioning between the light to visual novel. No longer a man with grey hair in his fifties, the visual novel depicts a much younger, red haired Axmann.
Personality and Beliefs[]
Axmann was a sociopath. An opportunistic and ambitious man, Axmann was out only for himself. He had no loyalty to a higher cause and was manipulating both the government and the rebellion for his own gains. The misery and pain of others was like a drug to Axmann, and in some cases he'd go out of his way to hurt others even if it inconvenienced him.
Axmann had a twisted sense of humor. For instances, in Requiem, he had Lise use a rock to beat two children to death after forcing her to execute seventeen other adults, citing that with all the shortages, she should learn how to conserve ammo. He then had her cave an infant's skull in, joking that it had seen too much.
Axmann relied on fear and manipulation to keep many of his subordinates in line, leading to resentment among some.
Trivia[]
Heinz Axmann is likely based off of the "Blonde Beast", Reinhard Heydric, one of the lead planners of the Final Solution and someone even Hitler considered to have an "iron heart".
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