Hydra

Hydra is an organization that has been around for several millennia. The organization or some incarnation of it has existed in civilizations as varied as Pharaonic Egypt and Imperial China, and nation-states as different as Nazi Germany and the United States of America. The latest reincarnation was created out of the remnants of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Some time before 1941, Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, leader of Nazi Thule Society, birthed the first modern incarnation of Hydra as his personal paramilitary force, with its very existence kept secret from Hitler's knowledge. Their name came from the fearsome Lernean Hydra.

Some time before 1943, Nazi officer the Red Skull, observing how Hitler's Reich was falling in pieces, started creating a secret organization in Japan merging several underground criminal societies, including the Hand, with fugitive members of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The Red Skull then assigned leadership of this new joint organization based in the Pacific Ocean to a Shinto Imperialist.

When Hitler ordered Baron Strucker's death after his several failures, the Red Skull helped his fellow Nazi official to reach Japan, where he joined the Skull's organization, renamed it Hydra, and killed its Supreme Leader, seizing control of the organization.