Herr Doktor

"As bright as any Southerner could be, if Albert Einstein tawked lahk thayat, theah wouldn't be no bomb. 'Folks, ah wanna tell yew 'bout newkleer fishin'...'"

— Lenny Bruce

In TV Land, a doctor or scientist is roughly 75% likely to be German or Austrian, complete with thick accent and often an entitled legacy. Increase to 98% for Mad Scientists.

We can probably thank Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Wernher von Braun. Many top-notch Jewish scientists from Germany, Austria, and Poland fled Nazi persecution in the pre-war and early-war period. Many more War Criminals attempted to flee to western Germany in the final months of the war to avoid capture and trial (for the various amoral deeds they had done For Science! and for personal gain). This allowed the USA to threaten them with acceptance of eastern European extradition requests (for trial) and offer them free passage to and employment in US government projects (Operation Paperclip). These German-Jewish refugees and ex-Nazis were prominent in many scientific fields during this period, especially The Manhattan Project and US Space Programme. Several wartime theories and inventions designed to aid the war effort, for good or ill, eventually changed how people lived when they were mass-manufactured and sold to the public. This cemented the longstanding trope of foreign geniuses being boons to welcoming societies.

It's worth noting that Central Europe was a scientific and economic powerhouse in the early 20th century, dominating the physics field. More than a few German scientists were "rehabilitated" by the US strategic rocket and space programs (and a handful by the Soviets), to the point of each side complaining "they have more Germans than we do!"^note More specifically the US got nearly all the scientists who designed the rockets, while the Soviets got ahold of the actual rocket construction facilities For a slightly safer stereotype, consider using a Swede or Norwegian instead, with the same unintelligible theories and outrrageous akksent!

In Russian classical literature set in the 18th and 19th centuries, there's a related trope of the other kind of doctor to be German as indeed was often the case during that period.

See also All Psychology Is Freudian, which has caused every psychologist to be portrayed as Austrian, and Stupid Jetpack Hitler for when this crosses over with Those Wacky Nazis. If the Nazi scientist has Supernatural Aid, see Ghostapo.

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Examples:

Advertising

• This commercial for a Schick razor. Combines with Asian and Nerdy for double stereotyping power, because Shaving Is Science!
• During Chrysler's brief stint being merged with Daimler-Benz, they ran a series of ads featuring a German-accented man named "Dr. Z" who answered alleged mail from customers. Most viewers assumed he was a fictional character they created to play up the German angle, but he was in fact the very real Dr. Dieter Zetsche, the CEO of the company. His doctorate is in Engineering.

Anime & Manga

• Case Closed: The American dub gave the local Absent-Minded Professor Dr. Agasa a German accent and his first name in both the dub and English manga was changed to Herschel.
• Dr. Heinz Schneider from El Cazador de la Bruja, who decoded the Mage Species genome.
• Haré+Guu: According to stuff Haré found laying around in his office, Doctor Clive may have studied in Germany.
• Hellsing has the obvious one; a Nazi scientist responsible for creating the FREAKS, as well as almost all of the other technology Millennium has. The real kicker is that as far as we're concerned, his real name is 'Herr Doktor'; he's never referred to as anything else in the main series.
  • His nametag in the manga, however, with some difficulty, reads "Avondale Napyeer". Some have taken it as the Doctor's name.
• Mazinger Z: Even though it is not apparent, Big Bad and Mad Scientist Dr. Hell is German. As a bonus, he started out as a weapon researcher for the Nazis.
  • It turns out he's only German in Gosaku Outa's continuity of Mazinger Z. In the main continuity created by Go Nagai, Dr. Hell is, in fact, Japanese.
• Subverted with Herr Doktor Kenzo Tenma from Monster who is a Japanese doctor working in Düsseldorf. And all other doctors in this series are German.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V: Academia has a man with the German title "Doktor" who is experimenting with mind-controlling parasites. The Doktor puts his parasites on the subjects' brain to create People Puppets that follow his orders. And he is a Mad Scientist who enjoys the evil things his puppets are commiting.

Comic Books

• Baron Werner von Blitzschlag in Avengers: The Initiative, a former Nazi scientist who was specifically added in reference to Wernher von Braun.
• In Captain America Comics #1 (1941), young Steve Rogers is given his super-soldier powers by the treatment Dr. Josef Reinstein. In 1981 a story by Roger Stern and John Byrne revealed that "Reinstein's" actual name was Abraham Erskine, but apparently without nullifying earlier stories that he had fled from Nazi Germany. (A Scottish name like "Erskine" would not be impossible for a German, as e. g. a number of Jacobite families settled in Germany since the beginning of the 18th century and stayed there).

• The evil Dr. Von Richter from Cybersix is an escaped Nazi living in Argentina.
• Kharnov von Kripplor from Danger Girl is a German Mad Scientist working for a Nazi terrorist organization.
• In Mastermen #1, the Sivana of Earth-10 is this trope played to the hilt, complete with Funetik Aksent (since English is meant to be a dead language on that Earth), Scary Shiny Glasses, and a black leather trenchcoat and hat.
• Tintin:
  • Tintin's recurring nemesis Dr. J. W. Müller (called Mull-Pasha in The Red Sea Sharks) started out as a good example. In his first appearance in The Black Island, he is a psychiatrist who uses his private clinic as a cover for his criminal activities.
  • Two of the scientists from the (Nazi-occupation era) Tintin comic book The Shooting Star are "Nordic" scientists, the Swede Erik Björgenskjöld and the German Otto Schulze, but they say little or nothing, so you can't really tell their accents. Most of the members of the expedition however come from "Latin" countries — a Spaniard, a Portuguese and a Frenchman.^note The Frenchman, Professor Cantonneau, is the only one who would make a return appearance, in The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun. The leader of the expedition, Professor Phostle (Calys in the original French), who comes complete with Einstein Hair, is a French-speaking Belgian. They all have huge foreheads.
  • The engineer Frank Wolff in the two Moon albums may not speak with a heavy accent, but was inspired by Klaus Fuchs (whose surname means "fox").
  • Flight 714 has Dr. Krollspell working for the Big Bad; he is very much implied to be an old Nazi scientist.
• In "The Frontier Frankenstein" in Tomahawk #103, British troops capture Big Anvil and a German scientist subjects him to a treatment involving "rare African herbs" which causes him to transform into a hulking green-skinned Frankenstein monster at night.
• This is the first of Napoleon von Strudel's titles in the Wallace & Gromit comic "Anoraknophobia"; he also has Count and Baron. They're all fake, and he's not even German — his real name is Bert Maudsley, and he hails from the same part of England Wallace does.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Paula von Gunther was an Austrian scientist who worked for the Nazis when they held her daughter Gerta captive after killing her husband for her initial refusal, but switched sides as soon as Gerta was safe. She helped improve the Amazon's purple healing ray and invented a teleporter among other things once she was working against the Nazis.

Comic Strips

• In a variation, Dr. Hans Zarkov of Flash Gordon is Polish. The original comic never really played up his accent, but every film and TV adaptation has given him a thick Polish accent (except the 2000s Sci-Fi Channel version, which made him American). Most kid viewers probably thought it was a German accent, because of the prevalence of this trope.

Fan Works

• The incarnation of Hugo Strange from Batman: Anarchy for All. He's a respected psychotherapist, hails from Vienna according to a diploma in his office, and his speech has a heavy Funetik Aksent, replacing his W's with V's, Th's with Z's, and hard C's with K's. The authors confirmed writing him like this was a joke on how the canon character is obviously inspired by Sigmund Freud.

Films — Animated

• Professor Zündapp in Cars 2. He's an international criminal mastermind who designs weapons of mass destruction for the lemons, and appearance-wise he wears a giant monocle and speaks with a German accent in condescending tone of voice.
• Cynthia Utrom from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the mad scientist in charge of TCRI and speaks with an Eastern European accent.

Films — Live-Action

• The Amazing Spider-Man 2 introduces as to a Gender Flipped and sadistic version of Dr. Ashley Kafka who is portrayed with a thick, German sounding accent by Marton Csokas
• This trope might just have been named for one of Sam Jaffe's character's first lines in the 1950s Film Noir heist movie The Asphalt Jungle:
  Dr. Riedenschneider: Maybe you've heard of me. The Professor? Or Herr Doktor, maybe.
• Subverted in the Austin Powers movies. Although Frau Farbissina refers to Dr. Evil as "Herr Doktor", he is not of German or Austrian ancestry (though she is). He was raised by Belgians, though, and they border the Germans... and a small part of eastern Belgium is natively German-speaking and has its own regional parliament, and German is even an official language in the country.
• Almost averted by Dr. Emmet Brown of Back to the Future trilogy. As we find out in the third movie, he has German ancestry, the old family name was Von Braun - Doc's father had changed the family name during the First World War.
• Mr. Freeze, a well-known Mad Scientist villain of Batman´s rogue gallery, is portrayed in Batman & Robin by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his trademark Austrian accent definitely puts this trope in mind. It's even more appropriate considering that "Fries" is a surname of Danish and German origin.
• The Science Hero of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a nuclear physicist played by a Swiss actor and speaking in the appropriate accent. Ultimately a downplayed trope, since aside from a single line of dialogue referencing "When he first came to this country...", his accent and nationality are never explicitly mentioned.
• BrainDead uses this trope for a one-off scene. The protagonist needs sedatives to deal with a zombie or two. He visits a bald, drooling, sadistic-looking taxidermist in a lab coat whose absurd accent is excused by Rule of Funny. The taxidermist claims not to be a doctor and that he fled the Latvian occupation, when "We were hunted like animals!" When he turns from his shelf, he snags his lab coat on something, and through the tear his Nazi armband is clearly visible.
• Dr. Erskine from Captain America: The First Avenger is a benevolent example, working for the Allies on their Super-Soldier project. His Evil Counterpart Dr. Zola fits the usual portrayal, as he works for the Nazis and then HYDRA, but he actually expresses some regret about what the Red Skull has him do. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he makes a point to correct this, he's actually Swiss.^note  Although parts of Switzerland are primarily inhabited by German speaking people.It's also shown that he is in fact genuinely evil, and gleefully tortured/experimented on American soldiers.
• The Crawling Eye: Professor Crevett, the German lead scientist at the observatory at the Trollenberg, is a kinder example of the trope. He's not at all a Mad Scientist, but instead a jovial and compassionate man who's good friends with American protagonist Alan Brooks, and does his best to be helpful throughout the film.
• Dr. Strangelove: The eponymous Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers again) is an ex-Nazi Mad Scientist who became a U.S. operative after the war. He has trouble shaking his old ways, to the point that he addresses the President (played by the same actor) with "Mein Fuehrer".
• Faceless: Dr. Moser is a Nazi surgeon who worked at Auschwitz and Dachau and who has been in hiding since the war. Flamand brings him to operate on Ingrid as he is the only person to have ever performed a successful face transplant.
• Professor Littleoldman (emphasis on the "old"), Dr. Richard Thorndyke's old tutor in High Anxiety — German, elderly, and a shrewd psychiatrist. Also comes across as Sophisticated as Hell, since his response to Thorndyke giving a feeble excuse not to seek help with his titular anxiety is to bluntly shout "Bullshit!"
• Dr. Elsa Schneider in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Though more strictly a historian, her knowledge of the Holy Grail's lore (and seduction of the Jones boys) is crucial to aiding the Nazis in discovering its location. In some respects, she also borrows from the related Mad Scientist trope because of her irrational obsession with possessing the grail, which leads to her untimely demise. During a Literal Cliffhanger, she hangs from Indy with one hand and uses the other to reach for the grail, which she had dropped moments earlier. Indy begs her to stop, but she keeps trying as she can almost grasp it. Indy loses his grip on her gloved hand and she falls to her death.
• In King of the Zombies, Dr. Sangre speaks with a Germanic accent but is deliberately vague as to where he comes from.
• In Lolita, Clare Quilty impersonates a psychiatrist and uses a heavy Germanic accent.

• Professor Max Krassman from The Muppet Movie, played by Mel Brooks in full Alter Kocker mode.
  "When a German scientist tells you to hold on to your hat, it's not casual conversation. HOLD ON TO YOUR HAT! HAT! HOLD! Good!"
• Drs. Gottlieb and Geizler, the Kaiju-researching duo from Pacific Rim, were both born in Germany though raised in England and America respectively, leading to no such German accent.
• Planet of the Apes (1968) has a brief reference to a Dr. Otto Hasslein, implied to be one of the astrophysicists involved in the rocket launch program. In the third film in the series, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, we finally meet Dr. Hasslein, and although he looks too young to have been part of Operation Paperclip, his accent — as well as his behaviour — are more than a little Nazi-ish, and he gradually becomes the villain of the movie.

• Dr. Scott from the The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Seems to be an expy of Dr. Strangelove and works for a government bureau that researches UFOs and is implied to be an ex-nazi.
  • Interestingly enough, Dr. Frank N. Furter himself originally had a German accent in the early days of the stage show. For reasons unknown, the idea was quickly dropped.
• Subverted in Sherlock Holmes (2009). After Watson is injured in a bomb blast, his girlfriend/soon-to-be fiance Mary goes to him in the hospital, as he is attended by a very German-sounding doctor. However, Mary figures out that the doctor is actually Holmes in disguise. (It is actually a much stronger subversion, as Holmes' impersonation sounds very French and not German.)
• Shutter Island: Played with. Dr. Naehring is undeniably German (although played by a legendary Swede), but his accent is much lighter than required by the trope. Teddy Daniels (a WWII veteran who participated in the liberation of Dachau) starts to believe that Dr. Naehring is a fugitive Nazi continuing his horrible experiments in the U.S. This theory turns out to be just another part of Andrew's delusion.
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow has a passel of German and Austrian Mad Scientists.
• Invoked in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020). When Sonic self-analyzes his feelings of loneliness at the beginning, he asks questions to himself while mimicking the stereotypical psychologist's Austrian accent.
• Ashley Kafka from the Spider-Man comics is reimagined as Dr. Kafka in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a madman speaking in German-ish accent who experiments on Electro.
• Professor Meisenbach in Thank You for Smoking. Implied to be a former Nazi scientist.
• Torture Garden: In "Terror Over Hollywood", Dr. Heim is a refugee from Nazi Germany who has been secretly uploading the brains of the Hollywood elite into robot bodies since the 1940s.
• In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, the Decepticon medic, Scalpel, is also known as "Ze Doktor" (and is in fact called only that during the film himself). Of course, weird accents aren't anything new for Transformers.
  Ze Doktor: We must have ze brain on ze table. Chop-chop!
  • Blaster from the Transformers: Shattered Glass uniform has an... unplaceable accent that seems phonetically German-ish. Even the writers have no idea what he's really supposed to sound like.
• Dr. Carl Mortner, Zorin's personal physician (und kreator?) in A View to a Kill. He's a Mengele-sque Nazi scientist from the war, responsible for experiments on women in concentration camps, resulting in highly intelligent and psychotic offspring. Zorin is one of them.
• Virtual Combat: A scientist working for a corrupt company who invents a way to download their virtual reality sex programs into artificial bodies is clearly Austrian.
• The "Doctor" (Pleasance) in Watch Out, We're Mad!, a German-born Freudian psychologist who is an extreme parody of this trope.
• In What's New Pussycat?, Peter Sellers plays a mad, lecherous Viennese psychiatrist.
• The Wolfman (2010) has a very terrifying sequence set in a European Bedlam House apparently staffed exclusively by this stereotype.
• Dr. Frederick Frankenstein of Young Frankenstein. He's even called "Herr Doktor" by Frau Blucher.
• Zonad features one of these as a parody of 1950s paranoia movies. The film is set in rural Ireland, and it's never explained what the doctor is actually doing there.

Literature

• The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids: Absent-Minded Professor and inventor-of-everything, Doctor Sigma, speaks in a comedy Austrian Funetik Aksent reminiscent of Paul Frees’ Ludwig von Drake. Why this is the case remains somewhat obscure in light of the fact that he is in fact a robot, who was, as far as anybody knows, built and programmed by the same inventor as all the other Mark 1 Clockwork Cherubs. Maybe he just does it because it's funny.
• In Dracula, Professor Van Helsing is actually Dutch, but constantly peppers his English with German. (Yes, Bram Stoker did, in fact, do the research — German was a lingua franca in that area of Europe, and Dutch is a Germanic language closely related to German.) Also, German was the language of science in the 19th century — a (non-German) scientist tossing around German words would be like a musician casually using Italian words.
• Frankenstein is the doctor's name and may be the trope codifier (although in the novel he is Swiss, implied to be Francophonic and doesn't actually receive his doctorate).
• In Unseen Academicals, Mister Nutt does psychotherapy on himself, using a thick Uberwaldian accent when in the doctor persona.
• Comes up as a sort of Discussed Trope in the Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Unnatural History. Fitz is annoyed by the Doctor pressuring him to have fun and mentally refers to him as Herr Doctor. There's probably some connection to the fact that Fitz is himself half-German and was picked on for it a lot growing up during World War II.
• Dr. Martin Hesselius from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly, the first Occult Detective of literature, is a German physician.
• Due to the Anno Dracula series being a Deconstruction Crossover, The Bloody Red Baron has a number of German Mad Scientists from film and literature, including Professor ten Brinken from the 1911 German novel Alraune and Dr. Caligari from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
• Justified in Suspicion by the fact that the story is set in Switzerland. Dr. Nehle and probably Dr. Edith Marlok are German. Dr. Fritz Emmenberger and Dr. Samuel Hungertobel are Swiss.
• In The Cosmic Express, the titular teleportation device was recently invented (in 2432) by "Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist".
• MARZENA loves to play with this trope.
  • We have narrator Anika From Bremen, which is really an anglicised version of Anika Von Bremen — although it's unclear whether she is a doctor or not, her description of all things biological and neurological goes so deep that she might as well be. And also bonus points for her seldom bilingual slips.
  • Subverted with Dr. Yoan; he isn't really from Germany or Austria but from Switzerland, and his accent isn't particularly atrocious either.
  • Averted with Private Thomas, he's neither German nor a Doctor, although his name might have been based on Dr. Thomas Starzl, the first doctor to successfully perform a liver transplantation.
• Lampshaded in The Martian, when Mark Watney writes a letter to his German crewmate Alex Vogel:
  "Frankly, I suspect you're a super-villain. You're a chemist, you have a German accent, you had a base on Mars... what more can there be?"
• Area 51: Werner von Seeckt is a German physicist whom the US "recruited" as part of Operation Paperclip (he was in the SS, though not a true believer in Nazism). He claims to regret that. Later some other German scientists are introduced who were also recruited the same way, and share a Nazi past (but appear to have been more hardcore than him).
• Terra Ignota: The German psychologist Adolf Richter Brill revolutionized justice, linguistics, and education, and developed the Brillist number set, an eight-digit string of numbers designed to quantify one's behavior and personality (think MBTI types if they used numbers and were actually reliable). The meaning of each digit is never actually mentioned, and understanding them requires years of study at the Adolf Riktor Brill Institute of Psychotaxonomic Science (and you have to learn German — Brill believed Language Equals Thought and that German was the only language precise enough to record and teach his work in), but the relatively few who have can Sherlock Scan someone by reading their body language and asking them to name a random color or whatever, and they're never shown to be wrong.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Highlanders", the Doctor pretends to be a German doctor. "Do you suffer from headaches?"
  • In "The Underwater Menace", planet-exploding ham Mad Scientist Professor Zaroff has the campiest German accent imaginable (which, amusingly, was the actor's natural accent).
• Even Emergency! gets into the act in the episode "Helpful". Character of the week Dr. Elizabeth Varner is a refugee from East Germany working at Rampart Hospital.
• One episode of The Honeymooners had a psychologist administer "Ze truth serum" to Norton.
• Murderville: Invoked by Terry in "Heartless", when he puts Sharon Stone on the spot while undercover as a German surgeon named Eva Brownfinger. Stone affects a German accent.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 uses this riff a lot. TV's Frank also once dressed as a "Dr. Frankenkeister" for a sketch, donning a fake beard and faker accent.
• Pixelface: In Claireparker's game Return to Zombie City, her stepfather is a scientist with a German accent. She remarks that it should come as a surprise to no one that he was the one responsible for releasing the zombie virus.
• Sidney from The Pretender is revealed to be a Nazi test subject, under the 'care' of a German doctor still running loose. The irony is that Sydney is an old man, too, now performing experiments on helpless children himself.

• Star Trek: Picard: Q apparently finds it impossible to impersonate a human psychotherapist without putting on a goofy Austrian accent.

Music

• "Ich bin der Doktor Eisenbarth" ("I am Dr. Ironbeard") is a satirical German folk song that inverts and parodies the stereotype (with a tip o' the lampshade). The verses consist of Herr Doktor revealing what a completely unqualified quack he is. The song was based on a real-life German quack, Johann Andreas Eisenbarth.
• Rammstein keyboardist Flake sometimes invokes this in his stage costumes and he's occasionally referred to as "Doktor Flake".

Puppet Shows

• The sesquipedalian Dr. Julius Strangepork, science officer of the SS Swinetrek in the "Pigs In Space" sketches of The Muppet Show.

Radio

• In The Men from the Ministry, the Ministry's psychiatrist is a man called Dr. Schwein who speaks with a German accent.

Tabletop Games

• Crimson Skies had a German scientist to rescue.
• The Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft campaign setting, featuring as it did expies of many classic horror characters, of course featured some of these:
  • Dr. Rudolph van Richten, expy of Bram Stoker's Abraham van Helsing.
  • Dr. Victor Mordenheim, expy of Victor Frankenstein and creator of Adam, expy of, well, you know....
• Twilight Struggle invokes this with the "Captured Nazi Scientists" card, which is playable by either player and grants one free move on the Space Race track.

Video Games

• The nurses in Scrapland speak with a German accent.
• Dr. Fred Edison of Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle may express this trope.
• Sasha Nein from Psychonauts, of German (or possibly Austrian) descent. He mainly stays in his lab, and performs psychic experiments that can sometimes scare the Whispering Rock campers. He's a pretty benign case, being unwilling to continue experiments if they threaten to harm the kids, and his Mad Scientist tendencies often take a backseat to the super-spy elements of his personality.
  Sasha: If I could get [Raz] into my lab, I'm sure he could withstand more than the others.
• The Medic from Team Fortress 2. Fellow Medics will even say "Thank you, Herr Doctor!" He had a medical license long ago, but due to an incident involving somehow stealing a patient's skeleton, he lost it. The details in-between are fuzzy, but according to a hidden page that used to be on the website, apparently he faked his death◊ and somehow ended up joining the team, still continuing to practice medicine, and inventing the Medigun. Confirmed not to be a Nazi (that would "be too easy"), but still not entirely sympathetic.
  • The "Loose Canon" comic reveals that the original BLU Medic was the Sigmund Freud.
• If you crashed in the old fight simulator Stunt Island, a German doctor would promise to have you "Patched up and flying again, tomorrow!"
• Warship Gunner 2 has Doctor Braun, a female scientist who lends the Wilkians a submarine to perform covert ops attacks. She's a weapons development specialist who becomes your resident expert on the enemy's Black Box superweapons.
• Call of Duty: Zombies: Dr. Edward Richtofen and Dr. Ludwig Maxis, both responsible for the creation of the zombies, are textbook examples of the Trope. Both are German Mad Scientists who have some very major Ax-Crazy moments (Richtofen especially).
• BioShock:
  • Not only was Dr. Tenenbaum a former Nazi scientist (and of Jewish descent, even!) she's responsible for the research that created the Little Sisters. However, she's trying to fix that.
  • Dr. Steinman, who is trying to be "The Picasso of Plastic Surgery". Picasso, as in the artist known for surrealistic abstract imagery. Do the math.

• Die Anstalt: Originally German, of course, but when they translate it into to English, will the previous psychiatrist lose his cool German accent? NIEMALS!
• League of Legends has Heimerdinger, a Gadgeteer Genius whose name definitely invokes this trope.
• Professor Von Kriplespac from Conker's Bad Fur Day, a weasel scientist that sits in a floating chair.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3 has Dr. Stanislaus Braun, who is the overseer of Vault 112. He keeps the vault dwellers trapped in a virtual reality simulator, keeping them there forever, for his own amusement. There's also Dr. Zimmer, a scientist from the Commonwealth who tasks you with tracking down his escaped android.
  • Fallout: New Vegas has Dr. Ada Straus, a caravan medic who shows an obvious lack of competence ("I need sterile medical supplies", etc.) and is the only Mojave doctor to sell both addictive chems and medical supplies at the same time. A straighter example is Dr. Klein, the head of the Think Tank in Old World Blues.
• Klingmann from Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within. "People refer to me as Herr Doktor Klingmann here." However, he's actually kind of an aversion — although he does have the title, he has barely a trace of an accent. Despite his infatuation with the hunting club philosophy, he's not insane either — just unscrupulous enough to trade a few of his wolves.

• The Norwegian Professor Ingvar Johanssen of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines was the one responsible for digging up the Ankaran Sarcophagus. His accent is outrageous, though surprisingly realistic^note If on the Swedish side of outrageously broad Scandinavian accents for a one-shot stereotype character.
• The Cybran leader from Supreme Commander, Dr. Gustaf Brackman, has a suspiciously Germanic name (Swedish actually), although he speaks clear English.
• Romanian Mad Scientist Dr. Ort-Meyer from the Hitman series, who sounds like a mix of Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price.
• Several of the scientists in the Half-Life series (Dr. Kleiner, Dr. Rosenberg, Dr. Keller) have German-sounding names, and one is Scandinavian (Dr. Magnusson).
• X-COM:
  • The XCOM: Enemy Unknown remake has Dr. Vahlen as your organization's head of R&D. She has a vaguely Germanic accent when speaking English^note although it's also vaguely French, suggesting she grew up near the Franco-German border, and is called upon to act as an interpreter during the turorial, which is set in Germany.
  • Similarly, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified recruited a former Nazi to study Elerium. He even says that Carter could talk to the OSS upon questioning of his nationality.

• The Mad Doctor in the Epic Mickey games clearly has a vaguely Eastern European-sounding accent.
• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has Wilhelm Voigt, known primarily by his colleagues as "Doktor".
• Angela Ziegler, aka Mercy, of Overwatch is a medic from Switzerland who speaks German, but she's a bit of a pacifist with very weak offensive abilities.
• Pink Panther's Passport to Peril has Von Schmarty, a Gadgeteer Genius and an ally of Pink Panther throughout most of the game.
• The scientists in the first Destroy All Humans! are mostly German scientists from German areas such as Peenemünde and Stuttgart, and some talk in a mixture of English and German. As a bonus, their appearance resembles Albert Einstein.
• CarnEvil: Ludwig von Tökkentäkker, the carnival's ringmaster, is very obviously German, from his name to his exaggerated accent to his Gratuitous German. He's also a professor, though it's unclear exactly what he's a professor of. However, he does enjoy turning people into twisted carnival freaks.
• The Syphon Filter series has Dr. Elsa Weissinger, the Agency's chief biologist and engineer of the eponymous virus.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive lampshades and parodies this trope with "Stereotypical German Scientist Dr. Germahn". Initially the host of a 'questions from the readers' sub-strip, he has since popped up frequently in odd places, even as the Q&A section has been mostly taken over by his Dumb Blonde assistant Amanda.

• Girl Genius revels in this trope. Then again, in a comic about Mad Scientists in a setting where German is implied to be the lingua franca, it's par for the course; bonus points go to those Sparks with Germanic-sounding names like Klaus Wulfenbach and Wilhelm Sturmvoraus. The only ones who speak with anything resembling the stereotypical accent are the Super-Soldier Jägers, though.
• Scandinavia and the World: Apparently, Austria is a Mad Scientist. He has shown more Deadpan Snarker behavior than anything this far.
• Follower: The character bio of the head geneticist of Project Cottontail, Dr. Bernhard Tolio, mentions that he was born in Germany.
• Gus from The Legend of Maxx is a Goblin Tinkerer who makes gadgets and speaks in a heavy German-ish accent.
• Dr. Vernon Glassner from Trying Human, a veritable Werhner von Braun, only crazier and creepier.

Web Original

• Bad Movie Beatdown: Professor Celluloid, a Mad Scientist with a ridiculous German accent. He's understandably offended by Die Hard (Matthew's favorite movie) for its depiction of Germans.

• The Dr. Kafka example above (see Film) is mocked in the Screen Junkies/CinemaSins crossover video "Everything Wrong With The Amazing Spider-Man 2".
  Dr. Kafka: [in German accent] I'm Dr. Kafka.
  Epic Voice Guy: [also in German accent] Zee stereotypical German scientist, ja?
• Jacksepticeye: Dr. Henrik Von Schneeplestein has a thick stereotypical accent. He's not much of a doctor, as he got his medical license out of a cereal box.
• Epic Rap Battles of History depicts Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud this way.

Western Animation

• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: Both Professor Caninestein and Professor Dinglehoper Von Schlemmer speak with a typical cartoony "exaggerated German" accent, to accentuate their Mad Scientist credentials, and their names are intended to invoke a cartoonish "German" family name.
• At the end of an episode of The Angry Beavers, Dagget ends up swimming in a lake full of chemicals that make him super-intelligent, complete with a swollen head. He becomes a scientist and speaks with a German accent afterwards.
• Walt Disney's Ludwig von Drake (sometimes psychologist, sometimes Omnidisciplinary Scientist, depending on the comic) comes from Vienna. Otherwise, there's not much emphasis on his German/Austrian origin, but he's got a very obvious accent in his cartoons.
• Count Duckula: Dr. Von Goosewing peppers his speak with Gratuitous German, especially when there's a good opportunity for some Who's on First? shenanigans. The show has people confuse "nein!" with "nine!" on more than one occasion. This makes a certain amount of sense given that the series takes place in Eastern Europe and the character is a nod to Professor Van Helsing fron Dracula.
• Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time isn't known to be of German descent, but she's a firmly-established scientist, and although primarily speaking English, she's very much fluent in German.
  "Ich bin hier, Finn."
  "It's me! Der princess?"
  "Ich bin so glücklich, ich könnte, ich könnte-..."
  "Auf wiedersehen!"
  "Ach, mein Glöb!"
• Animaniacs: Dr. Otto Scratchansniff, the Warners' "p-sychiatrist", speaks in a vaguely Austrian accent.
• Archer: Although Dr. Krieger is technically not German, his last name and the fact that he is implied to be a clone of Adolf Hitler make him one.
• Parodied in Bounty Hamster, where the recurring scientist character is named "Professor Notgerman" and has a Scottish accent.
• Despite being a race of cyborgs from another planet, the Gobots from Challenge Of The Go Bots had two of these: Guardian Baron von Joy and Renegade Herr Fiend.
• Dr. Von Richter from Cybersix, although unlike the original comics, the series does not specifically identify him as an escaped Nazi.
• A German-accented scientist creates the uppercase letter H in a 1971 Sesame Street insert.
• In sharp contrast to his original portrayal, Baron Silas Greenback is portrayed this way in the 2010s Danger Mouse series. Furthermore, he is even given the Germanic-sounding name of Baron Silas "von" Greenback.
  • Professor Squawkencluck from the original series is a more straightforward example.
• Dexter's Laboratory is about a boy genius with a gigantic laboratory hidden in his bedroom and an implaceable Central European accent that no one else in his family shares.
• Dr. Ketzer,^note German for "Heretic" a genius geneticist in Exo Squad. In a twist, he is not working for the local Nazis by Any Other Name, but rather against them... not that it makes him any more sympathetic.
• In Harley Quinn (2019), Mr. Freeze is portrayed with a thick German accent once again.
• Inspector Gadget's second season has Dr. Noodleman in "Gadget's Gadgets"; and the Arc Villain Professor Dummkopf in "Gadget in Minimadness", "The Incredible Shrinking Gadget", and "Gadget Meets the Grappler".
• Countess von Verminstrasser from the Invader Zim episode "Lice", who speaks in a German accent and is a scientist obsessed with destroying lice.

• Professor Dementor from Kim Possible, as indicated by his LOUD GERMAN-ACCENTED SPEAKING!

• Looney Tunes:
  • Dr. Oro Myicin, the psychiatrist from the cartoon Hare Brush, who convinces Bugs Bunny he is really Elmer J. Fudd, Millionaire, using hypnosis.
  • Years later, in Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare, Bugs Bunny himself, when posing as a psychiatrist to the Tasmanian Devil, does zo mit ein Zherrman akzent, ja?
• In Mega Man (Ruby-Spears), Dr. Wily is given a German accent, which is rather fitting given his Einstein Hair.
• Men in Black: The Series: In "The Mine, Mine, Mine Syndrome", the alien scientist Dr. Bjork speaks with a German accent.
• Phineas and Ferb has Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz,^note "Doof" means "stupid" in German. who actually never graduated — there's a song about it: "I Must Impress My Professor" — and has a brother who's in local politics and whose accent is not nearly as pronounced as his brother's.
• The Parking Lot 51 scientist pitties from UFM: Unidentified Flying Mater, as well as "Dr. Aschleppwagen"^note A misspelling of the German word "Abschleppwagen", which means "tow car" (Mater's disguise) from the same short, which he uses to gain access to the base and save Mator. A real pitty sees Mater:
  Pitty: So, herr doktor, what does "dad gum" mean?
  Mater: [fake German accent] Ze "dad gum" means... [drops accent, saves Mator] ...let's get outta here!
• Strudel, Gadgeteer Genius dachshund of The Hub's Pound Puppies. Aside from her accent, she's also a dachshund, a breed of dog that originated in Germany.
• Megabyte's mad scientist henchman in ReBoot is literally named "Herr Doctor". He's also the only viral binome in the entire series to remain completely and consistently loyal to Megabyte of his own free will, and thus Megabyte actually seems to like him: he's thus far the only character to ever get a ride in Megabyte's lavish limousine.
• Present in one episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show where a bus crash leaves the pair in critical condition, forcing said doctor to operate with the remaining parts which leaves the asthma hound chihuaha and red cat sown together into one mismatched hybrid. Despite having traits common to a Morally Ambiguous Doctorate, it can be assumed that the doctor is simply doing his job to keep his patients alive, even if he has to resort to nonstandard, questionably extreme practices, such as urgently demanding his assistant knock Ren back into unconsciousness with a mallet when he regains consciousness in the midst of surgery.
• In an episode of Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko takes Spunky to a pet psychiatrist who is an obvious Expy of Sigmund Freud. The psychiatrist falls in love with the dirty mop Spunky had fallen in love with.
• Recurring psychiatrist Dr.Lipschitz on Rugrats speaks with a German accent. And his first name is Werner. He even hums "Deutschland Uber Alles" twice. Whenever Didi quotes Lipschitz, she even speaks in his accent.

• A nuclear physics professor in an episode of The Simpsons is portrayed with something vaguely resembling a German accent if you don't listen too hard.
• In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, both Doctor Octopus and Doctor Doom had Germanic accents. This makes a little more sense for Doom, possibly, whose origins are canonically in Europe.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars has the episode "Blue Shadow Virus", with its main villain Dr. Nuvo Vindi being an alien scientist with a German accent.
• Dr. Paradigm of Street Sharks has some vaguely European accent for no reason ever given.
• Mr. Lizard the Wizard in Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales is a German-accented lizard... who is a wizard.

Real Life

• In the 1930's Germany was at the forefront of physics research, and scientists from other countries were expected to learn German so they could keep up with the latest research.
• Heinz Wolff
• Wernher von Braun is perhaps the Real Life Trope Codifier for much of this. A literal Rocket Scientist, he was frequently on television and in print, advocating for space exploration.
• Apparently, most doctors in Israel were German Jews some decades ago, when Ephraim Kishon wrote a story using this trope.
• Subverted with Karl Teodor von und zu Guttenberg, Anette Schavan, Silvana Koch Mehrin, Veronica Saß and Uwe Brinkmann (they cheated in their dissertations and lost their "Doktor"-titles because of that. Shavan did get an honorary degree afterwards, so she can keep her "Frau Doktor" title, even if it becomes just an "Frau Doktor h.c.").
• Fritz Haber is a German scientist who was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in ammonia synthesis. He was also known for pioneering gas warfare in World War I.

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