Ian Fleming’s real-life exploits during the Second World War have long been seen as the inspiration behind his James Bond novels.
As a naval intelligence officer, the author played a key role in planning top-secret operations and setting up an elite unit of commandos who seized enemy documents, reports MailOnline.
But now, German fans of the Bond franchise believe they’ve uncovered the real-life roots of one of Fleming’s most memorable villains — Moonraker’s Hugo Drax.
The so-called “Bond Club” argue that Fleming may have modelled Drax on a German industrialist he encountered after the war.
In Moonraker, Drax appears to be a patriotic British army veteran working on a rocket programme for Britain — only for readers to discover that he is actually Graf Hugo von der Drache, a Nazi determined to take revenge for Germany’s defeat.
In the novel, Drax is also linked to Rheinmetall-Borsig, a Düsseldorf-based company that supplied artillery to Nazi forces.
And according to the Bond Club, that’s no coincidence.
The club believes that while serving with the Allies’ secret units, Fleming came across top-secret files belonging to companies like Rheinmetall and Krupp, which he then transformed into fiction.
Tobias Schwesig, chairman of the club, told The Times: “In the films you have these characters — they look like normal Englishmen or industrialists, and then it turns out they’re bad guys, Nazis, who want to destroy England or America.
“He often had a real, probably a real person back in mind, I think.”
Speaking further about Drax, Schwesig added: “The villains in Bond feel so real because Fleming knew exactly how Nazi companies operated.
“This is particularly clear in the character of Hugo Drax in Moonraker.”
Members of the club also believe that Wattenscheid — the town in western Germany where they’re based — could have been Fleming’s inspiration for Bond’s fictional birthplace, although the author himself was always vague on that subject.
During his time in intelligence, Fleming founded 30 Assault Unit (30AU), a secretive commando force.
By early 1945, as the Allies advanced into Germany, the unit had orders to seize enemy papers and gather valuable intelligence.
Fleming also worked alongside T-Force, another specialist team tasked with capturing German technology and expertise — including rocket scientists, who were then brought back to Britain before the Russians could get to them.
The Bond Club also claim that one of Moonraker’s key characters — the scientist Dr Walter — was inspired by Hellmuth Walter, who ran the Walterwerke factory in Kiel and was also secured by T-Force.
The firm had pioneered engines for V1 and V2 rockets, and historian Sean Longden previously noted other similarities between Walter and his fictional counterpart.
In Moonraker, some 50 German scientists — described as “more or less all the guided-missile experts the Russians didn’t get” — are working on Drax’s rocket project, mirroring the way T-Force had retrieved German rocket specialists before they could be captured by the Soviets.
The club’s findings help shed light on one of Fleming’s most enduring villains — although the 1979 film version, starring Roger Moore as 007 and Michael Lonsdale as Drax, bore little resemblance to the book.
And the character of Walter, so prominent in the novel, didn’t appear at all.