Hugo Drax

Lore & Background

In the 1955 novel Moonraker, Sir Hugo Drax is an English World War II soldier, believed to have been working in Liverpool harbour before the war, who became a post-war millionaire. He has red hair, and the whole right side of his face is badly scarred from a German shell blast during the war. The same incident left him with amnesia. He is 6 ft (183 cm) tall.

After the war, Drax made a fortune from trading metals in Tangier and was able to start up his company, Drax Metals Ltd, which has a monopoly in the production of the metal ore columbite. Drax is also the backer of the Moonraker missile project being built to defend the United Kingdom against its Cold War enemies. The novel reveals that Drax was born in Germany as Graf Hugo von der Drache. Because his mother was English, Von der Drache was educated in England until the age of 12.

Afterwards he moved to Berlin and later Leipzig, where he continued and finished his education. After graduating, he joined the Nazi Party and entered the Wehrmacht as a soldier in the Panzer Brigade 150. At the outset of World War II he took part in the Blitzkrieg campaigns in Belgium and France, before becoming a Skorzeny Werwolf commando. After the Ardennes offensive he stayed behind Allied lines when their forces crossed the Rhine and started operating in the Low Countries with his commando group.

During a mission, he dressed as a British soldier so that he could sabotage and destroy a farmhouse holding a mixed liaison group of American and British servicemen, but he ended up at the same farm after being attacked by a German fighter plane because he was wearing a British uniform. While he was still conscious, he managed to destroy his motorbike and documents. Later he was found and brought to the farm, so he was caught in the explosion and nearly killed.

He was then rescued by the British and nursed back to health, faking amnesia and claiming to be a 'missing soldier' by the name of Hugo Drax. After receiving his medical discharge from the British Army, he killed a Jewish businessman in London, robbed him of £15,000, and escaped to Tangier to start his company. Drax sets up the Moonraker missile project under the pretence of test-firing it into the North Sea. His workers are former Nazis, including most of the members of his old commando unit, and his true aim is to establish German superiority over England.

Reader's Guide

In the 1979 film adaptation Moonraker, Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale) is a lavish French-German billionaire who owns Drax Industries, a private company which constructs Space Shuttles for NASA. Drax seeks to destroy the entire human race except for a small group of selected humans that would leave Earth on six shuttles and have sanctuary on a space station. Using chemical weapons derived from the toxin of a rare South American plant, the Black Orchid, he would wipe out the remainder of humanity.

Bond and CIA agent Dr. Holly Goodhead commandeer one of Drax's shuttles and blast off to his orbiting space station. Bond persuades Drax's henchman Jaws to switch allegiances. A team of space soldiers invade the space station, resulting in a laser battle. Bond then corners Drax in the station's airlock, shoots him with a cyanide-tipped dart, and ejects him into space.

In the novelization by Christopher Wood, Drax is described as red-haired and with a face scarred and botched by poor plastic surgery.

Did You Know?

• In the film, Drax is an accomplished pianist who plays Frédéric Chopin's 'Raindrop' Prelude.
• The later novel From Russia, with Love reveals that Drax had been an operative of SMERSH.