The untold story of how Canadian POWs helped liberate the women of Ravensbruck death camp
They were marched through the gates in ranks of five. Three hundred women, all of them starving, beaten, barely alive. They were spies and resistance fighters. Doctors, nurses. An art historian. One old woman, clinging to life, whose last and only wish was to die in France.
They wore a strange pastiche of civilian clothes — prisoners pushed out a death camp in mouldering frocks and at least one gown.
For days they’d been culled. Culled for swollen legs. Culled for noble names. Culled if their heads had been too recently shaved. They had been lined up and winnowed. Stripped, showered, left waiting for two days and nights in the cold. Then winnowed again. Lined up again. Stripped again. Showered. And now here they were, outside the gates.
Behind them they left only death. By starvation. By cold. By beating, neglect and medical torture. In the last months, there had been death by gas, too — in the chamber and in the van. And death by marching — to other camps in a collapsing Reich, pitted by madness and craters, and to nowhere at all.
Female prisoners at the Ravensbruck concentration camp. AFP via Getty Images
Out they marched, away from 30,000 of their fellow prisoners and the ashes of countless more, layered on the flowerbeds to help them grow. They staggered down the road toward the ragged woods. Round the bend they went and suddenly, there they were.
Decades later, the women would speak of what they saw that morning, standing in the road, behind the lines in the last days of Hitler’s Germany, with an awe unchecked by the years. In amongst the trees were about 10 white trucks on high tires. Standing next to them, in the road, were soldiers in khaki. On their sleeves, the women could make out one word:
“Canada.”
*****
Robert Kerr was born in Aurora, Ont., on Feb. 6, 1924. He signed up for the Canadian Army 20 years later, at a recruitment centre in Montreal. By the fall of 1944, he was in Italy, ferrying messages by motorcycle all over the countryside as a dispatch rider for the Fifth Canadian Armoured Brigade.
“The dispatch riders were a pretty rough group, on the whole,” Kerr said. They were boxers and ne’er do wells and other tough kids from the Griffintown neighbourhood in Montreal.
They also ran all the gambling in the division. But Kerr, he just loved to ride. If a message came in, and it wasn’t his turn, he’d take it anyway. “Whether it took you 20 minutes or three hours, no one ever seemed to pay any attention,” he said. “And as a dispatch rider, you could eat in any canteen at any hour of the day: American, British, Canadian, Australian.”
In November 1944, with the war going well, the brass in Northern Italy decided to throw a big party. They invited everyone in the area ranked colonel or above. But at the last minute, they realized they’d missed a crucial invite — a senior colonel in charge of a nearby regiment. Kerr was around, so he got the job.
He then realized that someone was shooting at him
At the time, the Canadians were dug in on the south side of a canal with the Germans holding fast to the north. Kerr drove up the road, away from camp and toward the spurned colonel, but he couldn’t find his regiment. He turned around, went about a quarter of a mile back toward the Adriatic, then realized, as he approached a crossroads, that someone was shooting at him.
“I dumped the motorcycle,” he said. “But stupidly … I went into the ditch on their side of the road.” He started crawling through the water in the canal, which was only a few feet deep. He figured he’d cross over when he came to a culvert. But instead, he arrived at a large pond. And he wasn’t alone. “A couple of guys just hoisted me out of the water,” he said.
They were Germans. Kerr was a prisoner of war.
*****
Five months before the Germans hauled Kerr out of the water in Northern Italy, Nazi agents in France arrested a young student turned spy named Odette Renée Bonnat, better known by her first husband’s last name “Allaire.”
Allaire was born 27 months before Kerr, on Nov. 26, 1921 in her father’s hometown of Limoges. She was studying medicine in Paris when the Nazis overran the city in June 1940. By January of the following year, she was an official agent of the resistance, run jointly by a French handler and a British consul in Switzerland.
For more than three years, Allaire carried out clandestine missions, gathering information about the enemy and later co-ordinating agents in Normandy. But in June 1944, just 10 months before the liberation of Paris, the Nazis found her.
You hadn’t confessed a thing
“I was questioned, beaten, tortured, sent to three prisons,” she said. In Romainville, at a transit camp for Parisian prisoners, she met Denise Vernay, a resistance fighter who went by the aliase “Miarka.” In a eulogy delivered decades after the fact, Vernay spoke of that first meeting. “You arrived from a prison in Amiens where you had been brutally tortured,” she said. “You didn’t speak of it, but you hadn’t confessed a thing.”
In August 1944, Vernay and Allaire were bundled onto a train destined for a lakeside camp about 80 kilometres north of Berlin. Denise DuFournier, a lawyer and resistance fighter, had made the same journey seven months earlier. She described that trip in a memoir published shortly after the war.
There were about 1,000 French women in that journey. They were jammed into train cars labelled for 40 men or eight horses. Charles De Gaulle’s niece was on the train. DuFournier remembers her singing Le Marseillaise.
One of the 289 French women released from Ravensbruck on April 5, 1945 and sent to Switzerland. avarchives.icrc.org
For days, they rumbled through a Europe at war with little food and nothing more than a bucket for waste. They didn’t know where they were going, which only multiplied the shock when they arrived. The women were pushed off the train in the middle of the night by guards with snarling dogs. They were ordered into rows of five. Always rows of five. And marched through the gates.
“A group of figures was waiting to let us pass,” DuFournier wrote. “We were able to see their faces; they were famished looking, impassive; their eyes protruded from their sockets. Their formless, emaciated bodies recalled statues of the Middle Ages.”
They had arrived at the place where many of them would die: The Ravensbruck concentration camp for women.
*****
Kerr’s own journey to Germany had some elements in common with Allaire’s. After his arrest, he was stripped of his leather jacket, his watch and all his personal belongings. He was locked up and later interrogated by a German intelligence officer, who was also a Lutheran minister. The minister was convinced Kerr was lying about his regiment. “He got indignant,” Kerr said. “I guess he threatened to have me shot at dawn.”
Instead, the guards locked Kerr into a long, thin cell about the size of a pigpen. The next day, the minister went at him again. Again, Kerr told him he was a dispatch rider in the 5th. And again, the minister was furious. “So I said ‘okay, you tell me what you want me to say,’” Kerr said. “So, boom, I went into solitary.”
Eventually, Kerr was loaded onto a freight train — 52 men per car — and transported north and west over the Alps into Germany. The journey took more than four days. “We were all wet and cold,” he said. Private Cecil Cook, another Canadian POW, traveled the same route, though it isn’t clear if he was on the same train. “We had no water and the only toilet facilities we had was a box, a small box,” he said.
On Christmas Eve 1944, Cook’s train arrived in Munich. The next morning, Christmas morning, the Germans transported them 50 kilometres north to Moosburg, home of the massive Stalag VIIA prisoner of war camp.
The commander inside Stalag VIIA was an old submarine captain from the First World War. He spoke once to every new batch of prisoners. He told them, according to Kerr, that the Geneva Conventions did not exist. “So forget it,” he said, “You are going to do what you’re told to do here. You are going to work. You don’t work, you don’t eat. You don’t eat, you don’t live.”
He threatened to have me shot at dawn
Conditions in the camp were Spartan, not brutal. But there was never enough food. Arno Rooke, a big Alberta farm boy, weighed only 122 pounds when he got out, according to his son. “He said he saw a guy killed a pigeon with a rock and eat it right in the middle of the yard,” said Garry Rooke.
As the winter of 1945 wore on, though, the food problem got worse. Allied bombing raids had wrecked German rail lines all across the Reich. Wehrmacht soldiers were retreating en mass. Concentration camps and prison camps were being emptied, through mass slaughter and deportation. And in Germany proper, the army had abandoned almost all efforts to keep the prison camps stocked. Inside, the inmates were beginning to starve.
*****
If the conditions in Stalag VIIA were grim by the winter of 1945, in Ravensbruck, they were brutal beyond human imagination. “Ravensbruck made us passive beasts, corpses — or it made us superhuman,” said Allaire. The women were worked 12 hours a day, every day, in factories and the nearby forest. Anyone who couldn’t work was killed.
For a time, Allaire was assigned to the drains where all the excrement in the camp was channelled off and saved as fertilizer. “I worked there barefoot for a month,” she said.
Most of the French women arrived during the last years of the war. They entered a world of unspeakable cruelty, where infants, hundreds of them, were deliberately starved to death, healthy Polish prisoners, known as “Rabbits” were cut open and infected with disease, and where, by 1945, the pace of deliberate murder had been stepped up dramatically.
A Ravensbruck concentration camp survivor. avarchives.icrc.org
About 130,000 women passed through the gates of Ravensbruck between 1939 and 1945, according to Sarah Helm, who wrote a book about the camp in 2015. Somewhere between 30,000 and 90,000 died there — starved, beaten, shot, gassed or simply worked to death.
“Did I ever see anyone killed?” said Allaire. “Yes, of course. One evening a woman was too tired to keep her place in line, and the SS guard gave her such a blow that he broke her spine and she died a few hours later.”
Many prisoners died during the morning roll call, when they would stand for hours, no matter the weather, with only the thinnest of clothes. About 100 a day perished from exhaustion, hunger or typhus during the last months, according to one survivor. Others were shot or poisoned after undergoing medical experiments, including mass sterilizations and amputations. Thousands were gassed in mobile trucks and others, eventually, in a stationary gas chamber.
“One day, passing the crematorium with our cart, we saw a lorry full to overflowing with piled-up corpses,” wrote DuFournier. “Prisoners were unloading them and carrying them to the entrance of the furnace.” After they were burned, their ashes were spread across the gardens.”
The Allies knew about the concentration camps by that point. Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in January, 1945. News of the women’s camp had also trickled out. And in Switzerland and Sweden, neutral diplomats were trying to negotiate some kind of rescue. For the women of Ravensbruck, though, time was running out.
*****
One day, in Stalaag VIIA, Cecil Cook came back from his work assignment to find a lineup of fellow prisoners outside the Sgt. Major’s tent. He saw his friend Bob in line and asked him what it was for. “Volunteer truck drivers,” was the reply.
All around Germany, the Red Cross had a problem. The organization had thousands of food parcels and the trucks to deliver them, but they had no drivers. The German supplies lines were shattered. The roads were pitted and wrecked. The collapsing German army had little interest in keeping its prisoners fed. Tens of thousands of prisoners were at risk of starvation.
In the camp one day, the Red Cross approached a Canadian Sgt. Major named Harry H. Stinson. Stinson was the Canadian Man of Confidence (or prisoner representative) in Stalag VIIA. The Red Cross man asked him if he could supply the Red Cross with drivers and mechanics, enough of them to keep three convoys of relief trucks operating all across Germany. “I agreed at once,” Stinson wrote in a letter after the war.
Did I ever see anyone killed? Yes, of course
Stinson recruited Sgt. Majors Walter Moss, Samuel Neilly and Fred McMullen to lead separate teams of drivers and trucks. Neilly and McMullen worked with Stinson out of Moosburg. Moss went north to the Berlin area. Rooke signed up. Cook and Kerr did too. “It was agreed that this was an all-Canadian deal,” Kerr said. “Canadians, you can be damn sure every one of them can drive a vehicle.”
The work was dangerous and incredibly trying. At times, they would drive for 48 hours straight without sleeping, resupplying POW camps, prisoner marches and even, on occasion, death camps.
“It is difficult to explain the chaotic conditions under which these drivers operated, for it is a situation without parallel,” a Royal Air Force officer who witnessed the convoys wrote after the war. “Every moving being or vehicle on the German roads was a target for the Allied aircraft.” They were always at risk of being strafed, hijacked or run off the roads.
For months, the drivers operated a series of non-stop one-way trips — to the depots to load, out to the camps or columns, then back again. But in early April 1945, one of the Canadian convoys, with Cook and Kerr aboard, was ordered north for a different kind of mission.
Swiss diplomats had negotiated a prisoner exchange with Nazi officials. The Germans had agreed to trade 300 French women at Ravensbruck for 454 German civilians held in France. But there was a catch. The Red Cross had to get to the women, somehow, and then ferry them across a collapsing Germany, full of flattened cities and death, into the safety of Switzerland.
In Germany, the apocalypse had come. But the Canadians were still on the road. The Red Cross gave them the job.
*****
In Ravensbruck, the looming end of war brought no end to the killings. Adolf Winklemann, a camp doctor, was ceaseless in his culling. He picked out women with swollen legs. He picked out women with white hair. He picked out women with faces he didn’t like. He had them drawn up in ranks of five. He watched their legs as they marched past. “From time to time, he would raise his hand,” DuFournier wrote. At his mark, a nurse would pull the selected woman from the line and lead her to her death.
On Easter Sunday, the French women were ordered to gather again the following morning for inspection. They argued amongst themselves about what it could mean. A few held out hope of rescue. Most expected death. “We thought we were all going to be gassed,” said Allaire. About 1,700 women gathered the next morning. Three hundred made it through — 299 French and Karolina Lanckorońska, a Polish countess with personal ties to the Red Cross. The rest were sent back to wait or to die.
Women released from the Ravensbruck concentration camp arrive in Switzerland. avarchives.icrc.org
Still, the chosen women wondered. They were stripped and bathed, then left to wait for two days and nights without blankets. They were showered again, then given their macabre collection of cast-off civilian clothes. The camp commandant reviewed them again. He pulled out any women with noble-sounding names. The next morning, Winklemann had his own final look, plucking out any with swollen legs. More were added to bring the total back to 300. And then, finally, they were brought to the gates.
The Red Cross convoy had arrived hours earlier. “But that night there was an air raid on, so we just pulled off to the side of the road, waited for daybreak,” said Cook. The Canadians had little idea what to expect. They had seen death camps by that point, most of them, Dachau and Mauthausen But it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t still have been shocked by what came around the bend.
Still in their ranks of five, the healthiest survivors of that human-made hell marched toward the Canadians. An American diplomat who met the women weeks later, after a spate of decent food and medical treatment, described them as “ a convoy of martyrs, frightfully mutilated, skeleton like — a terrifying spectacle.” Fresh from the camps, newly delivered from torment and likely death, they approached the trucks and froze.
I thought it was a dream
“The Canadians were like the first figures in a good dream,” one of the women told The New Yorker later that same month. “Our emotion was so intense that we stood motionless, completely dazed,” DuFournier wrote. “We were still too dazed to believe that we might be exchanged,” said Allaire.
Even decades later, the intensity of that moment, of seeing the Canadians and knowing they were saved, stood out, said Helm, who interviewed many survivors, who have since died, for her book.
“I thought it was a dream,” one of the women told Helm. “Really, I did not believe it. It was surreal. We went forward and we saw the soldiers … and they cried when they saw us. When I saw them crying, I began to think it was real.”
The Canadians helped the women into their trucks. There were about 30 of them in Kerr’s rig. One of them had been a nurse. The Nazis had charged her with giving aid to a downed pilot. She’d been in the camp for eight months and she told Kerr how lucky she was to have survived. “She said … they gassed 500 people before you fellows arrived today.”
A few kilometres out, one of the trucks burst a tire. It was only then that DuFournier realized how completely her situation had changed. No one ordered the women out to fix the damage. “There were no more shouts, no more threats, no more blows,” she wrote. Instead, joking around, the mood somehow — impossibly — light, the Canadians jumped out and changed the wheel.
*****
Their journey, through a shattered landscape, took days. The convey ran out of gas in a small Bavarian town called Hof and the women and their drivers were forced to wait there, sleeping on straw in a nearby town hall for two or three nights. On the road again, they passed through Ulm, a medieval town almost levelled by bombing. As they drove through the “shapeless expanse of rubble,” Lanckorońska, the Polish Countess, saw what seemed to her a miracle. The town’s famous cathedral loomed up from the destruction, “untouched, not a mirage,” she wrote in her memoir. She took it as a sign of the only power that still mattered in the world.
That night, the convoy arrived at Kreuzlingen, on the Swiss border. The remaining German guards ordered the women out and stood them up again, one last time, in rows of five. “It was the only formality that marked the end of that strange and marvellous journey across Germany,” DuFournier wrote, “ a dream rather than a reality.”
The survivors passed into Switzerland and freedom. The Canadians turned around and went back to work.
*****
Odette Allaire was too weak and too sick to be sent immediately home to France. Instead, she waited, under medical care, for several days in Switzerland. When she eventually made it back to Paris, she spoke to a reporter from French Vogue. He described her as a “24-year-old girl with a transparently pale face, dilated, tragic eyes.”
After the war, Allaire married an American diplomat. She worked for a time as a journalist and had a son, who grew up to become the jewellery designer Christopher Walling. But her eight months in the camp haunted her for the rest of her life. In her final years, she could speak of little else.
“I find that almost nobody gets it,” Walling said. “And I didn’t get it for a long time.” What his mother was doing, when she talked about working in the human shit, or watching her friends get beaten to death and starve, was expressing rage. “It is rage that this happened to her,” Walling said. “When I try to explain it to people, most of the time they don’t get it, but it is absolute rage.”
A Ravensbruck concentration camp survivor. avarchives.icrc.org
After the Canadian convoy left, the Swedish Red Cross organized a second, larger evacuation. Thousands of women were rescued from Ravensbruck and taken by bus to safety in Sweden. Inside the camp, however, the killings kept going — by shooting, by gas and starvation — until the camp was liberated at the end of April. Even then, the horror wasn’t over. Many of the survivors were raped by Red Army soldiers, according to Helm.
The Canadian convoys kept driving until the German lines were overrun and there were no more camps to resupply. Cook fell asleep in his truck one morning. He woke up to find it surrounded by American soldiers. His war was over. He was going home.
Kerr was discharged in May 1945. He went home to Montreal. He lives there still, in a hospital for retired veterans, with his wife. Next month, he will be 96 years old.
“Now this thing is not documented,” said Kerr. “But Canadians saved a lot of lives.”
— With files from Gayathri Peringod in Calgary and Jacob Dubé in Toronto
A note on sourcing: Cecil Cook’s role as a Red Cross driver was first mentioned in historian Daniel G. Dancocks’ 1983 book In Enemy Hands, an oral history of Canadian prisoners of war. Cook’s quotes in this story were taken from a larger, mostly unpublished, interview Dancocks conducted with Cook, a tape of which is held with his papers at the Military Museums Library and Archives in Calgary. The quotes from Robert Kerr come from an interview he conducted with The Memory Project in 2010, only a small excerpt of which has been published before. They appear here courtesy The Memory Project, Historica Canada. Historian Hugh A. Halliday wrote about the Canadian relief drivers in 2002 for Canadian Military History. He generously shared several of the primary research sources he used for that piece with the National Post. Odette Bonnat Walling died in 2010. She was 89 years old. Her quotes in this story were taken from the French Vogue article “In Paris Now” published in May, 1945. The quotes from Denise DuFournier were taken from the 1948 English translation of her book Ravensbruck: The Women’s Camp of Death. Likewise, the quote from Karolina Lanckorońska comes from the 2006 English translation of her memoir, Those Who Trespass Against Us. Sarah Helm’s 2013 book, If This Is A Woman, is the definitive English language history of the Ravensbruck camp. She interviewed several survivors about encountering the Canadians and the journey to Switzerland. James Calhoun, archivist at the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada Museum & Archives, provided valuable assistance tracking down living relatives of the Canadians involved.
My 14-year-old daughter complains about being tired all the time
Question: My 14-year-old daughter complains about being tired all the time. She was never that interested in sports but now has dropped out of all the ones she used to do.
She tends to sleep on in the mornings and wants to spend lots of time in her room. I am worried about her being inactive and I have been encouraging her to get out more doing cycling and family walks etc. She always resists when I push her and then can complain of headaches or sore joints after doing exercise or when we finish a family hike or something like that.
Her problems all seem to start about 14 months ago when she was very sick with a flu and took several weeks to recover. It feels like she has never fully recovered from that time. She got a bit better earlier this year and had more energy for going out, but then got a bad cold and all her tiredness and symptoms came back.
I have taken her several times to her GP, who has done blood tests etc (which show nothing wrong) and we have put her on multi-vitamins etc. I have read about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and it seems to describe many of her symptoms.
I mentioned it to this GP but she thought my daughter’s symptoms weren’t bad enough “yet” to get a CFS diagnosis. However, she did say she would monitor my daughter closely.
I have also read that some people think that CFS can be caused by getting the HPV vaccine which is worrying because my daughter did get a vaccine at the same time she got the original flu.
What should I do to help her?
Answer: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a complicated condition characterised by symptoms such as extreme tiredness, disrupted sleep, and physical pain. The symptoms have no underlying medical cause and are usually exacerbated by exercise and not improved by rest. Despite publicised myths to the contrary, careful studies show no link between CFS and the HPV vaccine. Part of the confusion can be that a common time for the onset of fatigue symptoms is in the 13-14 age group which coincides with the time of the vaccine. However, controlled studies have shown no increased rates of CFS in teenagers who have taken the HPV vaccine compared with those who have not.
There is no single medical test to confirm CFS, and diagnosis is usually by a process of excluding other medical conditions over time. The severity of symptoms can vary greatly with some people being mildly affected and making good recoveries over time while others more severely affected in the long term. Children and adolescents often have the best recovery rates. Many people experience triggers for their fatigue symptoms such as getting a flu or other viral illness (which may be the case for your daughter). The condition can also be known as Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome (PVFS) and also Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME).
Getting the right treatment for your daughter
It is good that you are working closely with your GP and this is the first port of call for your daughter. Whether the GP makes a formal diagnosis or not, it is important to get ongoing medical support and treatment to deal with each of your daughters symptoms as they present. You can also ask your GP to make a referral to specialists as appropriate. While it can be useful to have a name for what your daughter is dealing with, some doctors may be reluctant to initially use a long-term diagnosis such as CFS as they work on supporting patients to recover.
Talking to your daughter about her illness
Take your daughter’s symptoms seriously and be understanding and supportive as you help her manage. Many young people with debilitating fatigue symptoms describe not being believed at the beginning with many people thinking they are faking their symptoms or that they are simply avoiding doing things. This can lead to feelings of frustration and depression.
In addition, many well-meaning people can put pressure on them to get active, when they can’t do this because of their fatigue. Indeed, bouts of exercise can make their symptoms worse. Whether you use a formal diagnosis or not, talk about what your daughter is experiencing as something real and understandable. You can explain to her that “lots of people develop fatigue symptoms after getting a virus and can take a long while to recover”.
Supporting your daughter’s recovery
As well as following medical advice and treatments, lots of different things can help your daughter’s recovery such as ensuring she is eating nutritious food, getting the right amount of sleep (but not oversleeping), keeping her mind positive setting small recovery goals for being active. For example, rather than setting a “big” goal of going for a walk, the first step might be getting out of bed and doing an interesting activity such as reading or sitting out in the garden. Then she can build slowly from there.
The key is to go at her own pace and to encourage her to come up with her own recovery plan that she is in charge of. Different alternative treatments may work for her such as meditation, mindfulness, acupuncture and special supplements. While none are a silver bullet, individual treatments that she believes in may help her manage pain and other symptoms as well as keeping her motivated to keep going in her recovery. Finally, seek support and contact the many national organisations that offer support and information both online and face-to-face to both carers and patients suffering from CFS such as imet.ie, irishmecfs.org/mesupport.co.uk, and meassociation.org.uk
John Sharry is founder of the Parents Plus Charity and an adjunct professor at the UCD School of Psychology.He is author of several parenting books including Positive Parenting and Parenting Teenagers. See www.solutiontalk.ie for details of courses and articles
SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS Director Destin Daniel Cretton Reveals Why He's Helming The Movie
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is set to start shooting in Australia any day now, and it's fair to say that there's an awful lot of excitment surrounding the Marvel Studios movie. Now, director Destin Daniel Cretton - who is currently doing the rounds to promote Just Mercy - has shed some light on what led to him tacking a comic book adaptation like this one. "I grew up without a superhero to look up to," the filmmaker tells The Hollywood Reporter. "I gravitated to Spider-Man when I was a kid, primarily because he had a mask covering his face and I could imagine myself under that mask. I would love to give my son a superhero to look up to. I feel very privileged to be a part of telling that story." That's a great reason to want to direct a movie like Shang-Chi and in a separate interview, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige notes that "we've wanted to make [the] movie for a long time" and adds that it will feature a "98% Asian cast." That's a big step forward for diversity in the genre.
Going back to Cretton, though, and as you might expect, he's been fielding a lot of questions about this one, including what his take on The Mandarin will be. Understandably, the director is giving nothing away, but said that we can expect "the emotional aspect" and "the ideas of camaraderie, family, and connection is something that will definitely be a part of this movie."
That's a pretty vague response, but reading between the lines, it could confirm rumours that the real Mandarin will end up being Shang-Chi's father and that we'll follow the hero attempting to escape his shadow. Either way, this is clearly shaping up to be something very special indeed.
Hit the "View List" button to see which storylineswe think should be adapted in Marvel's Phase 5!
Breakout 
It's fair to say that Earth's Mightiest Heroes were "disassembled" in Avengers: Endgame, so taking inspiration from the storyline that introduced the New Avengers might be a smart move for this fifth instalment of the franchise.
Featuring a massive breakout at The Raft, an unlikely team of heroes made up of characters like Captain America, Wolverine, Luke Cage, and Spider-Man come together and attempt to stop the villains from causing chaos in New York City. This leads to a confrontation with Electro and a trip to the Savage Land, and there are lots of elements here which could he adapted for the big screen.
There would definitely need to be some changes in order to make it feel bigger and more epic, but providing Marvel Studios continues jailing it's bad guys rather than killing them, this has a ton of potential.
Dark Reign 
Rumours continue to swirl that Norman Osborn is coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and assuming Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures continue to play nice, we could definitely be in store for a Dark Reign to hit this shared world.
After all, Earth has been left without its greatest defenders (no, that's not a reference to those cancelled heroes on Netflix) so there's definitely a void there that could be filled by this charismatic villain as he poses as a superhero. There was a lot to Dark Reign and Marvel Studios can pick and choose whatever they like from it, but Spider-Man should be more heavily involved and the formation of the Dark Avengers is a must.
This is a storyline that needs space to breathe, though, so here's hoping Osborn is introduced sooner rather than later and that builds to a battle for the very soul of the MCU in Avengers 5.
The Kang Dynasty 
The Kang Dynasty is rightly considered a classic, and it revolved around the time-travelling villain deciding that to protect the Earth, he would have to conquer it. Telling the world's villains that they can keep the lands they conquer for themselves, Earth's Mightiest Heroes are forced to scatter themselves across the globe in order to keep the peace.
Ultimately, it may not be a strong enough premise to carry an entire movie, but it would make a great basis and Kang's big screen introduction is definitely long overdue at this stage.
Throw in some time-travel elements and pick some of the more memorable moments from other Kang stories and this could be an instant classic, pitting The Avengers against one of their most formidable foes to date.
Young Avengers 
There is, of course, a chance that Marvel Studios will do something totally unexpected with this franchise. Rather than creating a new team made up of heroes like Captain Marvel, Black Panther, and The Hulk, they could shift the spotlight to the Young Avengers instead.
Introduced shortly after the team was "disassembled" in the comic books, Marvel could mix Wiccan and Speed (both of whom could be introduced in WandaVision) with the likes of Ironheart and Clint Barton's daughter, a.k.a. the new Hawkeye.
Essentially taking the Avengers franchise down the "YA" route would definitely be a bold and potentially controversial move, but there's a lot of story to be told here and it's hard to escape the feeling that this is what Kevin Feige has planned, especially after Cassie Lang was aged up and is now ready to suit up as the size changing Stature!
Secret Invasion 
Heading into Captain Marvel, it's fair to say we all expected the movie to set the stage for a Secret Invasion in Phase 5. Instead, the Skrulls were taken down a more heroic route and it now seems as if it will be up to that movie's sequel to possibly delve into the more villainous side of the shape shifting aliens.
The potential of this storyline factoring into Avengers 5 is clear to see, especially as building this lack of trust in the MCU would be cool to see, as would witnessing the heroes fighting themselves and trying to figure out who is who. A very different sort of alien invasion, this would be more grounded than previous instalments, but still epic and very exciting.
Civil War II 
Civil War II is a terrible comic book series but it would be no bad thing to revisit this particular event for Avengers 5. Superheroes fighting each other is always fun, and while Iron Man is no longer around, Black Panther would be a great substitute and T'Challa having a disagreement with Captain Marvel could have some incredible ramifications.
Ultimately, this would have to be a very loose adaptation, but Ulysses could easily be swapped out for a mutant character and Marvel Studios could even incorporate elements of Avengers Vs. X-Men.
This might be best saved for even further down the line, but it does feell like Captain America: Civil War was just a warm up for an even bigger clash between our favourite heroes, especially after Avengers: Endgame left them fractured.
Ultron Unlimited 
Elements of Ultron Unlimited were included in Avengers: Age of Ultron, but there's still a lot here that could be used in a fifth Avengers movie. The villainous android may have been destroyed by The Vision but there are still ways he could return, and the addition of characters like Jocasta and Wonder Man would obviously be a lot of fun.
A huge part of this storyline involved taking Ultron from being a jilted creation to Hank Pym's evil reflection, and while Iron Man is dead and gone, Ultron could easily try to replace his "father" as the world's greatest hero in a suitably twisted manner.
Marvel Studios could also use Ultron's return to set the stage for an adaptation of Annihilation, especially as he played a key role in that event when he travelled into outer space and decided to conquer the cosmos rather than Earth. Either way, there's a lot of potential for greatness here.
Avengers Vs. X-Men 
Marvel Studios is going to reboot the X-Men franchise after the disastrous Dark Phoenix, but it's not going to be easy, especially as moviegoers are clearly sick and tired of the mutant superheroes.
So, why not skip straight past that initial movie and do with the X-Men what they did with Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War? Kicking things off for the MCU's mutants with an Avengers Vs. X-Men movie would be awesome, and it's hard to imagine it being anything other than a box office hit.
Providing Marvel Studios can find a way to convincingly introduce them and find a good reason for the two teams of heroes to clash, then there's no reason this couldn't be the basis of Avengers 5!
World War Hulk 
The Hulk now has Bruce Banner's intelligence, but using the Infinity Gauntlet took its toll on the Jade Giant and it's hard to imagine where things will go next for him. One possibility is that the character will take a villainous turn and if Marvel Studios takes him down the Maestro route, we could still get an adaptation of World War Hulk.
We've already seen Planet Hulk, of course, but this storyline featured the Green Goliath declaring war on Earth and its Mightiest Heroes, and had game-changing consequences for a number of characters.
The first Avengers movie was supposed to pit the team against The Hulk, and it would be amazing to see the likes of Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and Spider-Man battling the former hero who has been driven mad by his duelling natures. Honestly, not doing this would be a missed opportunity...
Kree/Skrull War 
The Kree/Skrull War played out in Captain Marvel and assuming that movie's sequel takes place in the past, then there's a very good chance the battle between these alien races has already concluded.
If not, though, it's about time this conflict reaches Earth and that The Avengers get involved. Just like Civil War II and Avengers Vs. X-Men could be combined, so too could this and Secret Invasion, and it would be great to see the likes of Black Panther and Scarlet Witch in space.
There are a huge number of iconic moments throughout this storyline, and after Captain Marvel's success, tying her franchise into The Avengers is just a smart business decision on Marvel's part.
Continue reading below to see some forgottenvillains we want to see more of in Phase 4!
Helmut Zemo 
While he was quite a bit different to the version of Zemo we're used to seeing in the comic books, Daniel Bruhl's vengeance-fueled former special ops soldier was a great big bad in Captain America: Civil War and managed to do something no one else had until Thanos came along: he broke The Avengers.
While he presumably remains behind bars, his story is far from over, and it was recently confirmed that he will return in the Disney+ series revolving around The Winter Soldier and Falcon.
In terms of the big screen, another clash with Captain America would be no bad thing and while it might take a fair bit of work to get him in that mask from the comics, I'm sure that's something Marvel Studios could do relatively effortlessly given their track record.
Justin Hammer 
Iron Man 2 may have been a bit of a mess but an undeniable highlight was Sam Rockwell's Justin Hammer. The actor made a brief and unexpected return in the "All Hail the King" One-Shot but hasn't been seen since.
Unfortunately, a fourth Iron Man movie seems highly unlikely at this point but Hammer could easily target a different superhero or even designs some armours for a group like the Masters of Evil or Norman Osborn's Dark Avengers. Even if he's just a supporting player, there's a lot of potential for Hammer to still make an impact in the MCU.
Personally, I could easily imagine him helping the Green Goblin design some of his tech...
Alexander Pierce 
Yes, Alexander Pierce died while uttering one final "Hail Hydra!" but that doesn't mean he can't come back in another way. Just think about it for a second; Black Widow is going to be set during the 90s/early 2000s, so a younger version of the character could easily come into play there, especially as we're bound to see some Hydra Easter Eggs. Honestly, he could even show up in Captain Marvel!
Abomination 
Another Hulk movie probably isn't going to happen due to some complicated legal issues with Universal Pictures but that doesn't mean Marvel Studios can't continue utilising characters from the Jade Giant's world.
The Abomination has presumably been in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody ever since the events of The Incredible Hulk and Marvel wouldn't even need to bring Tim Roth back (assuming he doesn't wish to return) considering the fact the villain is a CGI creation. This guy is a heavy hitter and would be a fantastic addition to any villainous group that steps up to challenge The Avengers.
Fans want to see this happen too and I'm sure Kevin Feige and company are well aware of that.
Arnim Zola 
Arnim Zola made an awesome return in Captain America: The Winter Soldier but was seemingly destroyed when that old S.H.I.E.L.D. base was blown up. However, this is a world of superheroes and supervillain so who's to say he couldn't have transferred his mind elsewhere before building himself a robot body?
Sure, he's on the goofier side of the spectrum when it comes to bad guys but that doesn't mean this wouldn't work and if we're not getting another Captain America movie, I can't help but think that he would be a great fit for the aforementioned Winter Soldier and Falcon series coming to the Disney+ streaming service.
Iron Monger 
Iron Monger is also dead but I'm not suggesting that Obidiah Stane make a miraculous return! Instead, I would much prefer to see his son Ezekiel Stane show up in a bid to get revenge on Tony Stark (assuming he's still alive in Phase 4, of course).
Wearing a suit of armour he's spent years perfecting since his father's demise, Zeke could pose a problem for any number of heroes and if Marvel Studios is planning to surprise us with an Iron Man 4, then this guy teaming up with The Mandarin would be a lot of fun. Once again, though, this guy definitely feels like someone who would be a solid team player.
In other words, Marvel has to bring together some sort of villainous group in Phase 4 and that's what a lot of these returning characters could actually end up being used for.
Red Skull 
The Red Skull made his return in Avengers: Infinity War but his future was very much left up in the air after Thanos threw his daughter Gamora off the side of a cliff in order to retrieve the Soul Stone.
The question is, has he been freed from Vormir in order to finally return to Earth and get his vengeance on Captain America or does he remain trapped, a shadow of his former self? It's impossible to say but Ross Marquand did a fantastic job, so I would have nothing against him reprising the role and possibly putting some of those supernatural powers to good use.
Honestly, though, the only way this could work would be if Marvel is planning a new Captain America movie and, as of right now, there's nothing to say that's actually going to happen during Phase 4.
The Mandarin 
During the "All Hail the King" One-Shot, we learned that there's a real leader of the Ten Rings called The Mandarin and he wasn't happy with Trevor Slattery impersonating him for the world to see.
Now, that should lead to the real deal making an appearance somewhere down the line but nothing is guaranteed, especially as Iron Man's big screen future is very much up in the air as of right now. Unlike a lot of the other characters here, it would be hard to get invested in this guy showing up if Tony Stark isn't involved somehow as there's just so much history between them.
I guess we'll have to wait and see but this would be one heck of a throwback to 2008's Iron Man!
Karl Mordo 
Doctor Strange ended with Karl Mordo making his new villainous nature known and it's pretty obvious that we'll see him return in the sequel. Whether he's the lead villain or a secondary bad guy, there's an awful lot that can be done with Mordo now that he's on a mission to take magic away from those he doesn't believe deserve it.
That's bound to lead to him crossing paths with Strange again and the battle between these two could be downright epic, especially if Nightmare - Scott Derrickson's top choice of villain for the sequel if past comments are to be believed - ends up also making an appearance. The sequel wouldn't be complete without this guy returning.
Mac Gargan 
There are rumblings that Mac Gargan will make an appearance in Spider-Man: Far From Home and while his origin story was a tad uninspired and rushed compared to his comic book counterpart, it would still be amazing to see him suit up as the Scorpion.
Marvel Studios will need to flesh Mac out in the Spider-Man: Homecoming sequel to make this work but this character's big screen debut is long overdue and while I would have liked to see him take centre stage as a lead villain, a member of the Sinister Six would be just fine thinking about it.
I definitely expect to see Gargan make this transformation during Marvel's Phase 4 so stay tuned!
Ultron 
Ultron is one of my favourite villains and I think Joss Whedon did a great job with him in Avengers: Age of Ultron (even if he did let off a few too many wisecracks). While it appeared as if The Vision destroyed him at the end of the sequel, the door is definitely open to the android once again taking aim at Earth's Mightiest Heroes in the MCU.
There are many ways Ultron could make a comeback; it could be as an outer space villain in a Guardians of the Galaxy movie or even back on Earth when he assembles the Masters of Evil.
Whatever the case may be, Ultron should not be a one and done villain and I would love to see what another filmmaker would do with the villain. One thing I can say for sure, though, is that James Spader should return to voice him because it's hard to imagine anyone else doing a better job.
The Winter Soldier 
No, I don't want to see Bucky return to his villainous ways but it's absolutely essential that The Winter Soldier makes his return in the planned Black Widow movie next year.
We know that Natasha has history with the Hydra assassin so even if this ends up being little more than a cameo, it would be fascinating to learn more about that and great fun seeing the Winter Soldier when he was doing the whole assassin thing we caught a glimpse of in the Captain America: The First Avenger sequel.
It's also possible that we'll get some flashbacks to this era of Bucky's life during his Disney+ series with The Falcon or if Marvel Studios chooses to remain firmly in the present there.
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