20 Things You Didn't Know About SPECTRE (2015)
2. “Something Of A Father To Me.”
The subplot of Franz Oberhauser killing his father, Hannes, owing to the perceived preference given to the orphaned James Bond - who was under Hannes’s guardianship - was derived from Ian Fleming’s short story, Octopussy, which was published in 1966, two years after the author’s death.
In Octopussy, British Army Major Dexter Smythe killed Hannes Oberhauser and hid his body in a glacier after the Second World War so that he could keep a cache of Nazi gold for himself. However, Oberhauser had taught the young, orphaned James Bond how to ski and to climb in the wake of his parents’ deaths in a rock-climbing accident, becoming a father figure to him. Tracking Smythe down, Bond gave him an opportunity to commit suicide rather than face a court-martial.
Whilst Octopussy (1983) tweaked the story to make the title character Smythe’s daughter, who was grateful to Double-0 Seven for giving her father an honourable alternative, Oberhauser went unmentioned.
SPECTRE introduced Franz Oberhauser as Double-0 Seven’s surrogate brother, who killed his father, Hannes in an avalanche as he felt that he had been sidelined in favour of the British boy. Faking his own death, Franz adopted his mother’s maiden name and became Ernst Stavro Blofeld.