First Appearance: Wonder Woman 308 (1983)
Creators: Dan Mishkin and Don Heck
Abilities: Evil scientist whose an expert on the mind. Army of devolved monsters, machine based psychic powers which allow him to perform a seemingly endless number of feats from teleportation, telekinesis, force fields, to controlling machines and nature with his very mind.
Backstory: Karl Schlagel had been a heartless and merciless nazi scientist during World War 2. His focus being on psychic abilities, Karl would use the resources given to him in the form of large camps of victims to at his leisure, put under the knife, attempting to carve out the secrets of the mind.
Having murdered hundreds in his sadistic experiments to tap into the secrets of psychic power and earning the name ‘The Knife’, Karl Schlagel after the colapse of the nazi regime would migrate to the United States and live a life of comfort for decades without even having to change his name. Never having to pay for his crimes.
However Karl was not satisfied with what dark secrets he uncovered in his horrific research. Thus he continued his work while in the states. Taking advantage of societies penchant for ignoring the poor and impoverished, he would kidnap people off the streets, subjecting them to his experiments without anyone ever being alerted to his actions.
Over the course of thirty years of kidnapping and experimenting on the poor and the overlooked, Karl would discover that he could steal away the untapped mental powers of others so long as he targeted them before their brains fully formed. Thus he would turn his focus to abducting children, going on to create a machine which would drain the minds of his victims, in the process turning their bodies into hulking mindless monsters which obeyed his will.
With every child he kidnapped and irreversibly transformed into his mindless minion, The Knife would obtain a new psychic ability. Growing in psychic power as he consolidated and prepared to use these abilities to retstore the nazi regime and conquer the world.
