Journey into Mystery #519
The Fire Next Time… Chapter Three
FBI Agent Carter Tenko is trying to learn the secrets of a terrorist organization called FreedomsLight, an accelerationist group that wants to overthrow the United States government. He has been interrogating Lottie Hederman, an elderly woman who was swept up in FreedomsLight’s activities due to her son’s association with the group and their clashes with the Black Widow. However, the old woman’s health is failing and Tenko is desperate to learn the truth before the old woman dies.
Once she has sufficiently recovered from her second heart attack in so many days, Lottie tells of the final clash between FreedomsLight and the Black Widow.
After the group stole a special device from a secret SHIELD warehouse, the group’s leader — the Ebon Flame — led the group on an attack on yet another facility. Upon their success, Lottie was brought to see what they had obtained: A massive computer that holds all the records of every SHIELD agent in the country. The device they stole earlier was a special key that would allow them to access and decrypt the data. FreedomsLight intended to use this data to free the world from what they viewed as SHIELD oppression.
However, they were then ambushed by the Black Widow, who had been trying to shut down the organization for some time. In a one-on-one battle with the Ebon Flame, the Widow gets her opponent to admit that she doesn’t actually care about the cause of FreedomsLight and just wants the SHIELD data for blackmail in order to line her pockets and get rich. Ebon Flames admits to it all, gloating how easy it was to manipulate various hate groups into a paramilitary organization to serve her real goals. Hearing all of this quashes any support that Lottie had gained for the group since they had captured her. Luckily, the Widow was able to destroy the encryption key, preventing the Ebon Flame from gaining access to the data.
Concluding her story, Lottie Hederman finishes by saying that the Ebon Flame managed to escape and the Black Widow took her home. Growing weaker by the moment, the only regret that Hederman has is the fact that she never got to see her son one final time. As the old woman dies, Agent Tenko erases his recording of their conversation as he got all the informatio he wanted and leaves. Moments after he is gone, “Lottie Hederman” suddenly sits upright in bed and rips off her mask, revealing that she was actually the Black Widow in disguise.
Sometime later, the Black Widow is reporting back to Nick Fury at SHIELD. She explains to them that “Lottie Hederman’s” story was mostly fabrications. She reveals that Lottie Hederman was a false identity. Her real name was actually Lottie Eikenski, a death camp commander during World War II.[1] Evading capture after the war, she relocated to America under an assumed alias. In her old age, she began working on a plan to overthrow the American government by using the internet to recruit disenfranchised Americans to her cause. She fabricated the story about having a son named Herve, as well as made up the identity of the Ebon Flame, as a rallying figure to her cause. This group eventually evolved into FreedomsLight.
When the terrorist group came to the attention of SHIELD, they enlisted the Black Widow to investigate and stop them. Learning that nobody had ever seen the Ebon Flame — since she wasn’t a real person — the Black Widow actually posed as her in order to infiltrate their ranks and draw out their leader. “Lottie Hederman” fell for the bait and welcomed the the Widow’s Ebon Flame into the group. Uncovering her real reason for wanting the SHIELD data, the Widow co-opted it as her own when she stole the SHIELD data. The shock of having her true intentions exposed and usurped by another was too much for the elderly woman who died of a heart attack. Learning that the group had moles within the government, the Black Widow learned about Carter Tenko and his desire to take control of FreedomsLight for a similar get rich scheme and posed as Lottie in order to lure him into a trap.
Fury thanks Natasha for a job well done and shows her that they Carter Tenko is being interrogated by Dum Dum Dugan. After finishing his story, Carter is allowed to leave, but Fury assures her that he’ll be arrested the moment he walks out the door. The Widow bitterly accepts this commendation, since she always has to lie, cheat, and steal to accomplish her goals. However, she’ll continue doing so because the world will always need the Black Widow.
Recurring Characters
Black Widow, SHIELD (Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan), Carter Tenko, Lottie Hederman
Continuity Notes
As of this writing (June, 2022) Lottie Eikenski being a Nazi commander and still being alive in the Modern Age becomes increasingly impossible without some means of artificially extending her life span. See below for my theory on this.
Topical References
Agent Tenko is depicted recording “Lottie’s” statements with a pocket tape recorder. This should be considered a topical reference as this is an obsolete technology.
The computers in this story are depicted as having CRT monitors, this should be considered topical as this is also an obsolete technology.
Theory: Lottie the Nazi?
This story states that Lottie Eikenski was a former commander of a Nazi concentration camp who fled to America under an assumed identity during the war. This becomes increasingly impossible as the Sliding Timescale bumps the Modern Age forward in time. In most cases, surviving Nazis have had access to methods to extend their life span either by slowing or stopping the aging process.
As of this writing (June, 2022), there is no explanation for how Lottie could still be alive in the Modern Age. In fact, the Black Widow profile in Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A-Z #1 only makes a passing reference to FreedomsLight. It seems unlikely that Marvel will go back and explain this growing discrepancy.
There are couple of ways to interpret Lottie’s apparent membership in the Nazis:
1) One is to assume that she somehow had access to technology that was able to slow her aging process. This is not impossible, especially since she was working in a concentration camp where people were experimented upon. In fact, the X-Men villain Mister Sinister often worked in the concentration camps to perform his experiments (as seen in Excalibur (vol. 3) #7 and Weapon X (vol. 2) #14) It’s entirely possible that she was experimented upon by Sinister, as unlikely as that may be.
2) The second explanation could be gleaned by how Marvel has explained away other Nazi operatives that have been hiding out in America. Particularly the Nazi agents who were waiting to awaken the Red Skull’s Sleeper robots in Tales of Suspense #72-74. In subsequent handbook entries on the Sleepers (Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A-Z #10), it has been stated that these operatives could have been successors to the original sleeper agents.
3) The third possibility, is that references to Lottie being a Nazi should be considered topical and modern readers should interpret her war crimes as being done during some unspecified European conflict instead of World War II.
At the end of the day, Lottie Hederman is such a minor character, I guess it’s up to you “HeadCanon” people to sort it out for yourself. I’m just here to No Prize some possibilities.
