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Franz Maréchal

Franz Maréchal in 1936.

Franz Maréchal (1901 - 1936) was a German Alsacian Luftwaffe pilot.

Biography[]

Franz Maréchal was born in Alsace-Lorraine in the German Empire in 1901. He joined the Nazi Party in 1921.

As a pilot, he was part of the German effort to locate the Ark of the Covenant in the Well of the Souls at the Tanis digsite outside Cairo, Egypt in 1936. Serving under Colonel Herman Dietrich, Major Gobler, French archaeologist René Emile Belloq and Gestapo agent Major Arnold Ernst Toht, the pilot was assigned to fly the Ark from Tanis to Berlin, aboard the jet plane Flying Wing following the Nazis' locating of the relic. However, American archaeologist Indiana Jones and bar owner Marion Ravenwood intervened, and ended up causing the destruction of the Wing and the deaths of the pilot, the mechanic Peter Röhm and others nine soldiers.

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