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Fictional villan created by Norbert Jacques
the literary figure created by Norbert Jacques

Dr. Mabuse is a fictional character created by Norbert Jacques in his 1921 novel Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler ('Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler'), and his 1932 follow up novel Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1932). The character was made famous by three films about the character directed in Germany by Fritz Lang: Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (silent, 1922), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), and the much later The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). Five other films featuring Dr. Mabuse were made by other directors in Germany in the early 1960s, followed by Jess Franco's interpretation The Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse in 1971. Although the character was deliberately written to mimic villains such as Dr. Fu Manchu, Guy Boothby's Doctor Nikola, Fantômas, or Svengali, the last of which was a direct inspiration, Jacques' goals were commercial success and to make political comments, in much the same way that the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) had done just a few years previously. Much of the Mabuse works are comments by Jacques on German society, in some case, the political excesses of the 1930s.

Dr. Mabuse is a master of disguise and telepathic hypnosis known to employ body transference, most often through demonic possession, but sometimes utilizing object technologies such as television or phonograph machines, to build a "society of crime". Mabuse rarely commits his crimes in person, instead operating primarily through a network of agents enacting his schemes, thus remaining a shadowy figure. Mabuse's agents range from career criminals working for him, to innocents blackmailed or hypnotized into cooperation, to dupes manipulated so successfully that they do not realize that they are doing exactly what Mabuse planned for them to do. Mabuse's identity often changes; one "Dr. Mabuse" may be defeated and sent to an asylum, jail or the grave, only for a new "Dr. Mabuse" to later appear, as depicted in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. The replacement invariably has the same methods, the same powers of hypnosis and the same criminal genius. There are even suggestions in some installments of the series that the "real" Mabuse is some sort of spirit that possesses a series of hosts. Mabuse is not a name in the normal sense, more a codename, or an idealogy. Mabuse has had a number of nemeses, with the main ones including Prosecutor (or Chief Inspector) von Wenk in Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (played by Bernhard Goetzke) and Kommissar Karl Lohmann (played variously by Otto Wernicke and Gert Fröbe as "Inspector Carl Lohemann").

Mabuse first appeared in the 1921 German novel Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler ("Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler") by Norbert Jacques. The novel benefitted from unprecedented publicity and quickly became a best seller. Fritz Lang, already an accomplished director, worked with his wife Thea von Harbou on a revision of the novel to bring it to the screen, where it also became a great success. The film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), with a playing time of more than four hours, was released in two sections: The Great Gambler: An Image of the Time and Inferno: A Game for the People of our Age. Despite the success of the novel and the film, it was almost a decade before anything more was done with the character. Jacques had been working on a sequel to the novel, named Mabuse's Colony, in which Mabuse has died and a group of his devotees are starting an island colony, based on the principles described by Mabuse's manifesto. However, the novel was unfinished. After conversations with Lang and von Harbou, Jacques agreed to discontinue the novel and the sequel instead became the 1933 movie The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in which the Mabuse of 1922 – played again by Rudolf Klein Rogge – is an inmate in an insane asylum but has for some time been obsessively writing meticulous plans for crime and terrorism, plans that are being performed by a gang of criminals outside the asylum, who receive their orders from a person who has identified himself to them only as Dr. Mabuse.