Chapter 1: The Depths of Despair

Setting the Stage

Greta Müller no longer tried to scrub the black crescents of coal dust from her fingernails. What was the point when she would be back at the railway tracks tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, searching for fragments of fuel that might keep her family alive another day? She knelt beside the railway tracks in the gray November dawn of 1932, her eight-year-old son Hans beside her, both of them searching for fragments of coal that had tumbled from the freight cars during the night.

They were not alone. Fifty meters down the tracks, she could see the Hoffmann children—three small figures bent over the gravel. Further still, old Herr Fischer moved slowly along the rails, his arthritic hands trembling as they worked through the stones. By midday, there would be dozens more, a human tide that followed the railway schedules with the precision of commuters. Everyone knew the 6:47 freight from the Ruhr shed the most coal on the curves. Everyone came hunting.

A small pile grew between Greta and Hans—pieces no larger than walnuts, but each one precious enough to extend the meager warmth in their Berlin tenement for another hour.

"Mama, why don't we just buy coal?" Hans whispered, his breath forming small clouds in the frigid air.

Greta's hands never stopped moving through the gravel. How could she explain to a child that his father, Ernst, had been without work for 1,096 days? That she had counted every one of them with marks on the kitchen wall? That the few pfennigs in their jar couldn't buy enough coal to heat their single room for even one night?

"Because we're treasure hunters," she said instead. "And we're very good at finding treasures."

Hans smiled and resumed his search, small fingers picking through the debris with the practiced efficiency of a child who had learned too young that survival was a skill.

Three kilometers away, in what had once been the prosperous Charlottenburg district, Otto Brenner sat at his kitchen table staring at a letter that had arrived the day before. The ornate letterhead of the Deutschen Bank seemed to mock him from the cream-colored paper. Final Notice, it read. Payment Required Within Seven Days.

Otto had owned a small metalworking shop—inherited from his father, expanded through fifteen years of careful investment and honest labor. He had employed eight men and their families had depended on his success. But orders had evaporated as if they had never existed. First, the construction projects had stopped. Then the manufacturers had cancelled their contracts. Finally, the government contracts—his last lifeline—had disappeared when the Reich could no longer pay its bills.

He had sold his machinery first, then his tools, then his wife's jewelry. Now there was nothing left but the shop itself, and by next Tuesday, that would belong to the bank.

His wife, Liesel, emerged from the bedroom where she had been mending their son's only good shirt for the third time this month. The fabric was so thin now that each repair made it more fragile, but they couldn't afford another.

"Any word from the employment office?" she asked, though they both knew the answer.

Otto shook his head. Yesterday he had stood in line with hundreds of other men outside the local employment office, their faces sharing the same hollow expression of hope wearing thin. When his turn finally came, the clerk had barely looked up from his paperwork.

"Nothing today, Herr Brenner. Check back next week."

Next week. Always next week. For three years, it had been next week.

---

He'd heard the number on the radio—six million unemployed. Nearly one in three workers. An abstraction, until it became the silence on his street.

In the farmlands outside Berlin, Heinrich Weber surveyed fields that had once been his pride. The debt notices from the agricultural bank lay scattered across his kitchen table like fallen leaves. Wheat prices had collapsed. The mortgage payments that had seemed manageable when grain was selling for good prices now consumed more than his entire harvest was worth.

His wife, Margarete, stood in the doorway holding a telegram from their eldest son in the city. "Klaus writes that he still hasn't found work," she said quietly. "He's asking if he can come home."

Heinrich laughed bitterly. Come home to what? A farm they would lose within the month? A family that was about to join the millions of dispossessed wandering Germany's roads?

"Tell him to stay in Berlin," Heinrich said. "At least there he has a chance. Here..." He gestured at the fields that surrounded them, amber grain that no one could afford to buy. "Here there is nothing."

---

The soup kitchen on Prenzlauer Berg served its thin broth to a line that stretched around the corner. Former bank clerks stood beside unemployed steelworkers. Women who had once employed servants now queued with their children, learning the discipline of hunger. The volunteers ladling the watery liquid—mostly potato peels and cabbage scraps—recognized many faces that returned day after day.

Sister Anna, a Catholic nun who had helped organize the kitchen, watched the crowd with growing alarm. Three months ago, the line had been half this length. The donations that kept the kitchen running were dwindling as the middle class families who had once contributed found themselves in need of charity rather than capable of providing it.

"How long can we keep this going?" her assistant asked quietly.

Sister Anna continued stirring the enormous pot. "As long as we must," she replied, but privately she wondered. The charitable organizations were overwhelmed. The government treasury was empty. The social fabric that had held Germany together was unraveling thread by thread.

In the line, Greta Müller held Hans's hand tightly. The coal they had gathered that morning was in a small sack slung over her shoulder—their morning's treasure hunt had yielded enough to heat their room for perhaps two hours tonight. Ernst would be home soon from another fruitless day of searching for work, his face bearing the same defeated expression that had become as familiar as sunrise.

But today the line felt different. The silence had edges.

"Did you hear what Hitler said in Munich yesterday?" a man behind her was saying to his companion. "He promises work for every German. Bread for every family."

"Promises," scoffed another voice. "How many promises have we heard?"

"But this one might be different," insisted the first man. "He says he knows who's to blame for our troubles. Says he'll make them pay."

She had heard whispers like this before, in the tenement hallways and the bread lines. People were looking for someone to blame, and there were men eager to provide answers.

She reached the front of the line and held out her bowl for the thin soup.

That evening, in their small room above a bakery that could no longer afford to bake bread daily, the Müller family gathered around their tiny table. Ernst had returned empty-handed again, his shoulders slightly more stooped than they had been that morning. The coal from their morning hunt crackled weakly in their small stove, providing just enough warmth to take the edge off the November cold.

Greta ladled soup into their three bowls—the same pot she had made on Sunday, now stretched to Thursday. Monday: three potatoes, an onion, and water. Tuesday: added more water. Wednesday: more water still, plus a handful of cabbage scraps from the market. Thursday: whatever remained, thin as dishwater, the potatoes now dissolved into memory. She had already decided she would claim to have eaten at the soup kitchen tomorrow, giving her portion to Ernst and Hans. On Saturday, she would make another pot. If she could afford three more potatoes. If they lasted until Saturday.

"Tell me about the treasure hunt," Ernst said to Hans, forcing enthusiasm into his voice. This had become their evening ritual—finding something good in each day, however small.

Hans's eyes lit up. "We found seventeen pieces! And Mama says tomorrow we might find even more."

Ernst smiled at his wife over their son's head.

But outside their window, the streets of Berlin were changing. On walls and lampposts, new posters appeared nightly. Bold letters promised simple solutions: "Arbeit und Brot"—Work and Bread. The faces in those posters were confident, certain, untroubled by doubt.

Germany was hungry for those certainties.

---

Six million unemployed. Ernst had heard the number so many times it had become meaningless—until he started counting faces on his daily walks. One in three men searching for work, their expressions mirroring the hollow look in his own eyes. Twenty-four million Germans living in households where hope had become a luxury they couldn't afford.

In the Webers' farmhouse, Margarete kept a small wooden box hidden beneath their bedroom floorboards. Inside lay the remains of their savings from before 1923: ornate bonds from the Imperial German government, stock certificates from respected companies, bank passbooks showing deposits that had once represented years of careful accumulation. All worthless now.

"Never again," she had promised herself after 1923. "Never again will we put our faith in paper promises."

But even land was failing them. Wheat rotted in fields because the cost of harvesting exceeded any possible profit. Milk sold for less than the price of feed. Germany was producing food that Germans could not afford to buy.

---

By December 1932, Otto Brenner stood in his empty shop for the last time. The bank would take possession on Monday. He ran his hand along the workbench his father had built, feeling the worn wood beneath his fingers.

Through the window, he could see other shuttered businesses on the street. Six of eight metalworking shops closed. The hammers silent. The machinery still.

The Social Democrats spoke of international cooperation. The Communists promised revolution. The conservatives called for patience.

But it was the National Socialists who promised work. Immediate work. Building highways that would span the nation. Reopening factories. Full employment for every German willing to labor.

"The Republic has brought us nothing but misery," Otto told Liesel that night. "Maybe it's time to try something else."

In tenement rooms across Berlin, families like the Müllers huddled around inadequate heat sources. In farmhouses like the Webers', rural families faced losing land their ancestors had worked for generations. In schools across Germany, teachers watched children arrive each morning having eaten little or nothing for breakfast.

Hans Müller, at eight years old, had never known a time when his father worked regularly or when his family had enough food. When his teacher spoke of German greatness, he thought of the soup kitchen line. The coal scraps by the railway. His mother's black fingernails.

"How can we teach them about German greatness," his teacher wrote in her diary, "when they can see with their own eyes that Germany cannot even feed its children?"

---

On the last night of December, Greta Müller stood at her window watching snow fall on the silent streets of Berlin. Somewhere in the darkness, the freight trains still ran. Tomorrow she and Hans would return to the tracks, searching for coal.

The snow covered the grime of the city in a thin sheet of white. Below, the bold letters on the poster stood out against the darkness.

Change was coming. In two months, Hitler would be chancellor. In six months, Ernst would have work again. In a year, Hans would join the Hitler Youth and learn to march in formation, his belly finally full.

But tonight, there was only the coal dust under Greta's fingernails and the snow falling on empty streets.