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“I do. I was just hoping that if I engineered a chance to see Karl, he would tell me more about this job.”
“Well, did he?”
“I never got the chance to speak to him.”
“I’ve tried to call him a few times.”
“You did?” He hadn’t mentioned this, but I knew Jürgen felt guilty that he couldn’t support us, so I hated to force him to talk about it.
“Young people are looking for work to try to support their families—no one has the capacity to study these days. What happens if there’s no work for me in the new academic year?”
“I can’t even let myself think about that,” I said. Jürgen had been working toward his doctorate when my brother broke the news that we needed to generate our own income, and although he’d been forced to abandon his studies, he was quickly employed to teach. Just a few years later, though, things were different. Six million Germans were out of work in a severely depressed economy. If Jürgen lost that job, he’d be unlikely to find another.
“Karl has been so busy that I haven’t managed to catch him on the phone, and he no longer has time to attend our meetings,” Jürgen admitted. Karl and Jürgen were both founding members of theVerein für Raumschiffahrt, the Society for Space Travel, and they spent their Saturday mornings tinkering with homemade rockets at an abandoned dump outside of Berlin. Their dream was to design a rocket that would take man to the moon, a prospect so absurd I struggled to understand why Jürgen even entertained it. “That’s what concerns me, Sofie. Karl is consumed by his work with the Party these days. I can’t imagine any position he knows of would be one I’d be interested in.”
“You think the job is with the Nazis?” I said, heart sinking.
“I fear it is, yes.”
“The fervortonight shocked me. I don’t know what happens to this country if those men find their way to power.”
“There are some who believe the Nazis set that fire in the Reichstag, you know.”
“Wasn’t it the Dutchman?”
“A mentally unwell Dutchman, with a loose association to an independent communist party in his home country, was somehow able to single-handedly destroy Germany’s parliament building?” Jürgen asked wryly.
“To think that the only thing standing between those dreadful terror attacks planned against this city was the SA.” TheSturmabteilungwas one of the Nazi party’s paramilitary wings. They were also known as Brownshirts, named for their uniform, and they’d been instrumental in uncovering a mass terrorist threat the previous week. It terrified me to think we were days away from catastrophe and the only thing that saved us was one of the Nazi paramilitary organizations.
“The Nazis have yet to release a single shred of evidence about those terror attacks, even though they promised they would immediately. I think we have to at least consider the possibility that the terror plot wasn’t real.”
“But the papers say—”
“This is my point, my love,” Jürgen interrupted me. “The papers say what the Nazis want them to say, now that the Reichstag Fire decree enables them to control what’s published. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that some unstable man supposedly commits an act of terrorism and by sunset the next day the government has discovered some fantastic plot to upend life as we know it, arrested most of their opponents, and passed a decree overriding our constitutional protections? If they really do have this overwhelming evidence, why would they need a right to arrest and detain their opposition indefinitely, without so much as a trial? And why would they need to end the free press or end our right to personal privacy? In the context of some of the things those men have said in the past, this Nazi power grab leaves me feeling anxious.”
“Surely even the Nazis wouldn’t lie about such serious, world-changing events,” I said uncertainly. “If those reports were fiction, how could we trust anything politicians say ever again? We couldn’t.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Sofie. What worries me most is that in fraught economic times like these, with men starving to death on the streets, people cast their votes impulsively, out of desperation instead of reason and compassion. The Nazis know this, and they purposefully present a powerful front—that’s why they love to hold military parades. That’s what I fear the announcements about the terror plots were designed to do—to stir up more uncertainty and then to paint themselves as the only solution.”
I’d been feeling anxious about the future for a long while, but that was the first night my worries kept me awake until dawn. And I was right to worry. A few weeks later, when the election results were announced, we learned that 44 percent of Germans had voted for the Nazi party. Joining forces with the Workers’ Party, they easily formed a majority in the parliament.
The Nazis were no longer a fringe party, no longer hovering on the edge of the German political system. Now they were at the very center of it, and from there, they could shape it as they pleased.
