Vienna was just what a capital city should be: glamorous and culturally influential, with renowned artists, musicians, and a celebrated art academy, and with beautiful streets and squares that were architecturally and aesthetically superior to those in any other Austrian town.

The family moved into a huge apartment in an immaculate and impressive baroque-style building near the center of the city. Although they had always had housekeepers, in Vienna Karl and Margarete added a luxury car and a driver as well. Their chauffeur-driven dark blue BMW confirmed their social standing. The building had an elevator, and they hired more staff to maintain the apartment.

Just as in Oppeln, however, outside appearance didn’t reflect the unhappiness inside. Both Frederick and Charlotte were deprived of emotional support from their parents, particularly from Karl, who was never around. He always preferred to wine and dine a mistress than to sit at home with his family asking about his children’s school or his wife’s goings-on. The simple truth was that Karl’s family ranked low on his list of priorities, and it affected Frederick very deeply. Engineering and business weren’t of any interest to him, but a relationship with his father certainly was. “My father was an officer in the reserves, and a bit derisive,” said Charlotte. He was a believer in Germany’s superiority and had little time for alternative points of view. His family obeyed whatever rules and regulations the Third Reich commanded, period. There were no exceptions because the Führer knew best.

In 1935, Hitler instituted the Nuremberg Laws, a racist set of statutes that resulted in the loss of citizenship for Jews and ban of marriages between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. But Karl and Margarete didn’t give any indication to Frederick and Charlotte that their lives were in danger or that anything about the direction of the country was warped. And there was absolutely no mention of Jews. “The Jewish question was never touched,” said Charlotte. It wasn’t as though Frederick and Charlotte were forbidden to have Jewish friends, or that Karl and Margarete spoke ill of Jews in front of their children. But they also didn’t defend them, voice any outrage over the deportations they knew were taking place, or, in fact, speak much of them at all.