Except once. On one particular morning, Karl joined his family for a meal, a rare occasion. He almost never ate with them, particularly on the weekends, because he was always with his girlfriends. Margarete usually slept late, leaving Charlotte and Frederick to eat alone. Having all four together for a morning meal made the occasion all the more memorable. Karl took his chair at the head of the table, with Frederick and Charlotte looking at each other and wondering why he was there. “I saw the Gluckmann girl at the train station,” he said, leaning in to whisper. He had seen Jews standing on the platform waiting to be deported. “I saw one of the daughters,” he said, referring to a schoolmate of Charlotte’s who was a few years older. Charlotte and Frederick knew why their father was whispering: a nosy housekeeper could have overheard the conversation and reported Karl to the police for talking about the Third Reich. No one in the family was to discuss the incident again.7 They just proceeded with breakfast: Margaret sipped her coffee and the children ate their food, a typical German breakfast of bread, rolls, butter, sausage, ham, jam, and boiled eggs. They carried on, like everyone else, as Jewish families were being rounded up and taken away.

Karl and Margarete focused their attention not on the Third Reich’s increasing authoritarianism, not on their children, but on wealth and good living. Although they had a loveless marriage, Margarete and Karl were an admired couple who managed to maintain a public image of a happy and unproblematic marriage.

Margarete was quite popular among the other wives in Vienna’s social circles, and she fit in easily because she was beautiful, cultured, and wealthy. She had many friends, some of whom she had kept in touch with since her school days in Westphalia, and she was great at what later would come to be called networking. Whenever she went someplace or met a new person, she knew what to talk about and how to be engaging. And she and Karl would go to great lengths to entertain powerful guests.8 Karl could attract important people both because of his success in business and because of his background in the military, and he did show loyalty to the party out of respect and as a means of survival. Though Karl and Margarete didn’t belong to the Nazi Party, they both respected Hitler as a leader and supported his plans for a great German empire. They were not interested in the obligations of party membership, however, and displayed just enough patriotism and rhetoric to escape suspicion and criticism.9