“The Reich is ever expanding. Even if we landed a man on the moon, Hitler would just want to occupy that too. And Otto says that as soon as we can prove the new prototype works, we’ll be asked to produce thousands of them.” Jürgen downed the rest of his wine in one gulp, then threw the glass into the fire. I flinched when it shattered. He kept his voice low, but he did nothing to curtail the fury it contained. “Thousands of them? It’s insanity. Do you know how we’re going to resource that production? It won’t be with paid laborers, that’s for damned sure.”

“How, then?” I asked hesitantly.

“Prisoners,” he said, and his voice broke. It was thick with tears as he whispered, “We are already using them to a lesser extent—we hire them from the SS. They bring busloads from the camps every few weeks.”

“German prisoners?”

“From all over Europe. Mostly Jews.” Jürgen slumped. He lifted a shaking hand to rub his forehead. “If Hitler orders us to go to full-scale production, it will be innocent Jewish men who pay the price.”

I’d seen my husband up and down over the years—but I’d never seen him like this. He was broken and angry and hard and almost oozing shame and guilt. A shiver of fear ran through me.

“We tell ourselves that we’re only protecting our family, but the family is damaged by our decision to protect it,” I blurted. “Georg and Laura are awash in propaganda and we can’t correct them. You’re a part of something you hate, and I can see that it’s killing you.”

Life in Berlin was close to normal, aside from some rationing and, at one point, a series of air raids. The papers painted the Reich as the victim of European aggression, always pushing forward to do good, never to harm. But the war machine was powered by German men, and when they were released on periods of furlough, they brought reality home with them. I’d heard enough rumors of systemic imprisonment of Jews across the expanded Reich to know there was hideous truth there. These whispers circled around me, each one a tiny piece of a puzzle I knew in my heart was dark, even if I couldn’t see the whole picture, and even if, day-to-day, it all seemed so very far away. “Every morning, I wake up and carry on as if this is all acceptable, so I’m complicit too, aren’t I?” I whispered.