Kurt and Matias (Heinrich) Wohlman/Bauman (Backstory)

​Although the escape of the Bauman brothers from Berlin, Germany sets the novel in motion, their backstory beginning in 1888 determines what happens when they re-establish their transportation company in Chicago.
 
At the time, Germany struggled under the oppressive dictatorship of Otto Von Bismarck, who ruled through an elite bureaucracy called Junkers and secret police, Geheime Feldpolizei.
He banned all Social Democratic associations, meetings, and newspapers, an act that drives the resistance of Alfred Wohlman – the Jewish President of a European rail and shipping transportation company headquartered in Berlin. Alfred is a Social Democrat and secret political activist who works with an underground network of agents, presses, and clandestine resistance groups that communicate the socialist cause. Over a thousand members of the resistance were incarcerated, including Alfred Wohlman. As fugitives from the sadistic Rudolph Palm’s secret police, his sons, Kurt and Matias, who changes his name to Heinrich Bauman, barely escape to America to avoid the same fate as their father.