She and her compatriots may not have known it, but in the winter of 1939 the Nazis were troubled by many problems of their own. Germany had entered the war on the verge of bankruptcy, in consequence of Hitler’s armaments expenditure. There was so little money for civilian purposes that the railway system was crumbling, and desperately short of rolling stock: two bad train smashes killed 230 people, provoking fierce public anger. Far from the Nazis having made the trains run on time, industry suffered from disrupted coal deliveries, and the Gestapo reported widespread grumbling about the
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