The problem of sympathetic characters who aren't good guys
I occasionally have twinges about some of the characters in the novel. Most of them are decent people, but one of them (Hans Josef Radach) is a moderately good man that's taken the wrong path. He's a police detective from Kassel, originally in the KRIPO (the criminal police), but takes a promotion and better opportunity with the new Prussian State Secret Police, which eventually becomes the Gestapo. He's got two basic purposes in the novel -- he's supposed to show the consequences of making the convenient choices again and again. Better opportunities, better job security, etc., but at the same time becoming more and more accepting of the SA beatings and killings that occu around him day after day. His other main purpose is to put a face on the banality of evil in the Reich. It's too easy to use Nazis like you see them in Indiana Jones. But turning them into caricatures is only going to serve to lessen the main characters who're resisting Hitler. And that's not going to work.
So I need to make him sympathetic. But emotionally, it's rather weird to think about making the Gestapo man sympathetic -- all the more so since I spent an hour with Rabbi Marshall this evening. I wonder what she'd think of that -- I don't know her well enough to say for sure, although I can probably guess. It's still weird, though.
And one of the main ways to make him more sympathetic, while still showing him making the wrong choices, is to start the narrative in 1933, around the time of the Reichstag fire (Feb. '33). That's the event that provides the National Socialists with a casus belli to openly move against their enemies. The Gestapo was just forming, and unlike how we normally think of them, were really just a branch of the police that dealt with political crimes. Not something that we think of in a very positive light today in the US and Canada, but much more common back then. Most of the original Gestapo weren't party members -- they were police professionals, who just saw it as a way to serve. Doesn't make up for what they turned into, of course.
The problem is that 1933 is too early for most of the main characters. And because it's the logical place to start if we're looking at a chronological telling, it's therefore suspect. In media res is probably a better idea. So I'll probably start in 1936, which the advent of the German intervention in the Spanish Civil War and the Berlin Olympics. But that means more backstory for the Gestapo man. And makes it harder for me to make him sympathetic. But maybe that's a good thing. Make me work for my supper.