Karl von Berginski, born in 1900, is a German veteran of the Weltkrieg. Born Karl Berginski to a Polish-German father who was a non-commissioned officer and a Lithuanian-German mother from the Baltic region, he was the second son and third child in a family of five. Although Jewish on his mother’s side, he received a secular education. An excellent student, he quickly became multilingual, speaking German, English, and Polish fluently, and had a solid foundation in French and Russian. In 1917, however, he chose to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had died in combat two years earlier, and his older brother Hans, an officer in the Imperial Navy, by enlisting and joining an elite unit of stormtroopers, with which he remained until the end of the war.
In 1920, he decided to travel to the East (notably former French Indochina), where he quickly learned Mandarin and, thanks to contacts he made there, made several shrewd small investments that allowed him to acquire a few cargo ships, which he used in particular to illegally import opium into China. This trade, conducted at the expense of the @Green gang, created a real conflict between Karl and the gang. However, the consequences of this trade were mainly positive for Karl and his family, as they allowed him to invest in China and German East Asia. Thus, within a few years, he founded an empire in China influential enough to greatly aid German interests in the region. For his assistance during the Jade Wind Incident, he and his family were honored with a noble title in 1929, changing their name to von Berginski.
Shortly thereafter, he married Princess Anna von Württemberg, and their first son, Karl Alexander, was born in 1930, followed two years later by Eugen.