Some Dwarfs enjoy a peaceful and quiet life in the reservations, but Eckehard’s parents were not those kinds of Dwarfs. Wilfried Köhler and Grete Köhler wanted their son to become someone in the history books, and pushed their only child into a life outside of the German reservations. The benefits given to the Köhler’s family were enough to allow Eckehard a decently comfortable life and education. Who knew being a near-extinct race had its upsides. Years passed, and Eckehard was moving through life with good results. By the age of 18, Eckehard had just graduated from his secondary education, but issues with Germany and the end of the First World War would cause a big road-bump ahead. Extreme instability forced Eckehard to take a short break from education, as he watched the political and economic situation go up in flames in his home-nation. Thankfully, the Golden Twenties came, and the new German Republic became more stable after the chaos of the First World War. Eckehard went back to schooling, and everything seemed to be back on track.
Unknown to Eckehard, the greatest economic event of the 20th century would change the young Dwarf’s life forever. The Great Depression came, with the New York stock market crash, and Germany became unstable once more. Eckehard still continued his educational plans and life as always, but soon became fearful of new rising political bodies. Eckehard knew that he had to leave Germany for one reason or another, and so moved to the Soviet Union before the National Socialist German Workers' Party fully took power.
Now in the Soviet Union, Eckehard quickly found himself a job at the state planning commission for Stalin’s five-year-plans. Dwarfs were rare sights outside their reservations, and they were often not highly well versed in technology. For Eckehard, this was the case, and combined with his background in industrial engineering, the Dwarf had no shortage of work to do.
The industrialization in the Soviet Union went forward, and Eckehard was responsible for the industrial construction and operations in Magnitogorsk. In 1937, a whole three years after moving to the USSR, Eckehard witnessed another historical event (besides the industrialization of the USSR and the Holodomor), the Great Purge. The Dwarf was never targeted by the NKVD, but Eckehard saw multiple familiar faces in the show-trials. Eckehard simply watched on the sidelines. This was merely another event inscribed into the Dwarf’s mind.
On August 30th, 1942, Operation Barbarossa was in full swing. Eckehard was tasked with ensuring stable military production and expanding war production. For the whole of the Second-World War, Eckehard did just that and then so much more, in the form of military R&D in the late years of the war (mainly with the development of the T-54/55). Once the Second-World War came to an end, and the Cold War began, Eckehard had his work sorted out for him again. The Soviets needed an atomic bomb, and the government pulled anyone of talent to the project, that included Eckehard.
On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet atomic bomb was dropped. Throughout the whole cold war, Eckehard helped develop the Soviet nuclear arsenal. In the history books, Eckehard is better known for his role in the space race. Both Sergei Korolev and Eckehard helped launch Sputnik in 1957, and spent Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, in 1961. Beyond the space race and until the end of the cold war, Eckehard developed multiple military systems for the Soviet Union. On one faithful day, while the Dwarf was working on paperwork alone in his office, a strange fog entered in. An odd feeling of future loss was felt as the Dwarf walked endlessly into fog and then a forest, seeing a massive corpse and then a eye. Before long, Eckehard woke up and he was still at his desk. Must have been a dream.
By the time of the Soviet collapse, Eckehard stayed in Russia for a bit before he moved to the U.S to work in NASA in 1999. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration would be the home for Eckehard for the latter-half of his life. Over the course of his later-years, Eckehard aided in the rapid development of space technology, and then later fusion energy. Fast forward to today, Eckehard has now retired and now lives in a small home in Germany.