Secrets live not only deep in the depths of history. Secrets are right next to us, and only a thin partition of our ignorance separates them from us. But sometimes chance breaks that barrier—and then we can see something that changes the world around us. That’s what happened to the author of this book: Ol’ga Greig caught hold of one of the greatest secrets of the 20th century, seemingly locked away at the bottom of secret archives. The Antarctic project carried out by the Russians and the Germans in the 1930s–1940s was a secret protected more reliably than the secret of the atomic bomb. But there’s nothing secret that doesn’t eventually become known. It’s time to reveal this secret too. Curious readers will learn about it from this book.