Abandoned buildings have a strange kind of gravity. Step inside and it feels like time has been paused, then forgotten. On this trip I left my usual metal-detecting fields behind and headed into one such place: a crumbling, 100-year-old building with an attic that turned out to be a genuine time capsule of everyday life — and ideology — from the 1930s and 40s.The attic had clearly been used for storage during the war. Beneath broken floorboards lay thick layers of sawdust, used as insulation, mixed with office trash. I put on a mask, crawled in, and started sifting through the dust.The first things to appear were surprisingly vivid: vintage cigarette packs. Dozens of them. Brands like Zigarren No.5 and bright red R6 boxes surfaced in almost mint condition. Back then, cigarette companies slipped collectible picture cards inside the packs – everything from the 1936 Olympics to propaganda themes. Holding them now, you can almost see office workers sneaking a smoke on their break.That made sense once we began finding envelopes, forms, and stamps. It seems the building once housed a public administration office, later used by the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service). We uncovered cloth name and rank tabs from RAD uniforms, addressed envelopes to RAD commanders, and even blank daily work report sheets for agricultural labor – all the paperwork of a bureaucracy at war.Mixed in with this were small, chilling fragments of the regime. Calendar pages with dates, sunrise and sunset times – and on one, a quote from Hitler. A subscription form for the Nazi propaganda newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. A matchbox with “SA marschiert” (“the SA is marching”) scribbled inside by some bored true believer, complete with a spelling mistake.Then the aircraft material began to surface.We found test certificates for Luftwaffe instruments: speed sensors marked with their FL numbers, installation instructions, and later, the devices themselves. A fuel pressure gauge, perfectly preserved. A large tachometer capable of reading up to 3,600 RPM, used in Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf aircraft. All of it had somehow ended up in this dusty attic, either stored there or dumped when no longer needed.The pile of finds grew stranger and richer:German transport tickets, likely for Reichspost buses or trains.A broken cup stamped for the Labor Service.Colorful German and even foreign packaging — American razor blades from Brooklyn, Ohio sugar wrappers, Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate designed for US soldiers in hot climates.The most striking items were personal and political at once. We recovered a belt buckle from the paramilitary Stahlhelm organization, with much of its original paint still intact. And then, almost casually, out of the dust: a cloth SA armband, the red still vivid after all these years. Another, previously found, had been cut into strips, perhaps deliberately destroyed.Sorting through all of this felt less like “treasure hunting” and more like quietly opening someone’s desk drawer 80 years too late. Cigarette packs, tickets, soap leaflets, propaganda forms — the daily life and dark loyalties of a vanished world, all thrown into an attic and left to rot.I don’t dig this kind of history to glorify it. Quite the opposite. Finding these traces in the dust is a reminder of how ordinary objects can serve an extraordinary – and dangerous – story.