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In the absence of Garen’s own testimony, all historical data must be inferred from non-contemporary sources.

Hansel Garen is the enigma at the heart the Unioners. In a sense - he is the Union - a physical representation of the many socio-ideological paradigms from which the movement is comprised - the avatar of everything a Unioner may stand to become, or fear.

Hansel has lead the brutal, calculative life that the mantle of Arbeitsdirektor necessarily mandates. A terrorist to the core, Garen is a cold, charismatic, benevolent, messianic psychopath - the stitch that unites the many myriad of Unioner cells to its ideologues. Born, as the Unioners say, to the song of hammers, Garen’s life and upbringing amidst the halogen-washed caverns of Pacifica base remained remarkable from his very survival - under financially insecure parentage a mere rung ahead of slavery, Garen spent his formative years inhaling the silicate dust from the planetesimal’s caverns, on a labour team, carving out new habitats into the depths of the asteroid to pay for the debts of his parentage. It has become a source of pride for Garen - Pacifica is a part of him, now - the homeland of the Union lining his arteries, not as a metaphysical claim, but a physical imprint into his flesh.

Hansel’s life went the way of most career terrorists, pirates, and brigands - killing his way through the off-cuts of transports that didn’t quite make the sanctity of Liberty space. He advanced through skill, through survival, and an unerring tendency to live through the unlivable that made him simultaneously a popular choice for raiding parties, and the subject of suspicion. How did Hansel live when others died? Was he a sellout? A snitch? Station side, his demeanour remained charitable - giving away enough to be socially responsible, keeping enough to tend the forge of his own fate. Garen, the leader of his own raiding party, became successful enough to win praise without inciting the knife of his brethren, tacitly memorising the ins and outs of the Liberty-Rheinland trade artery he’d made his living off squeezing. The cycle of the patrols. The maximum range of police interceptors before they had to call bingo fuel. The psychology of marked transport captains. The reliability of insiders. Garen became liked, but he never made friends - building up the cool charisma of a successful robber, of a player who walks with loaded odds. Above everything, Garen remained diligent, intelligent, tireless, quietly convinced of the totality of his own destiny.

At the age of twenty seven, Garen abdicated his comfy, if fatalistic position at the head of a raiding band, diving into the depths of the smugglers’ underworld on which the Union thrived, bartering with the New Berlin street gangs over the Rheinland blackmarket, fencing counterfeit goods for credits, services, luxuries. As close as he would ever come to the normality of Rheinland life, Garen’s inquisitiveness took him remarkably close to the opportunity that the Unioner movement collectively salivates over - integration into Rheinland civil life. Treading the streets of the capital, Garen exchanged his newfound wealth for information, self-training, self-improvement, dedicating himself to the study of social philosophy, history, economics - searching for answers to the harried existentialism of Unioner life. Rather than mute Garen’s militarism, it flourished, drawing Garen to the same conclusions that nourished the Union’s economic nationalist root. Garen’s frequent donorship to the Rheinland Imperial Party attached the focus of the Union’s political nucleus, which Garen both encouraged and patriated within the movement, succeeding in wrestling down the autonomy of individual smuggling gangs and warlords. As the LWB and the Unioners steadily pulled closer together, both in ideology and objective, Garen was quick to use the opportunity to doctor trade between the two organisations. In years of inconclusiveness following the nomad war, the purist faction was further strengthened, Garen quietly serving his own agenda through the numerous turbulent leaders that lined the successive decades. Wresting control of the Reichsarbeitergesellschaft itself by forcing the resignation of his predecessor, Garen commands considerable respect within the Union as the collective father of the organisation. Secluded by necessity, Garen, as one of Rheinland’s most dangerous men, adopts a transformational leadership style, tapered around the cross-cultural administrative necessity of a group as internally divergent as the Unioners. Whilst his decision making process is, as far as any individual can glean, highly autocratic, Garen prefers to faciliate the actions of a select group of loyal, capable underlings, rarely nanomannaging situational strategy, in direct opposition to the more direct leadership style of his ideological counterpart, Annabelle Mychaela Heinrich. Garen speaks for the movement, but is never the messenger, preferring to operate through his protege, Armin Janson, or his Procurator, Jennifer Soma, than place himself in any direct physical danger. The appearance of Garen within in-space operations usually infers an event of great strategic or personal importance to Garen’s vision for the Union. He is the proverbial head of the snake - the Union that holds the Unioners together.

The additive surname 'VonHimmel' defies explanation. It appears to be an honorific, asserting that Garen's cause comes from heaven itself.