Albert grew up in Germany, where he and his fiancée Hilda planned an escape to West Berlin. Their scheme was elaborate—they posed as circus performers, with Albert driving a truck carrying an animal cage while Hilda disguised herself in a lioness costume and rode inside alongside an actual lion. (The manga plays it this way; the 1980 film and 2001 anime series instead have Hilda as Albert's co-pilot.) Things went wrong fast when Albert forgot to grab his forged ID from a guard. Panicked, he floored it toward the border, and the guards responded by opening fire. Albert took a hit; Hilda didn't survive the shooting.
Black Ghost operatives found him at the scene and promised to get him medical help—a lie that set everything in motion.
In the 2001 series, waking up as a cyborg shattered Albert psychologically. The modifications left him in constant pain and brought on severe depression and suicidal thoughts. His suffering became so extreme that Black Ghost had no choice but to shut down the whole cyborg program indefinitely. All the existing cyborg soldiers got put into suspended animation while they waited for technology to catch up—they needed to develop something that would actually work without destroying the person inside it.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
