And for the first few weeks – perhaps until the end of June – this had indeed been the case. He’d relished the absence of danger and enjoyed the considerable trappings of victory. But as the summer took hold of Berlin, the city began to shake itself down and the Allied powers staked their various claims, his feelings began to change. It dawned on him how much he missed living with danger. He realised how the unique sense of exhilaration that came from risking his life had become an urgent physical desire.

Sometime in August, a young officer from one of Marshal Konev’s mechanised brigades had gone mad, climbing onto the table in the officers’ mess and shouting about peasants and Nazis as he fired his revolver at the ceiling before blowing off his own head.

Konev had been persuaded that this could well have been a direct consequence of the psychological effect of the war, and he realised the Red Army couldn’t risk a recurrence. As a result, a group of psychiatrists had been dispatched from Moscow with orders to interview all senior officers.

Kommissar Iosif Gurevich had been blasé about his own appointment. There was, after all, nothing wrong with him. He’d survived the war and had since been promoted, and he was absolutely fine, especially since he’d tracked down the SS officer who’d murdered his family in Minsk and wrought his revenge. Seeing the psychiatrist would be a mere formality, something he was only doing because he’d been ordered to. It would be like the visit he’d made to the dentist the previous week.

The dentist had turned out to be a rather beautiful woman from Leningrad who he was convinced had allowed her hands to brush his face: he’d even arranged another visit. The psychiatrist could not have been more different: a tiny man with thick spectacles and a slightly startled expression. But there was an unspoken connection between the two of them: the Jewish psychiatrist from Moscow, the Jewish commissar from Minsk.

‘Tell me about your family, Comrade.’

It was Gurevich’s turn to be startled. He’d only mentioned in passing that they’d been murdered by an Einsatzgruppen, and he was hoping the session would shortly come to an end with the psychiatrist assuring him he was fine.

But instead he found himself talking about his family’s murder, and how he had no one left other than a brother, and how much he regretted ditching a fiancée many years ago in order to save his career. By now he was pouring his heart out, and tears were running down his cheeks.

He stopped talking and apologised and assured the psychiatrist he had no idea what had got into him, but the man from Moscow said not to worry, it was good he was talking, and assured him this would not reflect badly on him at all.

‘It’s the ones who don’t react with any emotion that I worry about. You need have no concerns about my report, Comrade.’ He’d smiled: the unspoken connection.