Steiner said nothing: they’d been gone for a week, so he reckoned they’d be a safe distance from the farm by now.

‘Did my cousin Jens telephone, by any chance, the one from Essen?’

Frau Moser assured him he hadn’t. There were no messages for him.

Steiner was exhausted after his journey, and all he wanted was to have a bath and go to bed, but he had something more important to do first. He unlocked the cellar door and moved the crates and old bicycles out of the way. Then he lifted the boxes of empty bottles and placed them on the floor, and removed the four leather suitcases from under the large tarpaulin, checking them thoroughly to make sure they each had the right number of notebooks and rolls of film in them.

Once he was satisfied that everything was in order, he locked them again, replaced the tarpaulin and put the boxes back on top.

He’d give it a few more weeks, and if there was still no sign of Bormann, he’d put his own plan into operation, as he’d intended all along.

As October had turned into November, Wolfgang Steiner had begun to have mixed feelings. Of course he still wanted Martin Bormann to be alive, and he felt a duty to help him escape on the Kestrel Line. There was no doubt that with Bormann safe, some kind of victory could be salvaged from humiliating defeat, although he also knew that rescuing the Reichsleiter would be perilous in the extreme: he would be putting himself in enormous danger. And as November moved on and a harsh winter gripped the farm, he wondered how much he really wanted to risk his life. He knew it was likely that Friedrich and Ulrich had made their way to safety. He questioned how much of an obligation he now really felt to Bormann.

And then there was the question of his original plan, the reason why he’d photographed so many documents and compiled the notebooks in the first place, and why he’d gone to the trouble to find the farm. He’d put the plan on hold until he knew about Bormann, but now he didn’t want to wait much longer.

On a dirty Monday afternoon in early December, he locked himself in the cellar and took out the leather suitcases again, counting the 218 rolls of film that he’d meticulously logged in a ledger. He selected a handful of films, writing a list of their contents on a separate sheet of paper:

Roll 12/41: persons convicted of sexual offences, Berlin area, Jan. – June 1941

Roll 8/42: senior personnel, Luftwaffe Intelligence Directorate

Roll 22/42: names and addresses of senior NSDAP officials, Düsseldorf

Roll 6/43: names and address of clients arrested at (male) brothel, Spandau

Roll 17/43: General Staff and Senior Army Group F (Bayreuth)

Roll 20/43: NSDAP members: details of bank accounts with Bank Leu, Zurich

Roll 6/44: names of officers, II SS Panzer Corps

Roll 19/44: list of scientists, Peenemünde rocket development facility