She had known by the expression on his face that he found the idea distasteful. Göring had a weakness for blue-eyed blondes, especially blue-eyed blonde actresses.

‘I shall have to be at the theatre from very early on in the evening,’ she had said, wondering for how much longer she and Claus could maintain even the outward semblance of a close brother and sister relationship when so much now divided them. ‘Please give Reichsminister Göring my apologies.’

‘I can’t do that, Ilse,’ he had said flatly. ‘And you know it. It’s becoming a little obvious that you rarely mix socially with the wives or girlfriends of the hierarchy. I don’t want gossip to start. No other major industrialist has the potentially damaging family ties I have. I need your support, if only occasionally. If you were suspected of being an enemy of the state, the consequences would be disastrous.’

She’d known it wasn’t an understatement and so, for his sake and for her father’s sake, she had agreed to go.

She rose to her feet, brushed sand from her skirt and headed back to the car, unhappily aware that not everyone shared her political views. For a terrifyingly large number of people, Hitler’s iron-fisted dictatorship was not a nightmare, but a vast relief. That the emasculating Versailles Treaty was now as dead as a doornail was something every German rejoiced over and was something even she felt satisfaction at. Sometimes she wondered if she too would have fallen under the mesmerizing glamour and theatricality of Nazi torch-lit processions and swastika waving, if it hadn’t been for having a Jewish cousin-in-law.

Disturbingly, most people now no longer even paused to consider whether Jew-hating was rational. The barrage of Jew-hating propaganda had been so consistent and so relentless for so many years that now even the most patently absurd allegations about Jews were taken unquestioningly for fact. And when the harsh treatment being meted out to them did arouse concern, it was concern eased by the belief that the situation was too crazy to last for much longer.

She slid behind the Cabriolet’s wheel and put the car into gear, wondering about Max. He was the man she loved and yet she knew far less about his political feelings than she did about Hugo’s or Nicholas’s. Even within the family, whenever the subject of National Socialism was raised, Max listened hard and said very little. Not only that, he was the only member of the family still truly close to Claus. When Nicholas had once asked her how much time Max spent with Claus she had said she didn’t know, but thought it was very little. It hadn’t been true. Whenever Max was in Berlin he spent time with Claus and, on many occasions, with Claus’s high-ranking Nazi friends also.

Her head hurt with the puzzlement of it all and instead of turning the car around and heading straight back to Berlin she continued on the road towards Wannsee, intending to find somewhere on the lakeside where she could have dinner.