Always dramatically beautiful and racehorse-slender, the slenderness was now close to gauntness. Tension was in every line of her body and however impossible it was to think of fear and Zelda in the same sentence, he suspected that she was afraid. And so was he.

If this kind of savagery could be perpetrated on someone as Aryan-looking and respectable as Ilse, then it could be perpetrated on anybody. In the Germany they were now living in, no one was safe. Even here, in the private hospital room paid for by Schulenburg wealth, he and Zelda could not speak freely to each other of what had happened.

In tacit understanding, while at Ilse’s bedside, the word ‘Gestapo’ had not crossed their lips. Walls had ears. The entire country had become a country of spies and informants. Anyone foolish enough to say something risky or tell an anti-Nazi joke in company they were not utterly sure of, might get a knock in the middle of the night or a tap on the shoulder while walking along the street. And the result of that would be a trip to the Columbia-Haus, the prison centre in Berlin—and as screaming could often be heard coming from it, no one in their right minds wanted to risk being sent there.

Those wishing to ingratiate themselves with the regime they lived under, by informing on their fellows, could be anyone: a co-worker, a neighbour, the milkman, the postman, the old lady who lived across the street, the schoolboy in a near by apartment—and in a hospital it could easily be a nurse, a doctor or an orderly. Self-censorship had become a necessity and, in order not to bring further Gestapo attention to Ilse, the only politic thing to do was to stay silent and endure the charade that her ruptured spleen had been caused in a traffic accident.

It wasn’t a charade he was enduring passively, though. For the last three years, ever since it had begun to dawn on him, as a Foreign Office official, that Hitler was leading Germany towards a war it was almost sure to lose, he had been a member of a group of highly placed persons conspiring against him.

It had been—and was—an uphill task. Hitler controlled every aspect of German life. Not even in the smallest village or hamlet could anyone be in a club or society, not even a bowls club or a horticultural society, without also being a member of the Hitler Youth or a member of the Nazi Party. Only the army possessed the physical strength to overthrow him, and seeking out like-minded individuals in the upper echelons of the army was a nail-bitingly dangerous task.

It had been helped by the Night of Broken Glass, when what had previously been vicious harassment of the Jewish population turned into wholesale, murderous persecution, with over seven thousand Jewish business being destroyed in the one night, synagogues all over the country being simultaneously torched and Jews in their thousands being beaten on the streets and sent to camps. In the wake of such rabid anti-Semitism, resistance-group numbers had grown. Most of the new recruits were, like himself, young members of the old aristocracy. Some were former trade union leaders. A couple were clergymen. During the last year they had made several secret contacts with the British government, contacts in which Max had played a major part.