The artwork on the walls did not belong to him. It had come mainly from France and some had come from Poland. From where he was standing he could see a battle scene by Piotr Michalowski.

He averted his eyes. He had not hung it there. It was ‘spare’ plundered booty. Immediately Poland had been conquered, Göring had issued orders for the seizure of the country’s art treasures. As with French artworks, the greater part of them went to augment Hitler’s and Göring’s private art collections. The rest were dispersed among favoured members of the Nazi hierarchy and German museums. Schloss Niedernhall, now not only the country home of a government minister, but also a government and military conference centre, had received a generous allocation of works deemed unsuitable for placement elsewhere.

This evening’s event at the Schloss was a purely social one. A party to celebrate the minister’s fiftieth birthday. His invitation to it had caused Claus great irritation. He had not the slightest desire to be there, but failure to show would have been regarded as ‘unsupportive’ and would not have been wise.

Viewing the familiar room from his vantage point at the doorway, he rather thought a majority of the people in it would have preferred to be elsewhere. Though French champagne—as looted as the artworks—was being served, the atmosphere of gaiety was decidedly forced. The war was no longer going well and everyone knew it. One word that would not be being mentioned by anyone was ‘Stalingrad’.

He nodded a greeting in the direction of one of Göring’s aides. Göring himself wasn’t present, which was not surprising under the circumstances. The only hope for the Sixth Army besieged at Stalingrad had been the Luftwaffe—and the Luftwaffe, Göring’s responsibility for so long, had failed spectacularly. The result had been one hundred thousand half-starved, frost-bitten soldiers and twenty-four generals being marched off over snow and ice to prisoner-of-war camps in Siberia. Not even Goebbel’s massive propaganda machine could hide the fact that it was the greatest defeat ever suffered by a German army.

Closer to home the war news was equally grim. The US air force, as well as the RAF, was now bombing key German cities, the USAF by day, the RAF by night. Wilhelmshaven and Emden had suffered badly. In Dortmund, industrial and munition plants had been hit hard. In the Ruhr, Essen had been hit by a firestorm that in one night had devastated scores of engineering works, damaging part of the mighty Krupp factories. So far his own factories, south of Essen, were unscathed, but for how long that state of affairs would continue was anyone’s guess.

Berlin too had become a nightmare to live in. He’d done his best to persuade his parents to leave for somewhere out of reach of the present bombing raids, the Black Forest or southern Baden-Württemberg. His father, who had begun to suffer with a heart condition, had flatly refused. His mother’s only response had been to say tartly: ‘Where do you suggest in Baden-Württemberg, Claus? The Schloss?’