‘The labour problem must be difficult for you these days. I have my doubts as to the efficiency of the Russian prisoners of war being shipped in to man the factories. I know Krupp employs a large number of them. How satisfactory do you find them?’

The word ‘employs’ was a euphemism for slave labour and he was quite sure Todt knew it. He took a deep swallow of his brandy. ‘So far I’ve found them quite satisfactory,’ he said in the distinterested voice he’d adopted long ago when hiding his true feelings.

The brandy burned his throat, but didn’t take the bad taste from his mouth. With the war going badly and every available able-bodied male conscripted into the forces, he’d had no option but to accept Russian prisoners of war into his factories. It wasn’t something he had wanted to do and it certainly wasn’t something he felt right about doing. The use of prisoners of war in armament factories was a flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions.

‘Alfried Krupp has several hundred Jewish women prisoners working for him,’ Todt continued musingly. ‘Is that a road the House of Remer will be going down as well?’

Claus felt the tic near his eye begin jumping again. Only a week ago he’d received a directive from Fritz Sauckel, the Plenipotentiary General for the Allocation of Labour, instructing him that Jewish women imprisoned at Sachsenhausen would be supplementing the workforce in his Berlin clothing factories and that they would be housed in a near by bombed-out work camp from which the previous inmates, British POWs, had been removed.

The directive had gone on to say that the women were ‘to be treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure’.

He’d known what that meant. It meant there was going to be no adequate, or even nearly adequate, food provision for them. And these women were German-born. They were as German as Ilse and Lotti. It was then he’d begun to be plagued by the nervous tic near his eye and by a permanent gut-wrenching feeling of sickness and self-disgust in the pit of his belly.

He signalled to a near by waiter that his brandy glass was empty.

‘Probably,’ he said stiffly. ‘There’s scarcely a factory now without such a supplementary workforce.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Christian Todt said lightly, his eyes anything but light. ‘An unending supply of labour is one of the great benefits of our being the master race and holding the power of life and death over millions of Poles, Czechs and Russians. Though when we invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia, I must admit, Herr Remer, that I did not realize we were doing so in order that one half of their population could be shipped as slave labour to Germany and the other half, particularly the intellectuals, were to be simply “eliminated”. Naive of me, I must admit.’

That Todt had deliberately steered the conversation in the direction it had taken, was obvious. Claus wondered what he hoped to gain by it and then, as a waiter approached with his brandy, Christian Todt clicked his heels and moved away from him, the expression in his eyes one of open contempt.