Claus gave a slight, acknowledging inclination of his head. The requisite salutes and ‘Heil Hitler’s were given. The men entered the cars. Chauffeurs closed the doors. Moments later, the cars swept out of the factory yard bearing the occupants back to their government offices in the Bendlerstrasse.

Beside him, Claus’s factory manager said nervously, ‘What now, Herr Direktor? Do you want me to rescind the instructions with regard to the midday soup and the working hours?’

‘And have other women falling down dead?’ There was no dispassionate disinterest in his voice now. It was so raw with emotion his factory manager winced. ‘We’ll instigate a night shift, Gustav. And Gustav, the woman who was in the corridor when we came out of the inspection room—without bringing it to the attention of any of the SS, bring her up to my office.’

His factory manager was just about to hurry off to do his bidding when he said as an afterthought, ‘And have the photograph in my office—the one of myself with the Führer and Reichsmarschall Göring—put up in the most public place you can think of.’

His factory manager nodded understandingly. With a photograph such as that on public display, the SS guards within the factory would begin to tread more carefully.

Still exerting iron control Claus returned to his office. Only when he had told his secretary that he didn’t wish to be disturbed and only when the door was finally closed behind him, did he begin to shake and, once he began, he couldn’t stop.

Hester alive—and for years Hugo had lived believing her dead. The monstrous evil of it sent a judder through his body so intense he thought for a moment he was having a heart attack. How had a regime that had once seemed to be the best for Germany, a regime that had brought order and stability to Germany, metamorphozed into the present nightmare? He’d always considered himself to be a member of a civilized nation. He did so no longer. Five days ago, he had returned from the Ruhr and paid what had been intended as a fleeting visit to the Berlin factory, and when he had seen the condition of the women allocated to him as slave labour he had known that his country had abandoned all right to be described as civilized.

Their lack of adequate clothing and malnourishment had outraged him, but even worse had been the realization that when a woman collapsed through exhaustion the SS guards administered brutal punishment. It had been Gustav who had given him that information and, on hearing it, he’d been consumed with a rage he had thought was going to kill him.

His first act had been to demand a meeting, not with the relatively minor SS officer in charge of the guards who had come with the women from Sachsenhausen, but with Sachsenhausen’s Camp Commandant. And then he had put in hand immediate changes, providing proper toilet facilities, even though it reduced the toilet facilities for his regular workers, doing so on the argument that the privy in the yard was putting his regular workers at risk of disease.