He hadn’t troubled to explain away the bales of secondhand clothing and shoes he’d had distributed, and his argument for shortening the slave labourers’ working hours and providing extra food at midday had been that not to do so would result in such exhaustion on their part that overall production would plummet and government quotas would not be met.

The senior bureaucrats from the Armaments Board, with whom he tussled, had had to take into account that he wasn’t merely the owner of a not very important clothing factory, but that he was also the owner of the House of Remer steelworks. Perhaps even more to the point, that he was on speaking terms with the man Hitler had created Marshal of the Empire, Hermann Göring.

It was enough to ensure he wasn’t suspected of holding subversive views where Jews and Untermensch were concerned. Where the Camp Commandant of Sachsenhausen was concerned, he wined and dined him lavishly, giving him as a careless gift his now never-used two-seater aeroplane. In exchange for this largesse he received the promise that as long as his factory’s overseers and managers were able to adequately supervise the slave labourers, the number of guards at the factory would be reduced. At the prospect of more handsome gifts coming his way, he also agreed that punishments by SS guards, on factory property, would cease and be left to the responsibility of the overseers and general management.

All in all, it had been quite a coup. Aware of it, he forced himself into movement, walking unsteadily across to his desk and fumbling for cigarettes and lighter, wondering if Göring know about the conditions in the camps. As the camps came under the jurisdiction of Heinrich Himmler, it was possible that he didn’t. Possible, but not probable.

He lit his cigarette, inhaling deeply. Where the miracle of Hester was concerned, it was not so much that she had survived those conditions and been sent to his factory, but that he had recognized her, for she was emaciated almost beyond recognition.

The tic at the corner of his eye began jumping wildly. How was he going to be able to help her? How was he going to ensure she remained in the factory, where he could at least make sure she was humanely treated? The prospect of the SS sending her back to Sachsenhausen, or to a factory somewhere else, made sweat stand out on his forehead. And how could he get word to Hugo that she was alive? Max might have known of a method, but he hadn’t seen or heard from Max for over a year and didn’t even know if Max was still in Germany.

He took another deep draw of his cigarette. Nearly everyone else in his family had seen the evil inherent in National Socialism almost from the very beginning. Apart from him, only his father and his uncle had embraced it—and from the day he had handed over ownership of the House of Remer, his father had lost all enthusiasm for it.