‘I’ve personal business to attend to,’ he said to Wolf, and seizing hold of his overcoat he slammed out of his office and out of the factory.

As an Essential War Producer he not only had a Mercedes bearing a silvered swastika medallion that marked it out as an official car of the Nazi Party, but petrol for it. It was parked in the factory yard and he gunned it into gear, speeding out of the yard with such a scream of tyres that Hans Wolf ran to a window to see what on earth was happening.

As was often the case, Spandau hadn’t been bombed and, apart from the craters and potholes caused by earlier raids, the streets were clear. Considering the number of factories there were in Spandau, its relative good fortune where saturation raids were concerned was something he didn’t understand, but was also something he was deeply grateful for. It meant not only that was his factory still undamaged, but that the women workers he now felt a personal responsibility for, were still unharmed.

As he sped from Spandau into Charlottenburg the scene was very different. A cinema had been bombed and as fireworkers fought the flames, other people were bringing out a steady stream of bodies. His stomach curled into a knot. Didn’t the British and Americans realize that further bombing of Berlin was unnecessary? That the war was virtually over and that they were the victors? What point was there in continuing to create firestorms in a city that was now predominantly a city of women, children and old men? A city that desperately wanted the British and Americans to capture it before the Russians should do so.

In Mitte, the burning streets were mayhem and every now and again a shower of sparks rained down on his windscreen. Driving at any kind of speed was now impossible as people with scarves wrapped protectively across nose and mouth milled in the roads to keep away from the burning, collapsing buildings.

As he turned into the broad boulevard that was Unter den Linden his heart nearly failed him. Eddying clouds of soot and ash swirled amid monstrous mountains of smashed brick and twisted steel. Beyond the grand, gated entrance to his home stood a smoking, wrecked ruin he was barely able to recognize.

Though two of the four walls still stood, a third was semi-collapsed and the facade of the mansion had been blown out so that it had the appearance of an open-fronted doll’s house. The vast slated roof had collapsed inwards, its weight shearing down through every floor. Beams, chandeliers, statuary, paintings, furniture—the entire contents of a house that had stood for three generations—lay tangled and splintered amid rearing blocks of granite and huge slabs of masonry.

He slammed on the Mercedes’ brakes and hurtled from it, leaving the driver’s door swinging open behind him. He didn’t even attempt to locate the area where the entrance to the cellar was buried. Great slabs of pulverized marble and broken columns reared up over it, two storeys high. In the glow of a sky blood-red from the city’s raging fires he scrambled over the lower slopes of debris covering the garden. Somewhere beneath it was the tunnel exit, but the wreckage around him was so total, so complete, it was hard to assess exactly where.