It was a gloriously hot day and though his relaxed, easy demeanour didn’t reveal it, he was taut with tension caused by intense jubilation mixed with extreme dread.

The jubilation was occasioned by the orders he had just received. With Berlin now neatly divided into American, British, French and Russian sectors, he and his men had finally been given the green light to put the Elbe behind them and head for the city the Russians had cheated them of taking.

His dread was of what he might find when there.

Would those he loved still be alive? After years of intense murderous bombing raids and after the firestorm unleashed on it when the Russians had fought for it, street by street, it would be a miracle if they had all survived. And then there were the reports of the treatment meted out to the women of the city when the fighting had abated.

‘Mass rape,’ his colonel had said, chomping on a cigar. ‘Those are the reports we’re getting. Every female from nine to ninety—and by the way, good work in winkling out that guy who claimed he was a forced labourer. He’s not only SS, he’s high-ranking SS. Keep it up.’

Mass rape. And not only was the woman he loved still in the city but, to the best of his knowledge, so were his mother and two half-sisters. It was a nightmare of such epic proportions he didn’t know how he was managing to give concentration to the task in hand. Fleeing members of the Waffen SS were, at the moment, the least of his concerns.

During the early years of the war his anxiety on his mother’s behalf had been kept in check by the knowledge that Claus’s powerful position would ensure her safety. His half-brother was, after all, not only head of one of Germany’s major steelworks, but also a man who had the ear of one of Hitler’s closest henchmen, Hermann Göring. Hateful to him as that fact was, it had meant that, where his concern for Zelda was concerned, he had slept comparatively easily at night.

Those days had ended when the British had begun bombing the city by night and his own countrymen had begun bombing it by day. It was then he had learned to live with an inner tension quite at odds with his naturally relaxed, easy-going personality. Fear when in the midst of battle, he could—and had—coped with. Fear on behalf of those he loved was another thing entirely and it was a fear that had grown steadily as Germany had crumbled before the Allied onslaught. Claus would be no protection to their mother now. If he was still alive—and despite the yawning chasm that had divided them ever since Claus had first sported his gold swastika pin, he hoped with all his heart that Claus was still was alive—that he was Zelda’s son would now be an extra danger to her, not a protection.

And then there were Ilse and Lotti to agonize over. Neither he nor Max knew if they were alive or dead.