Nancy held on tightly to the bar on the jeep’s dashboard as it swerved along the outside of a long line of heavily provisioned army trucks, dust billowing in its wake.

As a journalist she had fought tooth and nail to be in Berlin for its final drama, the moment when the instrument of surrender, signed on 7 May by General Jodl, at General Eisenhower’s headquarters, was counter-signed on 8 May by Field Marshall Keitel in the presence of America’s General Spaatz, Great Britain’s Marshal Tedder, France’s General de Lattre, and Russia’s Marshal Zhukov.

It was a moment of history denied her. Though Western reporters and newsreel cameramen in their scores were there, she had been refused a press pass and, without one, Reuters had insisted she stay west of the Elbe.

She had a press pass for Berlin now, though, and it was a strange sensation to be battling through war-devastated countryside towards the city she had always, as a girl, believed would be her lifelong home.

‘Doesn’t your husband mind you racketing around bomb-torn Europe by yourself, ma’am?’ the American giving her a lift from Magdeburg asked, finding her sassy self-confidence a little unnerving.

Nancy shook her head. ‘Nope. He knows it’s my job—and he’s a politician. Leo would be here in a heartbeat if he could be.’

‘And what are you going to be reporting on when you get to Berlin? The supply difficulties? The political wrangling between Britain, America and the Soviets? The number of Nazis who’ll be standing trial as war criminals?’

‘Anything and everything,’ Nancy said truthfully, not saying that she also had a lot of personal business to take care of.

Her first priority was going to be her father. There’d been no news of him since Max had last seen him in the summer of 1941—and when she located him, she was going to have the terrible task of telling him that Hugo was dead.

The jeep bucketed around a pothole that appeared to be bottomless. Nancy braced her khaki-trousered legs against the front of the seat-well.

‘Hang on, ma’am,’ her new-found friend shouted cheerfully. ‘Don’t want to lose you now, when we’ve only another thirty kilometres to go.’

Nancy hung on as the jeep continued to bucket and bounce. Her generous breasts bucketed and bounced also, and a party of GIs in the back of one of the trucks they were passing wolfwhistled appreciatively.

Unfazed, Nancy grinned back and waved, her thoughts on what else she needed to do the instant she hit Berlin. As well as her father, she had Lotti and Ilse to locate and they too would have to be told about Hugo’s death. And then there was Claus.

Though her companion wasn’t aware of it, when he had asked if one of the things she would be reporting on were the number of Nazis expected to stand trial as war criminals, she had inwardly flinched.

When Max had last been in touch with Claus, Claus had been in regular social contact with many of the Nazi hierarchy and most especially with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. That fact alone would be enough to have ensured his arrest by the Allies, for an assumption would be made that he was a Nazi with political influence.