‘I’m so glad you approve.’ She was wearing a pair of green-velvet lounging pyjamas with a long, gold, fringed sash, and high-heeled green morocco slippers. Her blonde hair was done up in a braided knot at the back of her head, as was fashionable; but unlike most German women, she was also wearing make-up and smoking a cigarette. That sort of thing is frowned on by the BdM, the Women’s League, as being inconsistent with the Nazi ideal of German Womanhood; however, I’m a city boy: plain, scrubbed, rosy faces may be just fine down on the farm, but like nearly all German men I prefer my women powdered and painted. Of course, Ilse Rudel lived in a different world to other women. She probably thought the Nazi Women’s League was a hockey association.

‘I’m sorry about those two fellows on the door,’ she said, ‘but you see, Josef and Magda Goebbels have an apartment upstairs, so security has to be extra tight, as you can imagine. Which reminds me, I promised Josef that I’d try and listen to his speech, or at least a bit of it. Do you mind?’

It was not the sort of question that you ever asked; unless you happened to be on first-name terms with the Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment, and his lady wife. I shrugged.

‘That’s fine by me.’

‘We’ll only listen for a few minutes,’ she said, switching on the Philco that stood on top of a walnut drinks cabinet. ‘Now then. What can I get you to drink?’ I asked for a whisky and she poured me one that was big enough for a set of false teeth. She poured herself a glass of Bowle, Berlin’s favourite summer drink, from a tall, blue-glass pitcher, and joined me on a sofa that was the colour and contours of an underripe pineapple. We clinked glasses and, as the tubes of the radio set warmed up, the smooth tones of the man from upstairs slipped slowly into the room.

First of all, Goebbels singled out foreign journalists for criticism, and rebuked their ‘biased’ reporting of life in the new Germany. Some of his remarks were clever enough to draw laughter and then applause from his sycophantic audience. Rudel smiled uncertainly, but remained silent, and I wondered if she understood what her club-footed neighbour from upstairs was talking about. Then he raised his voice and proceeded to declaim against the traitors — whoever they were, I didn’t know - who were trying to sabotage the national revolution. Here she stifled a yawn. Finally, when Joey got going on his favourite subject, the glorification of the Führer, she jumped up and switched the radio off.

‘Goodness me, I think we’ve heard enough from him for one evening.’ She went over to the gramophone and picked up a disc.