It’s possible, she admitted to herself, that her rock-solid belief in her own racial superiority – and the contempt and hatred that came with it – would have quietly faded away had she not gone to study in Germany. But the prospect of enrolling for an MSc in molecular biology at Tübingen University, one of the foremost in its field, was just too good to pass up. And it was there, in her first year at the Interfaculty Institute of Microbiology and Infection Medicine, that she had met the man who would change her life. Professor Schultze was a brilliant scientist, revered by his students, and he had taken a special interest in the English girl who had chosen his course. Long after the lectures had ended she would stay on and listen to him for hours, hanging on his every word, their conversations migrating first from the lab to the campus canteen, then on to cafés in town and finally to his antique, hand-crafted bed.

It was after the third time they’d slept together that he invited her to come to a meeting. It was not about science, he warned her, it was about something else, something he believed would intrigue her, but he was cryptic about just what it was. She was surprised at first to find herself being frisked at the door by a big man with bulging biceps and close-cropped blond hair. ‘What are you looking for?’ she had asked.

‘Microphones, recording devices, anything that shows you are a journalist or an “unwanted person”,’ had been the reply.

She was even more surprised by what followed. When the doors were closed behind them and the meeting began, everyone stood stiffly to attention and threw out a Nazi salute while martial music blared from the speakers on the wall.

‘It’s the “Horst Wessel”,’ explained her professor, after the last chorus of ‘Die Fahne Hoch’ had faded and everyone had taken their seats. ‘It was the anthem of the Nazi Party until 1945,’ he said, giving her hand a squeeze. ‘For all of us here it speaks of a better time, a time when Germany was racially pure, before we got infected by all these Turks and Syrians and people from Africa.’