And we wait. My fingers and toes slowly become numb. I try wriggling them, clapping my hands and blowing on them, but it doesn’t work.

At last the band strikes up Franz Liszt’s fanfare. A hush comes over the crowd and, almost as one, a thousand heads turn. I glimpse the open-topped black Mercedes crawling down one side of the square. I forget the numbing cold, the unforgiving hardness of my chair. It really is him. The greatest of all men, my brother’s new father.

The car pulls up in front of the platform and the Führer climbs the stairs, passing me so close I could reach out and touch him. Vati is clapping hard and fast, smiling broadly. Small and nimble, Herr Hitler is terribly good-looking. He wears a brown suit and a swastika armband. His hair is very dark, like mine, and is swept elegantly to one side.

For a few moments, he surveys the crowd. He raises a fist skywards, then clutches it to his chest. The crowd go wild, crying, ‘Seig Heil! Seig Heil! Seig Heil’ until the Führer holds his hands out and, as one, they are silenced, without him uttering a single word.

‘Heil, my German youth!’ he cries at last. ‘It is our will that this Reich shall endure in the millenniums to come. We can be happy in the knowledge that this future belongs to us completely!’

Mutti is gripping my hand so tightly it hurts. Her eyes fill with water. The Führer pauses and looks around. His eyes, the colour of the deepest ocean blue, sweep over our little group of local dignitaries, pause, and lock with mine.

I can’t breathe and my head reels.

‘In you, my youth,’ he says as he looks at me, ‘there must be no weakness. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. A youth before which the world will tremble. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak, or gentle about it.’

Why does he talk directly to me? I can’t hear his words anymore because there is a strange roar in my ears and a mist comes down over my eyes. I watch his mouth move and his hands gesticulate; a little section of hair comes loose and flops over his forehead.

He isn’t looking at me now, he is gazing out over the thousands down there, but that stare, that connection has lit a white, hot fire in my soul. He singled me out.

He saw that I am special. I can be someone great!

‘That is how I will create the New Order,’ the Führer is saying, a fountain of spit spraying from his mouth, his body reverberating with the force of his words. ‘That is how victory will be claimed!’

Words pour from his mouth, building like a thundering wave around the square. He speaks of a brilliant future with no more poverty; no more class divisions. Just one, great, unified nation which will be the envy of all the world.