King Christian is going to be arrested… The Danish police are going to be disbanded… They want us to send twenty thousand Danes to the Reich as forced labour… make that fifty thousand… They’re going to deal with the Jews, at last… Half of us are going to be sent to the Eastern Front…

Ferdinand Rudolf von Buhler was careful not to contribute to the rumours himself, though he did his best to make sure he heard them all. As crazy as they sounded, they were also perfectly feasible.

He knew that when the rumours firmed up, he’d have to tell the British. He’d avoided contact with them since helping that agent escape to Sweden in April. He’d not slept properly for weeks after that, and indeed had been so unnerved by the experience he’d even told his driver to change his route into work so as to avoid passing the pharmacy in Nørrebro where the appearance of a red medicine bottle would be a signal to make contact.

What you don’t see you don’t know.

But the heightened trepidation he felt that particular Tuesday morning was a result of an order issued to all the diplomatic staff the previous afternoon. They were to ensure they were at the embassy in good time for a meeting at nine o’clock the next morning. Any other engagements had to be cancelled. The meeting was to be addressed by none other than Werner Best.

Best was a fearsome character: a career Nazi who’d been a stalwart of the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin before being sent to Paris to run the occupation. The previous November he’d arrived in Copenhagen with the title of Plenipotentiary, which was as good as saying he was the ruler of Denmark.

The meeting took place in the ballroom of the embassy, its rococo architecture and enormous chandeliers lending an incongruously grand air to the occasion. The room was full, with everyone standing: not just the diplomats from the embassy and senior military figures, but also, as far as von Buhler could tell, all the important Germans involved in the occupation.

Best marched into the room, mounted a rostrum at the front and began speaking immediately. His Hessian accent and quiet voice meant people shuffled forward to catch what he was saying.

‘Heil Hitler!’

The response was less clamorous than von Buhler expected it to be. People were nervous with anticipation.

‘Last year – on the twentieth of January, to be precise – a conference was held in Berlin on the specific instructions of the Führer to discuss the Jewish question, which still plagues us. At the outset of the war, there were eleven million of them in Europe. Some of them are in territories we now control, others in countries we will soon conquer. Eleven million…’

Best paused to allow everyone in the room to absorb that shocking statistic: so many of them.