As the bemused barber walked forward, Bormann fired off a parting shot. “Old man, one last thing. This entire event never happened.”

It took less than two minutes for the barber to complete the task, but, even with his moustache removed, Hitler’s hypnotic steely-blue eyes and pronounced cheekbones still combined to make his face instantly recognisable.

The three fugitives were dressed discreetly in drab civilian attire, sourced by Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge. Only the Führer made a further cursory attempt to disguise his infamous features, wearing a brown cashmere fedora with the brim turned down across his forehead.

Bormann had actually planned the escape to take place ten days earlier, on 20 April, to coincide with Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday but, at the last minute, the Führer had changed his mind. The two men had become inseparable since first entering the bunker three months earlier and Bormann had no intention of them being captured by the Red Army. He would stay by his master’s side, come what may. Now, as the bunker shuddered from the impact of Russian bombs landing directly above, Hitler had finally agreed to leave.

Berlin was being bombarded from all sides and the Russians were less than a mile away from the Führer’s secret underground base. Stalin’s troops, led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, were approaching the city from the north and Bormann, who had planned the escape route, had no real idea of the Red Army’s exact positions. In the immediate hours before they fled, he instructed his secretary, Else Krüger, to call random phone numbers of German civilians who lived on the northern outskirts. If a Russian voice answered, she knew the house and the street had been taken. It was a bizarre game of telephone roulette. Phones rang off the hook and, when they did occasionally answer, a German voice was never heard.

Despite the grim news from his secretary, Bormann knew they had no options left and the three most notorious figures in Nazi Germany began a hazardous five-hour drive through enemy lines, heading north-west towards the coastal city of Kiel. Their destination was the port which, throughout the war, had been one of the Nazis’ prominent naval bases on the Baltic coast. It housed enormous shipyards that had been used by the German Reich to build state-of-the-art submarines and, during the previous six months, had been subjected to constant aerial attacks from the Allied forces who appreciated its strategic importance. However, the Allies had been careful not to totally destroy the harbour, as they planned to use it as a naval base of their own, once they gained control of it, which was only a matter of days away.