‘Now you won’t have to feel ashamed of him. Now you will know what it means to lose all your family.’

She muttered something under her breath, perhaps not intended for him to hear. But he heard it. ‘We should have killed more of you,’ she said. ‘We should have killed you all.’

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

‘Well here we are, Professor Wilde. This is where it all happened.’

They had passed the shell-battered edifice of the Brandenburg Gate – the Soviet flag flying on high – then turned right at a huge portrait of Stalin that now dominated the Tiergarten end of Unter den Linden, and the car had stopped on Wilhelmstrasse outside the ruins of the old Chancellery. Then they had made their way on foot to the bunker, picking their way through the rubble and shell craters. The circular observation tower was still remarkably intact, but the square tower housing the entrance had suffered more hits.

It stood, bleak and grey, in a sort of junkyard of old planks, ash, boulders, blackened earth and abandoned concrete mixers. Wilde had seen newspaper photographs of it and knew that the area enclosing the bunker had once been the Chancellery garden. All that grew now were weeds.

The bunker’s construction was massive blocks of reinforced concrete several feet thick. Soviet shells and bullets and British bombs had cut chunks from the sloping roof and the blank, windowless walls, but could not penetrate.

The entrance doorway was open, its heavy steel door had come away from its hinges and lay flat on the ground like a gangplank to lead you in. One bored-looking Red Army soldier stood outside, rifle at the ready.

‘So this is the Führerbunker.’

‘Indeed, Professor. This is where Hitler made his last stand. Just like your Colonel Custer. But did Adolf live or did he die? Opinion in the Soviet Union is that he survived, that his supposed suicide and cremation was a carefully staged fraud so that we would not look for him.’

‘Opinions in the West are divided.’

Minsky had brought two hurricane lamps. He lit them both, turned the wicks up to brilliant, and handed one to Wilde. ‘Please, follow me in. This is the emergency exit, but it is the way Hitler’s corpse was said to have been carried out. The main entrance is on the other side of the complex and is accessed by way of the Chancellery. The bunker beneath us goes deep down into the ground on two levels. Hitler’s rooms are on the lower level and in all there are thirty rooms. I show you where it all happened. Perhaps you will find a souvenir. Some of Hitler’s nail clippings, maybe, or Eva Braun’s pretty pink lipstick. Come.’

Minsky flashed a card at the guard and he clicked his heels and let them pass without demur.