On landing at the airfield, a car was waiting for them and they were driven directly to the camp. They were still in the American zone and Wilde was shocked by the devastation he witnessed, far worse than the countryside and towns north of Munich. Almost the whole city of Darmstadt had been razed to the ground. Everywhere, women, children and men were scrabbling around the rubble and ashes, looking for food or coal and trying to find some sort of shelter. They were slow, ponderous and blank-eyed, like creatures from an old black-and-white Bela Lugosi movie.

It was as though they had given up all hope of a future. Many had limbs missing. From the car window, Wilde watched a small boy of about eight pushing a little girl in a wheelbarrow. It seemed likely that she was the boy’s sister. Her flaxen hair was plaited in pigtails and her face was exquisite. She had one arm and no legs.

There was something else, too, a miasma; the sickly stench of death, of decaying bodies still buried in the ruins. That and the ubiquitous waft of disinfectant. Half a dozen women with knives were attacking a dead horse at the side of the road, cutting ragged haunches and slices for their supper. Crows picked at the meat alongside them. Even from the car, Wilde could tell that the meat was already rotten, like pheasant hung a great deal too long.

They stopped briefly at a junction and an old man tapped on the window then presented his hands, palms upwards in supplication. ‘Cigarette, Ami, please. One cigarette.’ The car drove on.

The prisoner of war camp was nothing but a series of vast open-air fields surrounded by tangles of barbed wire, guarded by bored American GIs with their weapons cradled casually in their arms; these sentinels knew their many thousands of prisoners were defeated and that they had nowhere else to go. If any of them wanted to escape, so what? Maybe they’d shoot them, maybe they’d just let them go.

Word had been telephoned ahead from CIC Garmisch that Wilde and Heck would be arriving, and so Erich Kempka had been brought to the administration block to wait for them. It was a grey, damp, dispiriting afternoon. Here on the outskirts of Darmstadt, the destruction was everywhere and inescapable.

An American officer introduced Wilde and Heck to Kempka, then said he’d have coffee and sandwiches sent to them.

‘Just us,’ Heck said. ‘Not the prisoner.’

Kempka seemed to understand the gist of the English and looked disappointed.

‘Understood,’ the officer said. With a brisk nod to his guests, he said he’d leave them to it and went out to organise their refreshments.