We sipped our brandies and watched the show, which was more than we could have hoped for so early in our visit, and by midnight Streicher’s and our own were the only parties left in the café, the others having been driven away by the Gauleiter’s incessant cursing. Another waiter came to wipe our table and empty our ashtray.

‘Is he always this bad?’ I asked him.

The waiter laughed bitterly. ‘This? This is nothing,’ he said. ‘You should have seen him ten days ago after the Party rallies were finally over. He tore hell out of this place.’

‘Why do you let him come in here, then?’ said Korsch.

The waiter looked at him pityingly. ‘Are you kidding? You just try stopping him. The Deutscher is his favourite watering-hole. He’d soon find some pretext on which to close us down if we ever kicked him out. Maybe worse than that, who knows? They say he often goes up to the Palace of Justice on Furtherstrasse and whips young boys in the cells there.’

‘Well, I’d hate to be a Jew in this town,’ said Korsch.

‘Too right,’ said the waiter. ‘Last month he persuaded a crowd of people to burn down the synagogue.’

Streicher now began to sing, and accompanied himself with a percussion that was provided with his knife and fork and the table-top, from which he had thoughtfully removed the tablecloth. The combination of his drumming, accent, drunkenness and complete inability to hold a tune, not to mention the screeches and giggles of his two guests, made it impossible for either Korsch or myself to recognize the song. But you could bet that it wasn’t by Kurt Weill, and it did have the effect of driving the two of us off to bed.

The next morning we walked a short way north to Jakob’s Platz, where opposite a fine church stands a fortress built by the old order of Teutonic knights. At its south-eastern point, it includes a domed edifice that is the Elisabeth-Kirche, while at the south-western point, on the corner of Schlotfegergasse, is the old barracks, now police headquarters. As far as I was aware, there wasn’t another police HQ in the whole of Germany which had the facility of its own Catholic church.

‘That way they’re sure to wring a confession out of you one way or the other,’ Korsch joked.

SS-Obergruppenführer Dr Benno Martin, whose predecessors as police president of Nuremberg included Heinrich Himmler, greeted us in his baronial top-storey office. The look of the place was such that I half expected him to have a sabre in his hand; and indeed, when he turned to one side I noticed that he had a duelling scar on his cheek.