‘Irma was a clever girl,’ Hanke sighed. He spoke with a Rhineland accent, with a voice that was just like Goebbels’. ‘Clever enough to stay on at school and get her Abitur, which she’d wanted to do. But she was no book-buffalo. Just bright, and pretty with it. Good at sports. She had just won her Reich Sports Badge and her swimming certificate. She never did any harm to anyone.’ His voice was breaking as he added: ‘Who could have killed her, Kommissar? Who would do such a thing?’

‘That’s what I intend to find out,’ I said. But Hanke’s wife sitting in the back seat believed she already had the answer.

‘Isn’t it obvious who is responsible?’ she said. ‘My daughter was a good BdM girl, praised in her racial-theory class as the perfect example of the Aryan type. She knew her Horst Wessel and could quote whole pages of the Fuhrer’s great book. So who do you think killed her, a virgin, but the Jews? Who else but the Jews would have done such things to her?’

Herr Hanke turned in his seat and took his wife by the hand.

‘We don’t know that, Silke, dear,’he said. ‘Do we, Kommissar?’

‘I think it’s very unlikely,’ I said.

‘You see, Silke? The Kommissar doesn’t believe it, and neither do I.’

‘I see what I see,’ she hissed. ‘You’re both wrong. It’s as plain as the nose on a Jew’s face. Who else but the Jews? Don’t you realize how obvious it is?’

‘The accusation is loudly raised immediately, anywhere in the world, when a body is found which bears the marks of ritual murder. This accusation is raised only against the Jews.’ I remembered the words of the article in Der Stürmer which I had folded in my pocket, and as I listened to Frau Hanke it occurred to me that she was right, but in a way she could hardly have dreamt of.

11

Thursday, 22 September

A whistle shrieked, the train jolted, and then we pulled slowly out of Anhalter Station on the six-hour journey that would take us to Nuremberg. Korsch, the compartment’s only other occupant, was already reading his newspaper.

‘Hell,’ he said, ‘listen to this. It says here that the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinoff declared in front of the League of Nations in Geneva that his government is determined to fulfil its existing treaty of alliance with Czechoslovakia, and that it will offer military help at the same time as France. Christ, we’ll really be in for it then, with an attack on both fronts.’

I grunted. There was less chance of the French offering any real opposition to Hitler than there was of them declaring Prohibition. Litvinoff had chosen his words carefully. Nobody wanted war. Nobody but Hitler, that is. Hitler the syphilitic.