Two black Mercedes cars roared up just as the police were erecting their cordon. Lloyd looked on with interest. Out of the second car jumped a man in a light-coloured trench coat and a floppy black hat. He had a narrow moustache under his nose. Lloyd realized that he was looking at the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.

Behind Hitler followed a taller man in the black uniform of the Schutzstaffel, the SS, his personal bodyguard. Limping after them came the Jew-hating propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. Lloyd recognized them from newspaper photographs. He was so fascinated to see them close up that he forgot to be horrified.

Hitler ran up the steps two at a time, heading directly towards Lloyd. On impulse, Lloyd pushed open the big door and held it wide for the Chancellor. With a nod to him, Hitler walked in, and his entourage followed.

Lloyd joined them. No one spoke to him. Hitler’s people seemed to assume he was one of the Reichstag staff, and vice versa.

There was a foul smell of wet ashes. Hitler and his party stepped over charred beams and hosepipes, treading in mucky puddles. In the entrance hall stood Hermann Göring, a camel-hair coat covering his huge belly, his hat turned up in front, Potsdam-fashion. This was the man who was packing the police force with Nazis, Lloyd thought, recalling the conversation in the restaurant.

As soon as Göring saw Hitler he shouted: ‘This is the beginning of the Communist uprising! Now they’ll strike out! There’s not a minute to waste!’

Lloyd felt weirdly as if he were in the audience at the theatre, and these powerful men were being played by actors.

Hitler was even more histrionic than Göring. ‘There will be no mercy now!’ he shrieked. He sounded as if he was addressing a stadium. ‘Anyone who stands in our way will be butchered.’ He trembled as he worked himself up into a fury. ‘Every Communist functionary will be shot where he is found. The Communist deputies to the Reichstag must be hanged this very night.’ He looked as if he would burst.

But there was something artificial about it all. Hitler’s hatred seemed real, but the outburst was also a performance, put on for the benefit of those around him, his own people and others. He was an actor, feeling a genuine emotion but amplifying it for the audience. And it was working, Lloyd saw: everyone within earshot was staring, mesmerized.

Göring said: ‘My Führer, this is my chief of political police, Rudolf Diels.’ He indicated a slim, dark-haired man at his side. ‘He has already arrested one of the perpetrators.’

Diels was not hysterical. Calmly he said: ‘Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch construction worker.’

‘And a Communist!’ Göring said triumphantly.

Diels said: ‘Expelled from the Dutch Communist Party for starting fires.’

‘I knew it!’ said Hitler.

Lloyd saw that Hitler was determined to blame the Communists, regardless of the facts.

Diels said deferentially: ‘From my first interrogation of the man, I have to say that it is clear that he is a lunatic, working alone.’