They also liked the food the Americans were sending, especially the cans of compressed meat called Spam, strangely bright pink in colour but gloriously fatty.

Volodya had been posted to Germany because the intelligence he was getting from spies in Berlin was now not as up-to-date as information that could be gained by interviewing German prisoners of war. His fluent German made him a first-class front-line interrogator.

When he crossed the border he had seen a Soviet government poster that said: ‘Red Army soldier: You are now on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!’ It was among the milder pieces of propaganda. The Kremlin had been whipping up hatred of Germans for some time, believing it would make soldiers fight harder. Political commissars had calculated – or said they had – the number of men killed in battle, the number of houses torched, the number of civilians murdered for being Communists or Slavs or Jews, in every village and town overrun by the German army. Many front-line soldiers could quote the figures for their own neighbourhoods, and were eager to do the same kind of damage in Germany.

The Red Army had reached the river Oder, which snaked north– south across Prussia, the last barrier before Berlin. A million Soviet soldiers were within fifty miles of the capital, poised to strike. Volodya was with the Fifth Shock Army. Waiting for the fighting to begin, he was studying the army newspaper, Red Star.

What he read horrified him.

The hate propaganda went further than anything he had read before. ‘If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day,’ he read. ‘If you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German before combat. If you kill one German, kill another – there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Kill the German – this is your old mother’s prayer. Kill the German – this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German – this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.’

It was a bit sickening, Volodya thought. But worse was implied. The writer made light of looting: ‘German women are only losing fur coats and silver spoons that were stolen in the first place.’ And there was a sidelong joke about rape: ‘Soviet soldiers do not refuse the compliments of German women.’

Soldiers were not the most civilized of men in the first place. The way the invading Germans had behaved in 1941 had enraged all Russians. The government was fuelling their wrath with talk of revenge. And now the army newspaper was making it clear they could do anything they liked to the defeated Germans.

It was a recipe for Armageddon.

(iii)

Erik von Ulrich was consumed by a yearning that the war should be over.

With his friend Hermann Braun and their boss Dr Weiss, Erik set up a field hospital in a small Protestant church; then they sat in the nave with nothing to do but wait for the horse-drawn ambulances to arrive loaded with horribly torn and burned men.