She opened her eyes but didn't look at me. The wolfhound watched her, worried by the pain in her voice. "The grown-ups frightened me and now even the children had gone. I didn't know what to do. Once I ran to Uncle Guenther when I saw him standing alone at the end of a passage but he told me to go away. There was nowhere to go. Then I saw Goebbels and his wife come into the passage and walk past Uncle Guenther, who had a big can in his hand. I could smell petrol. When I heard the shots from the garden I screamed, but Uncle Guenther didn't even hear me – he simply went out to the garden. I didn't understand anything any more."

Guenther Schwaegermann had been Goebbels's adjutant. His orders had been to smother the bodies in petrol and cremate them.

"That night my mother took me away. We were with a lot of other people. The ground was shaking and the whole sky was red. There were four women in our party; one of them was the cook. She kept running ahead and the others kept pulling her back, because the Russians were shelling heavily and the whole length of the Friedrich-strasse was on fire. We got as far as the Weidendammer Bridge before I fainted; but I can remember water, and the smell of smoke."

She got to her feet so suddenly that the dog gave a low bark. The curtains were not drawn across the windows and the glow from the street lit her face as she stared down.

I waited, and went on waiting. I didn't move, even to ease the tension in my legs, because I knew the dog was on edge because of her voice. She was statue-still, her thin arms hanging loose from the shoulder, her head forward to stare at the scene below that she wasn't seeing.