The Chancellery itself was battered and defaced by the bombardment, particularly at the rear, but deep in the earth protected by thirty meters of concrete, the Führer and his staff still worked on in a subterranean world that was totally self-supporting, still in touch by radio and radio-telephone with the outside world.

The rear of the Reich Chancellery was also damaged, pock-marked by shell fire, and the once lovely gardens were a wilderness of uprooted trees and the occasional shell hole. One blessing: there was little air activity, low cloud and driving rain having cleared the sky of aircraft for the moment.

The man who walked in that ruined garden on his own seemed curiously indifferent to what was happening, didn’t even flinch when another shell landed on the far side of the Chancellery. As the rain increased in force, he simply turned up his collar, lit a cigarette and held it in cupped hand as he continued to walk.

He was not very tall, with heavy shoulders and a coarse face. In a crowd of laborers or dock workers, he would have faded into the background, nothing special, not memorable to the slightest degree. Everything about him was nondescript, from the shabby ankle-length greatcoat to the battered peaked cap.

A nobody of any importance, that would have been the conclusion, and yet this man was Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Secretary to the Führer, the most powerful man in Germany after Hitler himself. The vast majority of the German people had never even heard of him, and even fewer would have recognized him if they saw him. But then he had organized his life that way, deliberately choosing to be an anonymous figure wielding his power only from the shadows.

But that was all over, everything was finished, and this was the final end of things. The Russians could be here at any moment. He’d tried to persuade Hitler to leave for Bavaria, but the Führer had refused, had insisted, as he had publicly declared for days, that he would commit suicide.