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- [00:00]
Conor
Hi everyone. I'm Conor, head of Programming at Intelligence Squared. As we head into the festive season, what is for many of us, a time of comfort, celebration and gatherings round a table. Most of us won't think twice about the clean water running from our taps that make it all possible. But for millions of people around the world, this is something they simply don't have. That's why here at the Intelligence Squared podcast, we're proud to partner with WaterAid, a charity working to change this and to shine a spotlight on something that connects us all. In a special episode of our podcast, journalist Coco Khan speaks to Amica Godfrey, Water AIDS Executive Director of International Programs. Amica has spent more than 25 years working across the world in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector. She shares powerful stories about how clean water keeps children in school, helps mothers support their families or run businesses and and unlocks potential for entire communities. To hear the full conversation, just search Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts and listen to the episode titled Everything Starts with water released on 17th December. Listen to the full episode now on the Intelligence Squared podcast.
- [01:16]
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- [02:32]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with Jonathan Friedland, the columnist, broadcaster and former foreign correspondent. Friedland is the author of the Escape Artist, the acclaimed book about Rudolf Furber and Alfred Wetzler the first Jews to escape Auschwitz. Now with his new work, the Traitor's Circle, Friedland turns his attention to a different group of remarkable figures, the secret dissidents inside Germany who spent nearly a decade resisting the Nazi regime from within. Friedland was in conversation with journalist and broadcaster Jenny Kleeman live at the Kiln Theatre in London. Let's join Jenny now with more.
- [03:19]
Jenny Kleeman
Hello. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for joining us tonight. I'm thrilled to be here with Jonathan Friedland. You know who he is, but I'm going to introduce him anyway. He will be known to many of you as a longtime columnist for the Guardian and presenter of BBC Radio 4's the Longview. He's also the co host of the the Unholy podcast. He is the author of several acclaimed nonfiction books, most recently the Escape Artist, which covered the story of two young men and their escape from Auschwitz. It was very widely praised and Shortlisted for the 2023 Bailey Gifford Prize for nonfiction. In his spare time, because he has spare time, believe it or not, he writes best selling political thrillers under the pseudonym Spirit. But we're here today, of course, to talk about his new book, the Traitor's Circle, which is a gripping account of a group of elite non Jewish German people who are prepared to do what you describe in the book as mortally dangerous good, putting themselves at enormous risk to defy Hitler for no other reason just than principle, because they believed it was the right thing to do. Why haven't we heard of these people before? And how did you come to hear of them?
- [04:42]
Jonathan Friedland
You know, thank you for that very kind introduction. Thanks to all of you for being here. Why haven't we heard of them before? Let's start with that. I think we have. I mean, the Second World War exerts such a stronghold on our imaginations. Fascinatingly to me, it doesn't get weaker with time, it gets stronger. We're, you know, 80 years away from the end and yet we are still drawn to it. Why is that? I think partly it's because it is in some ways the last case of something that offers really sharp moral clarity, that we can use it as a kind of extreme case of good versus evil. So always you'll notice in any argument, any conversation. So you're saying even if you had a chance to kill Hitler, would you have done? You know, it's the case we go to straight away because it's so sharp. Closely related to that is a move that a lot of us make, which is to think because it was good versus evil. It's therefore very simple and binary. All the Germans were evil and everyone who fought the Germans was good. And that's not quite right because we know that lots of countries who were not Germany participated in the Holocaust. And that's very clear in the escape artists which you mentioned. You know, Rudolf Vrber, this man who escaped from Auschwitz, his fate would not have been possible without Ukrainians and Poles and Hungarians and Romanians and Latvians and Estonians. It wasn't just Germans, but the other half of that is that Germans themselves. There were some, you know, not enough, but there were some who did defy Hitler. And I think that complicates it in a way that the popular culture finds difficult. We want it to be really straightforward. And what's fascinating to me is I think even this goes even into Germany. So this story that's in this book, as you said, a group of aristocratic elite level Germans who gather one day for a tea party, 10th of September 1943, unaware that one person sitting around that table is going to betray all the rest of the Gestapo. That story has never been told in any book, including in Germany. It's never been published in German or in Germany. And I think that's almost because they worry that if they tell that story they're somehow trying, they'll be accused of playing down the guilt of, of Germany. People wanted to stay very straightforward. That was one half, the other half was how did I come across it? So it also relates to the escape artist and as Jenny mentioned, it's the escape artist story of an extraordinary escape. A 19 year old Jew escaped from Auschwitz. Hardly anybody ever did that. Jews who escaped from Auschwitz, you can count them on the fingers of barely two, I mean two hands, but not even you'll have some thumbs left over. It was almost impossible to do it. That's the story of that book. In the course of researching that book and you know this process yourself from your own book writing, sometimes you come across a document and you get diverted and you find yourself in the footnotes of that document and you come across something else. And I was reading this speech by Heinrich Himmler at that point, really the number two in the Nazi state, head of the SS who is giving a speech to the senior sort of top brass of the SS, the gauleiters of the SS in August 1944 and he is essentially reassuring them that he has not lost his grip because a few weeks earlier, 20 July 1944, there had been an attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler. The famous Valkyrie plot of 20th of July. Some of you will have seen the film with a hideously miscast Tom Cruise, so you'll know about it. He Himmler is gathering with them, saying, don't worry, things are not spiraling out of control. We have all of the dissenters and resistance against Hitler. We know where they are, we've got them in custody. He said, that reactionary cabal who were prattling over tea with the widow Solf and the old diplomat so and so. And he names names. We have them now in our grasp, he says, and I thought, tea. What does he mean? Tea? You know. And I clicked and clicked and clicked again and sure enough, there was a tea party. And that's how I came across the story and immediately thought, that's an amazing idea that these really. And it's very clear even from his description, these are aristocrats with, you know, von in their name. And they had. These were people who had vast country estates and so on. And he Himmler is talking about them being now in custody. Immediately I wanted to know more. What was this tea party, what had happened?
- [09:48]
Jenny Kleeman
So how did you go about trying to find out more, given that this was uncharted territory, that people hadn't collated these experiences before?
- [09:55]
Jonathan Friedland
Yeah, they'd never done it in a single book, but you could find out the names of the people who were there. A couple of academic sort of monograph articles had been written and so you could see the key names. And then interestingly, family members had written, not quite private, but in tiny memoirs that had been published by tiny houses 60 years ago about, you know, somebody wrote about their father in law, another one wrote about their great aunt who was in this group, but no one had ever pulled it together. And those had never been translated, these words, these were only available in German and they were out of print. And then once you had the names to go on, and I was working alongside a brilliant researcher who I credit in the book, Jonathan Cummings, who I've worked with now for 20 years, and he is able to search and discover that one of these people had been a witness at the Nuremberg Tribunal tribunals. And there you have to dig deep online, but you can find online the transcripts of every word said at the Nuremberg tribunals. And there was this account of what had happened and there are diaries and there are letters and, you know, the extraordinary thing about that period, sharp moral clarity. But also people wrote things down. You know. Now I always wonder about the historians of the future when everything's on WhatsApp and it will. It's disappeared. But then people wrote things down. They hid these letters. Sometimes it was letters and diaries written after the war. But once you knew the names and you went where to go to, you could find them. And there are surviving descendants, there are grandchildren, there are a few very old children of the people involved in this story, but nieces and nephews who themselves had become a bit obsessed by finding the story and were delighted when a knock on the door came and they said, look, I've got. I don't have much, but I've got this. And suddenly you've got a file of papers.
- [11:58]
Jenny Kleeman
You know, that sounds like a lot of fun. Or maybe that's just the nerdy journalist. It sounds like a very exciting hunt. So as you say, none of these people are alive to speak to. They have relatives that you can speak to. Is that easier? Because in one respect you don't have their modest to deal with. Or is there a danger of relatives romanticizing them, idolizing them?
- [12:23]
Jonathan Friedland
There is definitely that danger. And if that was the only source, I think you would worry. And also I really did encounter this. There is a nervousness among Germans now of seeming to over claim because it's a thing that some people did do immediately after the war where people claimed they were in the resistance when they weren't of try. I think it's a thing that people are modest about because if you are loudly bragging about your heroic relatives, people get suspicious. They think it's are you trying to hide something? Is there somebody you know? You're drawing attention to this person because there is actually a skeleton in that cupboard. It's also seen as. The sense I get is that it's sort of unseemly because it does seem to take away from what you should attract most attention, which is the grave crimes of the German people. If you are talking about those who stood out of line, then you are seeming to play down those who stood in line for Adolf Hitler. So there is a tremendous reticence about it, you know, so it's interesting you picked up about modesty. You know, that's. That I encountered. Yeah. More of that than of wanting to brag about family members. But the. The other thing was that there was. There is just a sort of. There is a historical record. I mean it is a cliche about the Nazis did document everything, but they did. And so it would be very hard for people to claim more than was there there these characters. You'll see there is eventually. I'm not going to say exactly who was involved. But there was a trial and the transcripts of that trial are there and it meant that I could reconstruct scenes in here with dialogue and so on. And a few people have said, you know, sitting in your chair have said so you fictionalize this amazing story. And I have to say, look, I'm going to stop you right there. There is no fiction in this book. Every scene, every bit of dialogue, every description is because things were written down. People wrote them down, whether they were the people themselves or their tormentors. You know, there is a tea party in this book. At the center of it, I'm able to tell you what was, what the food was at that tea party because everything was written down.
- [14:44]
Jenny Kleeman
I think maybe the reason why people think it's fictionalised is because it is a really rip roaring book to read. I mean, from the discussion that we've just had, you would think it was, you know, obviously it's meticulously researched and you would think that it would be quite a dense thing to read. But it is written with your Sanborn thriller writers pen and you know, there is so much of attention to detail, of plotting and pace and as you say, we don't want to give away spoilers because there is a betrayer, somebody who betrays this circle of people who stand up to Hitler. You do find out who that is. But there is this kind of propulsive sense of doom at the end of every chapter you're kind of reminding the reader that this is going somewhere. So how long did you spend thinking about the structure of it and how you were going to make it this very intense, exciting read?
- [15:39]
Jonathan Friedland
Well, it's really nice for you to say all those things about it because that's exactly what I was trying to do with this. I wanted it to be, yes, rigorously footnoted. There's 50 pages of notes and it to be a proper work of history. But I wanted it to offer the kind of pleasures of reading fiction. And so honestly, when I came across that footnote and it said about a tea party, immediately I thought to myself, it's an Agatha Christie story. That's what this is. This is a whodunnit. You've got a group of people. There are not one but two countesses in this group. There's the ambassador's widow, there's the doctor, there's the former model, there's the diplomat. It's like Pluto. Yes, yes, exactly what I wanted it to feel like. I want the reader to be thinking, oh, it's obviously that the first countess. Oh, Hang on, maybe it's the diplomat, you know, And I wanted that to be there from the start, how I conceived it. So I did all this research into the documents, but I also sat down and read and then there were none. The Agatha Christie. But I wanted to see, how does she do it when what? You know, how does she reveal a little bit more information at different stages? And so you're quite right, every chapter ends on a cliffhanger. That is something I did in the Sam Bourne novels. And I thought there was no reason not to do it because it is genuine. There was genuine suspense in this episode. What could be more sort of dramatic, really, than 10 people who are bound by this shared defiance of the most terrifying regime in human history coming together, believing they are among their own. They're among kindred species spirits, speaking candidly frankly about their loathing of the government, of their plans for a Germany without Hitler, and unaware that someone sitting among them who they believe is one of their own is about to betray them. That's, you know, it would be a sort of, in a way, a betrayal of the story itself to tell it in a kind of dry, academic way that isn't how this played out. And, you know, the fact that they are this kind of glamorous group of people who are used to white tie dinners and nights at the opera and embassy balls, it was. It cried out to be told in a way, like a sort of 1940s who done it. That had to be the way of telling it, you know, with the Escape Artist. It is the most serious book I've ever written about, the most serious thing you could imagine. It's right in Auschwitz Birkenau. But it's an escape story. And all the time I thought the genre here, it's documented and very avowedly non fiction, but the genre here is an adventure story. That's how I'm going to try and tell that one. And so I think you pick the form to fit the actual historical truth and reality. You're being faithful to the reality, not unfaithful to it, I think.
- [18:29]
Jenny Kleeman
Well, let's talk now about some of those characters on the Cluedo board in the Agatha Christie tale. Some of the protagonists of the story, and they all kind of resisted in different ways. Some of them helped Jews, some of them tried to undermine the Nazis, some of them got quite close to plots to kill Hitler. Let's begin with Otto Keat. He is a diplomat who actually joined the Nazi party. But then he had a big moment of resistance, his first big Moment of resistance involved army. Einstein in New York. Tell us about him.
- [19:04]
Jonathan Friedland
So you're absolutely right to pick up on Otto keeps, you know, mixed history. One of the reasons, one of the things that drew me to the characters in this book is they're not perfect, they're inconsistent, they are flawed, they're contradictory, they're human and they don't always make the right decision. You know, it's not as if they are kind of wearing capes with lantern jewels, superheroes. They're not. They sort of fumble their way towards this position. And you're absolutely also right to pick up on the fact that it's weigh its resistance large and small. So, you know, some are on the. Actually, as you said, on the edges of these plots to kill Hitler. But others, I mean, I don't want to jump ahead too much, but I'm just going to mention one about the. One of the two countesses because I came across this story very early. You know, her habit. Young woman, 29, a sort of glamorous society. She'd been a kind of debutante and a fixture of the social scene in Berlin. She made it a habit when walking around wartime Berlin and Nazi Berlin to always carry two heavy bags of shopping. Why? Because if somebody was to come across her on the street and greet her with a Hitler salute, sorry, I wish I could, but my hands are full. It's just such a small act of defiance. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't move. But in her own way, it was her taking a stand. And I sort of looked at that and I thought, I can now see the world of these people. When I came across that story, as I said, it was one of the first things I found. But Otto Keep had been a kind of rising star of the German diplomatic corps. Fascinatingly, he was born in Scotland. There was a German Scottish community. He always spoke English, completely fluent, but with a slight Scottish accent. He gets the plumbest of plum jobs, which is he's sent to be the Consul General of Germany in New York City. And for him, in the late 20s, early 30s, it's a life of a sort of Great Gatsby lifestyle on Long island of weekend parties, horse riding and swimming. And then he, like everyone else, realizes in the last day of second last day of January 1933, there's a change of government and suddenly he is working for Adolf Hitler as chancellor. And he's still there, having been appointed under the Weimar Republic a few weeks later. Invitations come all the time. An invitation lands on his desk. It is for a fundraising dinner at the Astoria Hotel, Waldorf Hotel, a joint fundraiser from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Our honored guest is somebody who is the most famous scientist in the world, probably one of the most famous Germans in the world, and certainly the most famous Jew in the world. It's Albert Einstein. And he has to make a decision because he knows that if he doesn't go, sorry, or rather, if he goes, he is defying his masters in Berlin because they are no longer hospitable to Jews like Einstein. But if he doesn't go, he believes, well, then I'm just siding with this thuggish anti Semitism from back home. And he has to make a decision. And the decision he makes, in a way sets him on a path that will lead 10 years later to that tea party. So it's such a fateful decision. And it comes about really, just because. And one of the things I find so interesting about it is what are these Jewish organizations doing inviting the German diplomat? It's because they don't know yet. And that's another thing you realize is we all now have hindsight, but in February 1933, yeah, there's a change of government and there's things they're reading in the newspapers, but they don't know what it means that Adolf Hitler is literally the ruler of Germany. They still think you can invite. So all these things that sort of are just in one small moment, there's a whole world contained in that one incident.
- [23:01]
Conor
Hi, everyone. I'm Connor, head of programming at Intelligence Squared. As we head into the festive season, what is for many of us, a time of comfort, celebration and gatherings round a table? Most of us won't think twice about the clean water running from our taps that make it all possible. But for millions of people around the world, this is something they simply don't have. That's why here at the Intelligence Squared podcast, we we're proud to partner with WaterAid, a charity working to change this and to shine a spotlight on something that connects us all. In a special episode of our podcast, journalist Coco Kahn speaks to Amica Godfrey, Water AIDS Executive Director of International Programs. Amica has spent more than 25 years working across the world in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector. She shares powerful stories about how clean water keeps children in school, helps mothers support their families or run businesses, and unlocks potential for entire communities. To hear the full conversation, just search Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts and listen to the episode titled Everything Starts with Water, released on 17 December. Listen to the full episode now on the Intelligence Squared podcast. You didn't start a business just to keep the lights on. You're here to sell more today than yesterday. You're here to win. Lucky for you, Shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet like the just one tapping ridiculously fast acting sky high sales stacking champion at checkouts. That's the good stuff right there.
- [24:38]
Jonathan Friedland
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- [24:40]
Conor
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- [24:48]
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- [24:50]
Jenny Kleeman
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Jenny Kleeman
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Jenny Kleeman
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- [25:19]
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- [25:47]
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- [26:23]
Jenny Kleeman
Tell us about Elizabeth Van Thaden. She was a very religious headmistress.
- [26:30]
Jonathan Friedland
Yeah. So she is one of several people in this story and particularly there are several women in this story. The majority of the people at the Tea Party were women who, yes, deep faith but who had been given kind of responsibility very early. So she was the daughter of Pomeranian nobility. There were fontadens going back centuries and centuries. When she was 19, her mother died and her father decided that she should be the chatelaine. She should be in charge of this huge country estate, managing hundreds of people and she is the lady of the manor at 19, running this huge household and business. And then this huge shock, the biggest of her life up to that point. When she's already age 30, her father announces that he's marrying again, and he's marrying a woman five years younger than she is. And that woman will now be the lady of the manor. And she is left bereft. She has no partner of her own, she has no career of her own. And so she looks deep inside what counts to her. Partly it's faith, but partly it's education, and particularly girls education. So she founds a school, a school for girls, and she's got lots of very progressive ideas about education. But then she too is running this school when in 1933, the government changes and she too thinks, well, look, you never know, it may be okay. But bit by bit, it becomes clear what's happening in her country. And she begins to do what she can, small gestures at first, so she allows. She quietly removes the portrait of Adolf Hitler. That's compulsory in every school. And she says the girls can join the hit, the girls equivalent of the Hitler Youth. But she's going to make sure the person who runs this girl's branch, the sort of brown owl for this branch, will be a teacher of, not somebody from outside, somebody she can keep control of. And bit by bit, she does more and more that is sort of bending the rules until eventually she realizes the thing she can do that is most useful is she takes in non Aryan girls. And these are the daughters of Jewish families who are scrambling to get the papers to get out of the country. It becomes a kind of hiding place that the daughter can hold out in that school until they get the word. And there's testimony from pupils at that school who remembers they'd be in a dormitory one night there might be a new arrival, you know, with a Jewish name who arrives at the school. And then maybe three weeks later, they wake up in the morning and there's an empty bed next to them in the dead of night. The girl has been spirited across the border to safety. And that's because Elizabeth von Taden took this huge risk of turning the school into a kind of unofficial, you know, sanctuary for some of those students. So she was doing her bit.
- [29:36]
Jenny Kleeman
My favorite character in the book is the Countess Maria von Mausen. A woman of chutzpah, I think we could safely say so.
- [29:47]
Jonathan Friedland
She is extraordinary. She is the other countess in the story. She is 34 at the time of the Tea Party. She is again daughter of a huge in a country estate. This house that she grew up in, it was a castle, was so vast, it had its own church, it had its own library and ballroom and domed galleries. It was home to the Largest collection of engravings anywhere in Europe. They had, you know, stables and then a set lesser stables. The stables themselves had a kind of en suite bathroom for the horses. You know, it was so lavish. But she was a rebel from the very, very start. And her mother, for example, told her that the one thing she couldn't be, what she wanted to be, was a vet. Her mother would forbid it. So of course she trained to become a vet. And one of the other things that was insisted upon by her aristocratic mother was that she must never even consider marrying a Jew. The mother was a really conviction anti Semite. So sure enough, Countess Maria von Meltzen. And it's a real type we all can imagine, the very sort of posh young woman whose choice of boyfriends is designed to anger her parents. You know, it's a type that recurs down the generations. So sure enough, her first husband actually is a cabaret artist. I can picture with the sort of black eyeliner in Munich and that doesn't work out. Give you a flavor of what she's like at the wedding. They are in a wedding just in a room above a pub. At that time, all places like that would have a picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. They're all partying away and one of the guests says, I can't really relax with him looking at me all the time. Go on, Maria. They pass Maria a gun and she takes fire and shoots out both of the Fuhrer's eyes from the portrait. That's the kind of person she is. But in amongst all of that, she is harboring Jews in her home. Now, at this point, I didn't really know much about this at all. It is extraordinary to me that in the height of the Nazi supremacy, when Adolf Hitler is directing the extermination of the Jews of Europe, that there in the German capital itself, incredibly, about 1500 Jews were clinging on, living in hiding. And the word for them that was used was they were submarines because they had to be beneath the surface, they had to be hidden and they had to be silent so no one could discover them. She did this in Maria the Countess, in her home. She had about at some point there could be 20 people there on a single night, including her own hidden Jewish lover. She'd made a habit of this. Her second sort of love was this man, Hans Herschel. He was in hiding. They had a protocol between them which was if ever the Gestapo should come to cool, then the plan was that he would clamber into this space under one of two sofa beds. It was a kind of Wooden cupboard. Box, really wooden box where he could hide each. She had fitted a system of bolts. She was very handy with a drill. She had fitted a system of bolts in there so that it couldn't be opened from the outside. And each morning when she would go out, because she had to go out to work, she would put a glass of water in the space and a couple of tablets of codeine to repress the cough that might give him away. Well, sure enough, one day in 1943, the Gestapo knocked on the door. And so they went straight into their plan. And Hans clambered into the box. And so I'm going to read you just a little bit of what then happened. The search of the apartment continued. Lying in the box, Hans could hear the sound of feet scurrying across the floorboards. Maria was throwing a ball for her two dogs. Audibly irritated, the Gestapo men asked her to stop, but she refused. This was the hour when the animals were used to their afternoon walk. She explained they had to be exercised. As three o' clock passed, then four, they kept up their fusillade of questions. We know that a Jewish girl used your apartment for two weeks, they said. It's true that I employed a girl, but she wasn't Jewish, Maria replied. The papers were absolutely in order. No, they were fake, said one of the Gestapo men. Maria asked how she, a mere veterinary student, could possibly know of such things. Indeed, she seemed shocked at the very idea. By now they were in the bedroom. Hans could hear the three voices as the formal interrogation began. The men told Maria to sit. She lowered herself onto the sofa bed. We know you are harbouring Jews, they said. That's completely ridiculous, replied Maria with all the hauteur she could muster. Inches below her, Hans Herschel lay motionless. The Countess was gesturing towards the portrait of her father, an aristocrat in dress uniform that held pride of place in that room. You don't believe that I, as this man's daughter, am hiding Jews? Hands stayed rigid, listening to every word. Now came the moment he dreaded. The Gestapo men insisted that Maria open up the two sofa beds that were in that room. Hans could hear as she opened the first, easily doubtless revealing the empty space within with a flourish that confirmed the agents were wasting their time. They turned to the second, his one. He could feel movement, the effort to lift the lid. Sorry, it won't open, Maria was saying. She explained that soon after she bought it. She had tried, but without success. It could not be done. The men were not persuaded. They were tugging at it, determined to Prize the opening apart. And now Maria took a gamble, one that required iron self confidence. Hans heard the word she used, but could let out no gasp as she made her suggestion to the Gestapo. Take out your gun and shoot through the couch. She seemed deadly serious, as if she were not setting a dare, so much as offering a reasonable solution to the standoff. If you don't believe me, all you have to do is take out your gun and shoot through the couch. How long did Hans lie there, waiting for the Nazi's response? How long did Maria's words hang in the air as he braced himself? It would have taken only a second for one of the men to pull out a pistol and call this imperious woman's bluff. If they did, how long would it take for hands to die? A few seconds a minute was one of them. Even now training his weapon on the bed box, the barrel would be just inches away. And then Maria spoke again. However, she said she had one condition. If they went ahead and opened fire, I insist that you give me a credit note for new upholstery fabric and that you pay the repair costs. She was adamant that there was no room for a raggedy piece of furniture in any home of hers, and I would like to have that in writing from you in advance. It seems that after nearly a decade of dealing with the National Socialist masters of the new Reich, and indeed with bureaucrats of every stripe, Maria had learned one thing that such men feared straying beyond their authority. There would be an expenses form to fill in a superior who would demand an explanation. Sure enough, the bullets remained in their chambers. Only once Maria was sure the two men were gone and would not be coming back, did she dare give the signal for hands to unseal his tomb and emerge. He came out deathly white, his body clammy with sweat. He had believed those long hours might be his last. What saved him was the swagger, the ingrained self belief of the woman he called Maruschka. A woman whose blood was so blue she'd grown up in an actual castle. These days she was a trainee vet living in an abandoned shop in Berlin. But she was of a class that had spent centuries ruling this land. Not even the Gestapo could intimidate her. For now, at least.
- [38:36]
Mia Sorrenti
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