In Europe

as long as they did not meddle in affairs of state. (This did not, by the way, keep the Vatican from having the anti-Nazi encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge
read aloud in all German Catholic churches in 1937.) In late November the Gestapo was officially given supra-legal status. A little over a year after the Nazis had seized power, Kurt and Elisabeth von Schleicher were murdered by six SS men in their villa on the Wannsee.
    My long wait at Tempelhof airport is like slipping back sixty years in time. Tempelhof is now a little airfield and a big museum, all rolled into one. Of all the airfields I have ever seen in Europe, it is perhaps also the most deserving of the description ‘field’: once this was a parade ground where planes were occasionally allowed to land, and that is how it has remained, here in the middle of the city. A hypermodern terminal was built here in 1934. With its enormous semicircular awning, it is one of the few intact examples of Nazi architecture.
    The circular plaza at the front fits the picture, and the former government buildings give it a fine theatrical touch. The first reaction is: keep your head down, the new order rules here, come on, raise that right arm! Then come the genteel sounds of the airport terminal, and after that the impressive semicircle of buildings, the gesture to the rest of the world that says: here comes the new Germany!
    And now I am up in the waiting lounge with its 1930s Bakelite coziness. I recognise almost everything here, from newspaper photographs and newsreels: Hitler under the awning, stepping out of his Focke-Wulf Condor as the crowds cheer; Göring leaving for a working visit to the Eastern Front; Hitler's friend Albert Speer in his English-tailored tweedjacket, standing on the ladder of a plane; Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel crossing the tarmac with firm tread on 8 May, 1945, surrounded by Allied officers; the Americans and the Berlin airlift: it all happened here.
    I have never been here before, but everything in this place is etched in my memory, as though they were my own recollections.

Chapter SEVENTEEN
Bielefeld
    THE PHOTOGRAPH OF ANNE FRANK, HER MOTHER AND HER SISTER Margot has no date on it. Anne looks to be about three. It's still winter-coat weather, but the girls’ knees are already bare. The place where the picture was taken has been carefully documented by the people from Frankfurt's Historisches Museum: right in front of Café Hauptwache, in the city's shopping district. The little photo-booth picture of mother and daughters, taken at the nearby Tietz department store, does have a date on it: 10 March, 1933. They are wearing exactly the same clothes, the photographs were probably made during the same shopping spree. These were the final, innocent days of Frankfurt.
    Three days later the SA raised the swastika banner above the balcony of the town hall, and three weeks later a boycott was pronounced against most Jewish shops and businesses. After the Easter holidays, Margot's ‘non-Aryan’ teacher seemed to have disappeared into thin air. During those same weeks, Otto Frank began making plans to emigrate. Within a year the whole family was living on Merwedeplein in Amsterdam. The rest of the story we know.
    Had the Franks remained in Germany, it would have been – strikingly enough – little Margot who first suffered under the deluge of measures that went into force in January 1933. I see her in another archive photo: a summery photograph of the first-form class of the Ludwig-Richter-Schule, taken during a school outing in June 1932. The girls are wearing thin summer dresses, some of them have sun hats as well. The five Jewish children are standing among the others, there is nothing different or conspicuous about them. Margot is leaning towards a little girlfriend, a typically blonde German girl.
    One year later all the casualness had disappeared. Margot's ‘democratic’ principal was replaced in April 1933 by a Nazi. One by one, the Jewish girls in her class stopped coming to school. And she was no longer allowed to play with most of her former girlfriends, for fear of neigh-bours and informants.
    The Frank family home at Ganghofstrasse 24 is still standing, marked by a massive stone monument dedicated by the city's young people – ‘Her life and death, our duty’ – and the same trees around it, now thick and old.
    On my next journey through Amsterdam I was given a van to use, a little one in which you could make a cup of coffee, type