In Europe

you going to do after the war?’ ‘I'm going to take the bike and tour the borders of Germany.’ ‘And what are you going to do after lunch?’
    The Gestapo's relative leniency towards ‘normal’ Germans had evaporated. Starting in March 1942, every form of defeatism was punishable by law. In Berlin alone in the first three months of 1943, fifty-one Germans were sentenced to death for listening to enemy radio broadcasts or expressing ‘hostile’ opinions. In the Flossenburg penal camp in Bavaria at least 30,000 German convicts were killed, including the renowned Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Hans Oster, the
Abwehr
officer who had passed along the German plansfor the invasion of the Netherlands. Ninety executions a day was not an abnormal tally at Flossenburg.
    That malaise spread to the army units as well. Wolf Jobst Siedler, who fought in Italy, heard soldiers shout to each other: ‘Enjoy the war, peace is going to be terrible.’ In the field hospital where he ended up in late 1944, the wounded soldiers listened openly to swing music on the British radio.
    On several occasions, elements within the
Wehrmacht
, along with certain key figures from the German churches, the former union movement and trade and industry, seemed on the brink of open revolt. As early as May 1942 contact had been established between the British government and the resistance group surrounding Bonhoeffer and his
Bekennende Kirche
. On 20 July, 1944, an attempt was made on Hitler's life.
Wehrmacht
officer Claus von Stauffenberg concealed a time bomb in his attaché case, took it into a staff meeting at the
Wolfsschanze
, placed the case under the table and left the room. Under normal circumstances, the force of the explosion that came a few minutes later would have killed everyone in the room. But the meeting had been moved at the last moment from the command bunker to a lighter barrack, and the number of victims remained limited. Hitler himself escaped with a torn uniform, punctured eardrums and a few scrapes and burns. It dawned on him only gradually that this attack had been meant as the starting sign for a general uprising against his regime. His rage and suspicion were uncontrollable.
    For the Nazis, meanwhile, the war had become a ‘sacred struggle’ on behalf of Europe against the Bolshevik monster. In Berlin's Sportpalast on 18 February, 1943, immediately after the fall of Stalingrad, Goebbels had declared ‘total war’. His speech was interrupted hundreds of times by cheering, singing and thundering applause, and the hall went wild at his final words: ‘Now, Germans, rise up – and the storm breaks loose!’
    In actual fact, Goebbels’ speech was a desperate move: the situation had deteriorated so far that the German people had to be prepared psychologically for hard times. As Goebbels vouchsafed to his diary, he and his old companion-in-arms Göring had a long, private discussion on 2 March, 1943. Both were worried about Hitler's mental stability, and about the chaotic situation within Nazi headquarters. The Führer, both of them felt, had ‘aged fifteen years in the three and a half that the war has lasted’.Ribbentrop had failed completely as minister of foreign affairs: he had not made a single attempt to arrive at a modus vivendi with Britain. However, at the same time, Göring said, the Nazi command could not permit itself any sign of weakness. ‘With regard to the Jewish question in particular, we have gone too far ever to get out.’

Chapter FORTY-ONE
Rome
    ROME. THESE ARE THE DAYS OF THE GREAT SUMMER HEATWAVE. THE local youth stands fomenting its own discontent on Campo dei Fiori till late into the night, across Piazza Navona saunter the beanpole families of Swedish schoolteachers, between the two squares the city is white with table linen. Above the ochre houses of the old working-class neighbour-hood of Trastevere, the church bells strike their tinny strokes, year after year.
    In the early 1980s I came here often. Of the dozens of grocers’ shops and vegetable stalls I remember from those years, one remains. Mario with his seven stray cats and his echoing voice, the king of our little street, moved away long ago. Americans live in his house now. Of the once innumerable clothes lines flapping with laundry, only two are left; from all the surrounding streets, they have disappeared completely. Around the fountain on Piazza Santa Maria, the flirting and sighing takes