A few days before the American Army liberated Colditz in April 1945, the small group of high-born prisoners-of-war known as the Prominente were whisked away in middle of the night to another prison camp in the foothills of the Alps near Hitler’s retreat in Berchtesgaden.

All too aware that they were really being held as hostages, ‘something to negotiate with when the war ends,’ as one of them put it, they were terrified they were about to be shot in a final act of the Fuhrers’ vengeful fury.

The door to their hut opened and in walked SS general Obergruppenfuhrer Gottlob Berger, Head of Prisoner of War Affairs. He told them he had an order from Hitler to shoot them but, for the first time in his long military career, he was going to disobey a direct order and would arrange safe passage to the Allied lines. ‘Please remember what I have done for you when the war ends,’ he said.

Within a few days, the Prominente were free and reunited with their families. Berger was arrested and convicted as a war criminal at the Nuremberg Trials. He was sentenced to 23 years, reduced on appeal to ten, of which he served just six. His lawyers asked the Prominente to write a letter describing what he’d done for them, which they did. This was a major factor in his serving such a light sentence.

One of the Prominente was George Lascelles, the King’s nephew and son of the 6th Earl of Harewood, who had married George V’s daughter Princess Mary. George’s son David Lascelles is the author of this hauntingly vivid book.

Why, he wondered, had Berger saved his father’s life? Was it simply that he wanted to save his own skin in the post-war reckoning? Or did he experience a moment of late onset compassion? He set out to retrace his father’s PoW journey and to visit Berger’s home village in south-west Germany to see if he could trace any living relatives. It turned out that Berger’s son Folkrat was still living in the village.

David recounts what happened to the Prominente in the terrifying, chaotic final days of the war. On April 12 they were driven in pitch darkness to a miserable SS-run camp called Laufen, then on to Tittmoning – ‘another bloody castle’, as one of them put it – where they decided to hide out in a tiny, airless chamber inside the thick castle walls, in the hope that the Allies would liberate the castle before they were found. But they were discovered by the Germans, taken back to Laufen and isolated in a remote wing.

On receiving Hitler’s order to ‘shoot them all’, Berger decided to use delaying tactics. Laufen’s local Gauleiter, regional leader of the Nazi Party, was hellbent on executing all the prisoners.

Berger managed to bundle them on to a bus to their final camp near Berchtesgaden, where he informed them he was going to save their lives. ‘Did what I think just happened … happen?’ asked an astonished Lascelles, when the SS general left the hut.

Within days, he was back in Britain, having a stilted, stiff-upper-lipped supper with his mother and the King in Buckingham Palace, where no one asked him in any detail about his ordeal.

Lascelles went on to read English at Cambridge and married concert pianist, Marion Stein. Berger was taken to Dachau – the Allies used the Nazis’ own prison camp as a special facility to hold SS soldiers awaiting trial and Berger ‘complained bitterly’ about conditions there.

He was found guilty on four counts, including selecting children aged ten to 15 to be forcibly removed from their homes in the Eastern Territories and made to work in Germany as slave labourers. Outrageously, he claimed he was removing the children from their families ‘to save them from the lustful and bloodthirsty hordes of Bolshevism and give them a chance to learn an honest trade’. In other words, that brutal act was a ‘youth training scheme’.

After his release in 1951, he milked that letter from the Prominente for all it was worth. The authorities became suspicious of his manipulation of the de-Nazification process and ruled that he should never be eligible for a state pension.

Folkrat recalled his father sitting in brooding silence for long periods after his release from prison. If he did talk about the war, it was always to project himself as ‘victim, not perpetrator’.

This excellent book, rich in atmosphere, ends with a touching scene of reconciliation. David Lascelles’ godfather was Benjamin Britten and Berger’s grandson (Folkrat’s son Wolf) adores Britten’s music. David and he went to a performance of the Britten War Requiem in Cologne together in 2025.

That great piece, a mass for the dead, intertwined with the poetry of Wilfrid Owen, is the ultimate musical expression of the pity and futility of war.