Meanwhile Hitler’s bodyguards, in their black uniforms embellished with silver skull and cross-bones, were particularly chatty. One of them – ‘a tall well-built young man; row of white teeth; like a smart bus driver’ – told Jones how only a couple of nights earlier he had picked up a communist protester and ‘crashed his skull apart’ on a piano. Despite this, Jones noted that he had seen nothing cold about his fellow passengers, ‘they could not be more friendly and polite, even if I were a red-hot Nazi myself’.9
