The song before it is sung - Justin Cartwright

On 20 July 1944 Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped death when an assassin’s bomb failed to kill him in his Eastern command, the Wolf’s Lair. The conspirators were hunted down and hanged from meat-hooks, and their executions were filmed. Among them was Axel von Gottberg. Sixty years after his death, von Gottberg’s close friend and now a legendary Oxford professor, Elya Mendel, receives a legacy of papers and letters to a former student, Conrad Senior. With the legacy comes a mysterious duty to unravel the past. The friendship between Mendel and von Gottberg is fatally undermined by a romantic rivalry, but it is finally destroyed when von Gottberg returns to Germany. Mendel, who is Jewish, believes him to be a Nazi, and alerts the Allies to his doubts about his friend, doubts which torment him after von Gottberg is garrotted. It is Conrad Senior’s task to understand what happened, but as he becomes more and more involved with the past, his own relationship with his wife begins to fall apart. Weaving darkly though these complex stories is the infamous film of Axel’s final, awful moments, a film which Conrad is desperate to find for reasons he can barely understand himself.