The heroes who plotted against Hitler – and the mole who betrayed them

“I grew up in a house where nothing German was allowed.” So reads the first line of Jonathan Freedland’s magnificent The Traitors Circle. He goes on to explain that this was an edict from his mother, Sara, not just because of the Holocaust but also because her own mother had been killed by the last V2 rocket to fall on London in March 1945. According to Sara, “the Germans were a guilty nation, every last one of them implicated in the wickedest crime of the 20th century”.