The End of the Night
Park Theatre, London

Two improbable interventions during the Second World War separately involved Rudolf Hess, a Hitler deputy who parachuted into Scotland in 1941, apparently to negotiate peace, and Oskar Schindler, an industrialist who arranged the evacuation of 1,200 Jewish Germans from concentration camps.

A fascinating new fact-based play dramatises the lesser-known combination of a sort of Schindler and a sub-Hess. On 20 April 1945, 10 days before Hitler’s suicide, with the Nazis losing the war, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, secretly met in woods north of Berlin Norbert Masur, a Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress, to discuss sanctuary for some concentration camp inmates. If the encounter itself seems unlikely, even more so is that it was facilitated by Himmler’s masseur, Felix Kersten.