In the novel, Berlin is both the setting of secret wartime negotiations and the starting point of the flight that leads to the 1945 crash on Vatnajökull. Its significance lies in the gap between what the operation’s participants know and what the flight ultimately carries: an Allied mission whose hidden purpose is disclosed only later, and whose failure leaves room for persistent uncertainty about Adolf Hitler’s fate.

Negotiations and the concealed plan

The plan was developed through Allied–German talks, but Robert Miller was kept ignorant of its origins, the division responsible for it, and the identities of those who attended the meeting in Paris. He was given only the part of the operation he needed to carry out. The initial proposal was to use an Allied aircraft held by the Germans; instead, the parties chose to paint a Junkers Ju 52 in Allied colours. Berlin’s negotiations thus belong to a larger pattern of compartmentalized knowledge: even an intelligence agent involved in the mission did not know its ultimate purpose.

The operation’s concealed purpose was connected to Adolf Hitler. Robert Miller later explained that Hitler was to be allowed to take his German shepherd, Blondi, and nothing else. He had never received confirmation of the plan and could not say whether sparing Hitler originated in negotiations with the German war cabinet, whether Hitler was handed over to facilitate talks, or whether the British and Americans were competing with the Russians to reach him before their rivals. He also considered the possibility that the Germans hoped to drive a wedge between the Allies. Berlin’s role is therefore not limited to the creation of a flight plan: it is where political motives remain obscured behind the operation’s partial disclosures.

From Berlin to the glacier

Robert Miller’s brother was selected to pilot the aircraft, having flown the route before. Miller believed the assignment would be a safe mission near the end of the war; he expected to meet his brother in Reykjavík before they continued to South America for leave. The plane’s departure from Berlin instead coincided with a deteriorating weather system moving towards Iceland. After taking off, it made its last known contact with air traffic control at Prestwick, north of the Scottish coast. No further report came from the plane. Later, two brothers in Höfn reported seeing an aircraft flying so low that they believed it had crashed on the glacier.

The news that contact had been lost left Miller waiting and hoping for his brother’s return. When the report from Höfn arrived, he was appointed leader of the rescue mission. Berlin’s secret diplomacy had set the flight in motion, but the storm and the loss of contact transformed the mission into a search for the aircraft and its crew—and left Miller facing the possibility that he might recover his brother’s body rather than see him again.

Berlin and the uncertainty over Hitler’s fate

After the war, competing accounts of Adolf Hitler’s fate continued to circulate. Although the Russians reported that they had identified his remains through dental records, and a later report described the body as probably Hitler’s, rumors claimed that he had survived. One placed him in the British-occupied sector of Berlin; others imagined him in Spain or South America. Kristín also encountered a theory that the British had taken him by submarine to a remote island. The novel sets these contradictory claims beside the secret negotiations and the concealed flight: Berlin remains a place associated both with the operation’s hidden origins and with unresolved questions about what happened at the war’s end.