The World

Roosevelts, Suns, Krupps, Pahlavis and Saudis

HIROHITO INVADES CHINA

Hirohito, consulting with his generals, led by his great-uncle Prince Kotohito, chief of staff, and his premier Prince Konoe was assured the war would be ‘finished up in two or three months’. Konoe, cultured and pragmatic, a fan of Oscar Wilde, was convinced, after attending the Versailles conference, that the western powers were racist colonialists determined to break Japan.

‘Wouldn’t it be better to concentrate a large force at the most critical point,’ asked Hirohito, ‘and deliver one overwhelming blow?’ The war minister agreed: it must be ‘total war’ but ‘undeclared’ to avoid western or Soviet intervention. On 28 July 1937, the correct date for the start of the Second World War, the Japanese launched a full offensive against Beijing and the port of Tianjin. On 8 August, the old capital was captured along with much of northern China.

Chiang Kai-shek was agonizing over when to resist ‘the dwarf bandits’, asking ‘Existence or obliteration?’ If he did not resist, he risked losing power; if he did, he risked defeat. He agreed to negotiate with Mao on a united front against Japan. In Xi’an, Chiang met Mao’s lieutenant Zhou Enlai. But the Communists manipulated the patriotism of the Manchurian warlord, the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, who, disgusted by the generalissimo’s vacillations, devised a plot to force Chiang’s hand. The Young Marshal’s troops stormed Chiang’s villa, killing his guards, and discovered the generalissimo hiding on a mountainside in his nightshirt and without his dentures. His wife, Meiling Song, considered attacking the town but instead rushed to join her husband. Mao wanted Chiang killed, but Stalin, afraid of Japanese attack, ordered his release. Chiang agreed to Stalin’s plan for an anti-Japanese alliance, receiving his son back as a prize.

On his release, chastened and humiliated, Chiang defended Shanghai with 500,000 men. Hirohito agreed with his generals to order Japanese forces 200,000 strong to storm Shanghai. Nine thousand Japanese were killed as against almost 250,000 Chinese. The Japanese were outraged by their losses, and their troops were ordered to treat civilians and non-civilians the same: they took no prisoners, butchering thousands in Shanghai. On 13 December, they seized the capital Nanjing. General Matsui Iwane, commander of the front, and Hirohito’s uncle Prince Yasuhiko Asaka as commander of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force ordered harsh reprisals as a preliminary to a parade. On the first day, 32,000 people were killed. Asaka’s order was ‘Kill all captives’. All told, Asaka’s troops may have killed as many as 340,000 Chinese; some 20,000 women were raped, mutilated and killed.^* The killing, an expression of rage for Chinese resistance and a demonstration of Japanese racial superiority, continued for six weeks. Hirohito and his generals were responsible, but even General Matsui became ‘depressed’, adding, ‘I feel sorry for the tragedies, but the Army must continue unless China repents.’ Matsui and Asaka were recalled, but Hirohito praised Matsui and decorated Asaka.

Chiang took a stand at Wuhan but was routed, moving his capital to Chungking in the interior. In his Shaanxi fiefdom, Mao settled down for a long guerrilla war, remarking on the irony that ‘Those who’ve seized the latrine pit can’t shit while the people who are bloated have no pit.’ In his capital, Yan’an, he increased his forces from 30,000 to 440,000, but left frontal warfare to Chiang. By 1938, the Japanese controlled most of coastal China, with Chiang and Mao holding out in the interior, but they were committed to a war they would never finish and could not afford. In this rapidly changing kaleidoscope, there was only one certainty understood by all players: the coming conflict, said Stalin, would be a ‘war of machines’, and that meant that ‘mastery of oil’ in Churchill’s words ‘was the prize’. Those who controlled it would be the masters.

OIL KINGS – THE CONQUEST OF ARABIA: ABDULAZIZ AND REZA

The shah had clashed with the British, demanding a bigger share of Iranian oil. By threatening to cancel the concession altogether, he got better terms. It was the beginning of a transfer in power from Europe to Asia. But the friction poisoned Reza’s court.^*

Reza hoped to secure the dynasty for his son, Mohammad, who now arrived home from Swiss boarding school with the effete school odd-job man Ernest Perron, eleven years older: ‘a curious fellow’, wrote a British diplomat, ‘dressed like a musical comedy bohemian who also writes characters from the palm of your hand and makes the most surprising statements about your vie sexuelle!’ The shah, terrified of homosexuality, was horrified and attacked Perron with his whip, ordering his expulsion until his daughters persuaded him to let him stay. The shah appointed him gardener. Whatever Perron’s role it was emotional, not sexual: the crown prince had lost his virginity to a Swiss maid, and embarked on a lifetime of womanizing.

The shah, rushing to arrange his son’s marriage, chose an Egyptian princess: the House of Mehmed Ali was the oldest dynasty in the region, even though it was Sunni. In March 1939, at Abdeen Palace in Cairo the crown prince was married to Princess Fawzia, sister of young King Farouk of Egypt, before the ceremony was repeated in Teheran in the presence of the shah. Fawzia, whose mother Queen Nazli was part French, had ‘a perfect heart-shaped face and strangely pale but piercing blue eyes’; raised in the hedonistic luxury of Egypt, she was horrified by the uncouth shah, bored by the bourgeois parochialism of the Persian court and unhappy with her awkward husband. Sensing the coming war, the shah hoped to secure his kingdom by balancing Britain against Germany.

To the south, on 3 March 1938, an American oil company struck oil at the Dammam 7 well in the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Until then, the rise of Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his Wahhabis had been a minor security issue for the British, defending their Hashemite kings in Iraq and Transjordan. Now Arabia joined Iran and Iraq as increasingly potent masters of oil.

The king depended on pilgrim tolls in Mecca, but his revenues sank during the Depression. The Ikhwan had made him, but now they threatened him and he had to destroy them. In March 1929, at Sabilla, Saudi machine-gunners, aided by RAF planes, mowed down several hundred cameleteers, ending the Ikhwan as a force. On 23 September 1932, Abdulaziz declared himself king of a new country, Saudi Arabia.^* The rewards emerged immediately: his engineers fitted out his new Murabba Palace with electricity and lavatories, the start of the transformation of the Saudis from desert warlords into international potentates. Encouraged by a byzantine Englishman, St John Philby, a former British diplomat who on converting to Islam was named Sheikh Abdullah by the king, western oil companies (all of them paying Philby) started to prospect for oil.^* In Riyadh, Philby played the sheikh, in the clubs of St James’s, the British civil servant. Now he negotiated the first Saudi oil concessions, signed in 1933 with SoCal, joined in 1936 by Texaco, in a joint venture with Abdulaziz’s Aramco. As international tensions rose, every power – but particularly Germany and Japan, which controlled no oilfields – sought ‘the prize’.

THAT’S HOW IT’S DONE: HITLER’S PLAN

On 20 April 1937, his forty-eighth birthday, Hitler revealed his real vision for empire to his two confidants: Albert Speer, a suave young architect, presented him with a model of his gigantomaniacal new capital, Germania (Berlin). ‘Do you understand now why we plan so big?’ asked Hitler as he, along with Goebbels, admired a People’s Hall that was seven times the size of St Peter’s, designed to hold 180,000 people; the fortress-like Führer Palace; a 260-foot Victory Arch to dwarf the Arc de Triomphe; and a station bigger than New York’s Grand Central. ‘I did these sketches ten years ago,’ Hitler had said when he commissioned Speer. ‘I knew some day I’d build them.’ Speer planned to complete Germania in 1950. Afterwards he showed his father. ‘You two have gone completely mad!’ his father said. But now Hitler confided in Speer that Germania would be ‘the capital of the Germanic empire’. Later he told Goebbels of his imminent plans for Austria and Czechoslovakia: ‘We’ll get them … Hence the Führer’s great construction plans.’ At a secret gathering, Hitler explained, ‘I always go to the extreme of what I feel I can risk and no further … I say, “I want to destroy you. And now I’ll ask my wits to help me manoeuvre you into a corner so that you can’t lash out at me because you would suffer a fatal blow to the heart.”’ And then he bellowed: ‘That’s how it’s done.’

Hitler started to increase the pressure on Austria, summoning its chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg in February 1938 to threaten invasion. ‘My task is preordained,’ he told him. ‘Surely you don’t think you could put up even an hour’s resistance? Who knows? Maybe I’ll be in Vienna tomorrow morning like a spring storm.’ Schuschnigg tried to beat Hitler at his own game, calling a referendum on independence which provided Hitler’s pretext for massing the Wehrmacht on Austrian borders.

In Vienna, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild was unsure whether he should leave or not, but his wife, an elegant Englishwoman named Clarice Sebag-Montefiore, heard from her lover in the Foreign Ministry that the Nazis already had a list of Jews to arrest. They packed up their car and drove into France. The eighty-two-year-old Sigmund Freud refused to leave. ‘In the Middle Ages, they’d have burned me,’ he insisted. ‘Now, they’re content with burning my books.’

Schuschnigg cancelled the plebiscite and resigned, handing over power to his Nazi interior minister. On 12 March, German forces entered Austria. Driving in a motorcade of open-topped Mercedes through ecstatic crowds, Hitler passed through Linz, where he looked up at the window of his Jewish doctor Eduard Bloch who nodded back at him, and then into Vienna, where he appeared on the balcony of the Hofburg before visiting the grave of his niece Geli Raubal. This Anschluss – Union – unleashed a host of tragedies: Nazi thugs forced Jews to clean the streets. Himmler’s Jewish expert Adolf Eichmann, a former Dachau guard and son of an accountant who now ran the SD’s Jewish Department, Section II/112, commandeered one of the five Rothschild palaces for his Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, to oversee the confiscation of Jewish wealth, particularly that of 100,000 Jews who wished to leave.

Baron Louis de Rothschild, debonair brother of Alphonse, polo player, botanist, aesthete, married to an Austrian countess, was visited by SS officers who were told by his butler to return after lunch. When he tried to leave, he was arrested at Aspern airport. Göring and Himmler vied with each other to extract a Rothschildian ransom. Himmler won, visiting Rothschild in jail to negotiate the handover of $21 million of assets in return for freedom. Louis joined his brother in America.^* Freud refused to leave.

In the Nazis’ wake followed the profiteers, led by Krupp, who now, aided by Göring, seized the chief Austrian steelworks. Just as the Wagners were Hitler’s cultural dynasty, the Krupps were for him industrial royalty. When Mussolini visited, he showed him round Krupp’s Essen works. Krupp celebrated Hitler’s fiftieth birthday by presenting him with a swastika-spangled steel table engraved with a Mein Kampf quotation. Hitler was thrilled. Gustav’s son Alfried, hook-nosed, cadaverous and sunken-eyed, an SS member since 1931, joined the board, developing tanks for the new, mobile warfare.

‘Now it’s the Czechs’ turn,’ a euphoric Hitler told Goebbels, preparing for war against Czechoslovakia on behalf of its German minority in the Sudetenland. On 17 September 1938, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, beakily uninspiring, now determined to save European peace, arrived at the Berghof, the Führer’s spectacular Alpine home, where he was treated to foam-flecked rants and rational negotiations. Chamberlain disdained Hitler – ‘entirely undistinguished’, he said, ‘you’d take him for the housepainter he once was’. Hitler mocked Chamberlain as ‘schoolmarmish’ and ‘a worm’. After subsequent meetings, Chamberlain boasted that he would try to avoid war ‘because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’. At a Munich conference mediated by Mussolini, Chamberlain and the French premier Daladier agreed the ‘cession to Germany of the Sudeten German territory’ of Czechoslovakia.

Chamberlain flew home triumphantly. ‘My good friends,’ he said at the airport. ‘I believe it’s peace for our time. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.’ Wise men did not sleep. ‘You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war,’ warned Churchill, calling Munich an ‘unmitigated defeat’. Watching from Washington, Roosevelt privately agreed, noting the ‘blood on their Judas Iscariot hands’. Keen to divert Joe Kennedy from a presidential bid at home, FDR promoted him to London as ambassador. There the cocksure Irishman revelled in society but supported the antisemitic coterie around Viscountess Astor, who favoured appeasement of Hitler. The German ‘kikes’, Kennedy said, ‘had brought it upon themselves’, telling a friend that ‘individual Jews are alright but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch.’ FDR was horrified by Hitler – ‘His shrieks, his histrionics and the effect on the audience – they did not applaud – they made noises like animals,’ FDR told his confidante and cousin Daisy Suckley. ‘Europe is full of world dynamite.’

The Sudetenland was not enough for Hitler, who, cheated out of war, planned to ‘rapidly occupy’ the rest of Czechoslovakia, then, ‘When the time is right, we’ll soften up Poland using tried and tested methods.’

Weeks later, after the shooting of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jew, Hitler and Goebbels organized an anti-Jewish pogrom, Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), across Germany. On 9–10 November, Jews were beaten, around 100 were killed and 30,000 were arrested and sent to camps; 1,000 synagogues were burned, Jewish shops smashed. Hitler discussed ‘the Jewish question’ with Goebbels. ‘The Führer wants to drive the Jews entirely out of Germany. To Madagascar or somewhere like it.’ On 30 January 1939, speaking to the Reichstag, Hitler linked the fate of European Jews to the war he was planning to start. ‘I’ve very often in my lifetime been a prophet and been mostly derided,’ he said. ‘I want today to be a prophet again: if the international Jewish financiers … succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’

In March, he summoned the old Czech president Emil Hácha to force the surrender of the rest of Czechoslovakia. Hácha suffered a stroke. German troops then occupied Prague, now capital of Hitler’s Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while a Slovak client state under a Fascist priest was granted independence. Hitler gave the Škoda works to Krupp. Days later he forced Lithuania to hand over the Baltic port of Memel. Finally Britain and France, realizing their mistake in appeasing Hitler, guaranteed the borders of his next target, Poland. Hitler had delivered a streak of successes. ‘It’s the miracle of the age that you found me among so many millions,’ he told a rally. ‘And that I have found you is Germany’s great fortune.’ Believing war was inevitable and desirable, he turned to the other anti-Versailles power that had lost its Polish lands, led by his Bolshevik enemy Stalin. Only the Soviet dictator could prevent Hitler fighting a war on two fronts.

In May, as Hitler brooded at the Berghof, Ribbentrop, his foreign minister, played him footage of Stalin in Moscow reviewing the May Day military parade from Lenin’s Mausoleum. Stalin, said Hitler, ‘looked like a man he could do business with’.

It was mutual – but always temporary.

Stalin had been sending signals of detente for some time. The Terror was spinning out of his control. On 25 November 1938, Yezhov, sinking into binges of drinking and fornication with both sexes and trying to cover up his own excesses, was replaced by a highly competent myrmidon, Lavrenti Beria, a toadish Georgian, a sadist and rapist, who oversaw a last spasm of killing that now included Yezhov himself. ‘I die with Stalin’s name on my lips,’ said Yezhov, before he was shot. Stalin, facing a resurgent Hitler in Europe and an aggressive Japan in Asia but master of a terrified Party and weakened state, entertained the approaches of both the Nazis and the Anglo-French democracies. Distrusting the British, who had long tried to destroy Soviet Russia and ‘want to use us like farmhands’ to ‘pull their chestnuts out of the fire’, Stalin had no illusions about Hitler’s ultimate hostility. He had read Mein Kampf in translation but found Hitler’s detente more plausible, and more profitable. As for Hitler, never forgetting his promise in Mein Kampf to eradicate Judaeo-Bolshevism, he ordered war against Poland – a decision that was dependent on an alliance with Stalin. Courted by all contenders, time was on Stalin’s side.

In August 1939 Hitler sent a telegram to Stalin suggesting Ribbentrop’s immediate flight to Moscow. When Stalin’s reply was brought in to Hitler at dinner, he banged the table: ‘I have them!’ As the Führer briefed his generals that Germans would now get their ‘living space’, Ribbentrop flew to Moscow and drove to Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, the Little Corner, where the general secretary was ready to negotiate the carve-up of eastern Europe. While Stalin was hosting Ribbentrop, he was directing battles against the Japanese on the Mongolian border. Two days before Ribbentrop arrived, Stalin’s newly promoted commander, Georgi Zhukov, attacked the Japanese with 50,000 troops at Khalkhin Gol. The battle would decide the future of the world war every bit as much as the conversations in the Little Corner.

At the Berghof, Hitler dined with Eva Braun and retinue, then stayed up with Goebbels, sleepless, hollow-eyed, almost feverish. At the Little Corner, Stalin and Ribbentrop traded quickly – one advantage of dictatorship. ‘Germany and Russia will never fight again,’ exulted Ribbentrop, toasting Stalin with champagne.

‘That ought to be the case,’ said Stalin, beaming but vigilant. At 4 a.m. Hitler received Ribbentrop’s telegram: he and Stalin had divided Poland; Stalin was promised ex-Romanov limitrophes, parts of Finland, Baltics and Romania.^* Hitler greeted Ribbentrop as ‘the new Bismarck’ and ordered the Polish invasion. On 25 August, far away in Mongolia, Soviet tanks encircled Japanese forces, a victory that changed Japanese plans. Instead of attacking Russia, Japan would assault Britain and America. As for Stalin, he had found a winner: Zhukov, strong-willed, coarse, tough, would be the greatest general of the Second World War.

Until victory was secured, ‘I want nothing more than to be the first soldier of the Reich,’ Hitler, in a field-grey tunic, told the hushed Reichstag on 1 September, or he ‘would not live to see the end’ – a public warning of suicide. He compared himself to Frederick the Great, who had also ‘confronted a great coalition’ but ‘triumphed’.

As 1.5 million troops smashed into Poland that morning, Hitler ordered his henchmen to fight a new type of war. ‘Annihilation of Poland,’ he specified in notes kept by a general. ‘Hearts closed to pity. Brutal action … Maximum severity.’ Hitler despised democracies – ‘Worms! I saw them at Munich’ – but this time the worms turned: Britain and France declared war; Chamberlain sent an expeditionary force of 390,000 troops to support the French and reluctantly brought the indomitable but masterful Churchill back as first lord of the Admiralty.

FDR, realizing Chamberlain was damaged, wrote to ‘my dear Churchill’ secretly, encouraging him to ‘keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about’. But he was restrained by 62 per cent of Americans who wanted neutrality, by widespread antisemitism and by Ambassador Kennedy: ‘always has been an appeaser and always will be an appeaser’, said FDR. ‘Pain in the neck.’

Hitler ordered ‘a bitter ethnic struggle’ in Poland with ‘no legal bounds’. While annexing ex-Prussian provinces and creating a General Government to run the rest, he explained, ‘all we want there is to harvest labour’ and ‘cleanse the Reich of Jews and Polacks’. Around 1.7 million Polish Jews fell into German hands. The army was followed by five, later seven, special murder squads, SS Einzatzgruppen, created by Heydrich, now head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office / RSHA), combining the SD with battalions of ordinary policemen. They murdered all those on a death list (Special Prosecution Book) of 40,000 elite Poles. ‘There must be no Polish leaders,’ said Hitler. ‘Where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, however harsh that sounds.’ Some Einzatzgruppen commanders were coarse thugs with criminal backgrounds, but many were highly qualified – three commanders were doctors, as were nine of seventeen officers in Einsatzgruppe A – and middle class if not aristocratic. After the war, German generals propagated a myth that the Wehrmacht had played no part in Nazi atrocities. In fact, most officers not only acquiesced in and sanctioned the ‘ethnic–political tasks’ but assisted them; ordinary soldiers joined in and even took photographs. A very few, very brave soldiers refused to take part. Himmler attended some of the executions, telling the murderers, ‘I can be frank – I do nothing without the Führer’s knowledge.’^*

Although thousands of people were already involved in killing, it all depended on Hitler’s leadership. In November he flew to Munich to give his annual speech to ‘old fighters’ of the Beer Hall Putsch, ending his speech early and leaving – just as a bomb, planted by a lone assassin, Georg Elser, exploded. Hitler believed providence had spared him – ‘The fate of the Reich depends on me alone’ – which made his mission even more urgent: ‘We can only confront Russia if our hands are free in the west.’

A race between Britain and Germany to seize Norway was lost by the British. Chamberlain, no warlord, lost his authority. At 10.15 a.m., on 9 May 1940, he met the two contenders for his succession. Chamberlain and the Tory grandees preferred the foreign secretary, the earl of Halifax, nicknamed the Holy Fox, ex-viceroy of India. Halifax, a desiccated, self-righteous aristocrat with one withered arm lacking a hand, leaned towards negotiation with Hitler. Churchill, regarded as a piratical, bumptious, half-American warmonger, brooded in pugnacious silence until Halifax gave way.

Churchill, an aristocratic imperialist, was an eccentric throwback, extravagant and bon vivant, heavy-drinking and cigar-chomping, irascible, cutting and witty, with a taste for idiosyncratic uniforms – his self-designed siren suit resembled a baby’s romper suit. Yet not only had he recognized the nature of Hitler, but his martial temperament, visionary creativity, exuberant energy, unrivalled ministerial experience, knowledge of war and history, and mastery of language made him singularly qualified to ensure British survival. ‘Poor people, poor people,’ murmured Churchill. ‘They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster for quite a long time.’

On 10 May, after months of ‘phoney war’, Hitler, skittish and nervous, announced a battle that would decide ‘the fate of the German people for a thousand years’ and struck west through Belgium and Holland. But he aimed his main thrust further south through the Ardennes, boldly using his tanks in a lightning war – Blitzkrieg. ‘We’ve been defeated,’ the French premier Paul Reynaud, told Churchill, who flew out to stiffen French resistance. When Churchill asked, ‘Where’s the strategic reserve?’, the French commander-in-chief replied, ‘Aucune.’ None.

Reynaud appointed the Verdun hero, Marshal Pétain, aged eighty-four, to his government along with a general who had led three failed counter-attacks and believed that France should never surrender: Charles de Gaulle, under-secretary of war, was an ungainly, six-foot-four soldier-scholar of minor nobility with a small head and long nose nicknamed Le Grand Asparagus. On 9 June, he flew to see Churchill at Downing Street and requested the commitment of the RAF to the battle of France. Churchill refused. But he admired the ‘young and energetic’ de Gaulle: hardened by his German imprisonment as a First World War PoW, he believed in ‘a certain idea of France’, a France of grandeur, preferably led by a regal leader who might one day be himself.

Two days later Churchill returned to France to meet a despondent Reynaud, and there observed de Gaulle’s ‘vigour’; Pétain was already a defeatist. Back in London, Churchill proposed an Anglo-French union, but on 10 June Reynaud resigned and Pétain became premier to negotiate with Hitler. As Mussolini joined the war, invading France from the south, de Gaulle escaped to London, ‘alone and deprived of everything … I was entering into an adventure.’ On 14 June, Paris fell. Four days later ‘I, General Charles de Gaulle, currently in London’, broadcast to France. He asked, ‘Has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No! … Nothing is lost for France.’

As Pétain opened negotiations, the British army was surrounded on the beach at Dunkirk. The victory was so total that Hitler wavered. ‘Führer’s terribly nervous,’ wrote his chief of staff. ‘Frightened by his own success’. While Hitler vacillated, 300,000 British soldiers were rescued by a flotilla of small boats.

Hitler received the French surrender – technically an armistice – in the same carriage at Compiègne where the Germans had surrendered in 1918; and left southern France and the French empire intact under Pétain ruling from Vichy. The ex-kaiser and his sons congratulated Hitler.

At dawn on 23 June, accompanied by Speer, Hitler flew into Paris for sightseeing in an open Mercedes, stopping at the Tour Eiffel and standing before Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, where he ordered the return of the body of the emperor’s son, the duke of Reichstadt, one of his stranger historical obsessions. ‘Wasn’t Paris lovely?’ he said to Speer. In July, Hitler arrived in Essen to celebrate Krupp’s seventieth and to thank him in person for the panzers.^* At Bayreuth, he watched an operatic Götterdämmerung. ‘I hear,’ he told Winifred Wagner, ‘the wings of the goddess of victory.’ He was about to order the greatest gamble of a gambling life.

He expected the British to surrender. Halifax suggested negotiations. Churchill held his nerve, telling the British people, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’ in a war ‘against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime’. Sneering at ‘Britain’s hopeless military situation’, Hitler ordered a sea assault (Operation Sealion), but his admirals warned that such an operation would be possible only with air superiority. In July 1940, Hitler commanded his chosen heir, Göring, the Luftwaffe commander recently promoted to Reichsmarschall, to ‘beat down the RAF’ then ‘eliminate the English motherland and … occupy the country completely’. But he was already turning to the crusade of his life: ‘Once Russia has been destroyed, England’s last hope will vanish.’

In August, Hitler unleashed the Luftwaffe but delayed Sealion after plucky British pilots and superior aeroplanes, aided by new radar, combined with eloquent Churchillian defiance, won the battle for Britain. Churchill’s other victory was transatlantic. Kennedy, denouncing the ‘actor’ Churchill, believed (in Roosevelt’s words) that his ‘small capitalist class was safer under Hitler’, reporting to Washington that Britain was doomed and ‘democracy is finished’. But Churchill won over Roosevelt, urgently requesting help – ‘I must tell you in the long history of the world this is the thing to do now.’

HITLER AND THE YOUNG KING

FDR delivered fifty destroyers to Britain and recalled Kennedy, whom he slyly neutralized by offering to support his future presidential bid. FDR, running for an unprecedented third term, won by a landslide,^* freeing him to help Britain with a Lend-Lease plan. ‘Suppose my neighbour’s home catches fire. If he can take my garden hose,’ he artfully explained in a Fireside Chat to the Americans, ‘I may help him put out his fire.’ America would be ‘the arsenal of democracy’.

On 22 June 1941, Hitler, now widely regarded in Germany as a genius, invaded Russia in what he called Operation Barbarossa, a campaign that he had first envisioned in Mein Kampf and had planned since the fall of France. ‘The demolition of Russia’, he had explained to his generals, would force a British surrender but also enable Japan to ‘concentrate all its strength against the United States’, which would prevent America fighting Germany. He ordered the generals to prepare post-Barbarossa for an ‘invasion of Afghanistan and conflict with India’. Barbarossa was to be a war of annihilation, ‘a fight to the finish’ in which ‘Bolshevist rabble-rousers, partisans, saboteurs and Jews’ were to be instantly liquidated and Russian prisoners of war were to be deliberately starved to death. ‘Once we’ve achieved victory, no one will ask about our methods,’ he said, reflecting that ‘No one remembers the Armenians now.’

Hitler was exhilarated by the scale of this ‘mass attack on the grandest scale, the most enormous that history has ever known. The example of Napoleon won’t be repeated.’ The USSR would collapse ‘in four months’. Even for Hitler, there were moments of doubt about the ‘great risk’ he had taken: ‘The beginning of every war is like opening the door into a dark room. One never knows what is hidden in the darkness,’ he admitted to his secretaries. ‘Uncanny’ Russia was like the ‘ghost ship in the Flying Dutchman. Nothing at all can be known … It could be a gigantic soap bubble but it could be completely different …’ And it was.

The invasion had been delayed by the contingencies of proliferating war. Hitler’s successes attracted bottom feeders: Generalissimo Franco of Spain met Hitler to demand British Gibraltar and French colonies. ‘I’d rather have two or three teeth pulled,’ grumbled Hitler, ‘than meet him again.’ Mussolini wanted Nice and French Tunisia but overestimated Italian capabilities: he invaded Albania, ruled since the 1920s by a self-made king, Zog, who fled to London; then, without consulting Hitler, he invaded Greece, where his troops ran into trouble. The British, fielding 375,000 African troops, liberated Ethiopia, restoring Haile Selassie, then attacked Mussolini’s Libya, where the Italians collapsed. Hitler sent an Afrika Korps to halt the Italian retreat and threaten British Egypt and also had to rescue Italy in Greece.

Hitler was anxious about the Balkans, source of Romanian oil as well as the base for Barbarossa. Stalin had been pushing for Soviet influence in Bulgaria and Romania, which made Barbarossa even more urgent. The Führer admired the Romanian despot, Ion Antonescu, a splenetic martinet, nicknamed Red Dog for his ginger hair and furious temper, who had made his name fighting for the Allies in the First World War. King Mihai, last of the Hohenzollerns, haunted by his narcissistic, sexually incontinent and politically catastrophic father Carol II, endured the bullying Red Dog, who now delivered Romania to Hitler.

The eighteen-year-old Mihai, gentle and decent, brought up by his responsible mother, was powerless, forced to grant Antonescu the Führeresque title of Conducator. ‘We had a strange relationship,’ the king told this author. ‘He treated me as a child, excluded me. I hated having a dictator.’ In early 1941, Mihai lunched with Hitler, who was ‘stiff and unfriendly. He’d suddenly get on to a subject, his eyes would go glassy and he would start declaiming. I tried to speak but couldn’t interrupt.’ Hitler kept talking: ‘The last thing I remember him saying was “I guarantee America will never enter the war against us.” I didn’t believe him.’

Antonescu was a vicious antisemite. ‘Satan is the Jew,’ he told his cabinet. ‘Ours is a life-and-death struggle. Either we win and cleanse the world or they win and we’ll be their slaves.’ Antonescu keenly embraced Hitler, who even allowed Red Dog to lecture him on Romanian history. Antonescu promised troops for Barbarossa. Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia joined Hitler’s Axis, until a pro-British coup in Belgrade threatened to delay his Russian invasion.

Hitler, enraged, ordered a war of ‘pitiless harshness’ to ‘destroy Yugoslavia’, dividing it to create an independent Croatia under the ultra-nationalist Ustashe, led by Ante Pavelic´. Once in power – nominally under an Italian king Tomislav II – Pavelic´, assuming his own Führeresque title Poglavnik, unleashed a frenzy of killing, supported by Catholic priests. Aiming to kill all Croatian Jews plus a third of all Serbs, his butchery exposed the hatred of intimate neighbours: 300,000 Serbs, 30,000 Jews and 20,000 Roma were killed in such ghoulish bedlam that the Nazis called the Ustashe ‘monsters’^* and Himmler complained to the Poglavnik.

Yugoslavia delayed Barbarossa by a few key months. ‘In four weeks,’ said a euphoric Hitler, now ensconced at the Wolf’s Lair, a gloomy, mosquito-infested headquarters of hulking concrete bunkers at Rastenburg, East Prussia, ‘we will take Moscow …’ At 3 a.m. on 22 June, three million soldiers^* and 3,000 tanks crossed the border.

THE GREATEST BATTLE IN HISTORY: HITLER’S WAR OF ANNIHILATION; HIROHITO’S GAMBLE

The surprise was almost total. The day before, Stalin listened tensely to growing reports of massing German forces and his generals’ unease. Allowing only minor preparations, he had scarcely fallen asleep at his home, the Nearby dacha when he was awoken by the phone. Zhukov reported that the Germans were attacking on all fronts.

It was the biggest mistake of Stalin’s career. Intelligence had poured in from his superb espionage network in Berlin and Warsaw, as well as from Churchill and even Mao, but particularly from his spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, a raffish half-German, half-Russian playboy. Sorge, best friends with the German attaché whose wife was one of his many lovers, learned the date of the invasion. ‘There’s this bastard who’s set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June,’ sneered Stalin. ‘Are you suggesting I believe him too?’ Dictatorship and Terror can suppress priceless intelligence and common sense. ‘Send your source to fuck his mother,’ he wrote on one report. Stalin could be as mulishly obtuse as he was lupinely astute and felinely flexible. ‘An intelligence officer,’ he said, ‘ought to be like the devil, believing no one, not even himself.’ In this case, the devil out-devilled himself. He knew that Hitler was his enemy and that war would come but believed the pact would delay it until 1943. As tension rose, he should have probed an alliance with Britain. His mistake was to regard Hitler as a conventional statesman, while in fact the Führer was the self-declared ‘sleepwalker’ who sought wars of annihilation.

Rushing to the Kremlin, Stalin ordered counter-attacks on all fronts. They were disastrous, drawing millions of Soviet soldiers into German encirclements, as the Germans powered forward, taking Minsk, then Smolensk. When Stalin and his retainers visited headquarters and demanded the latest reports, Zhukov, a general of adamantine hardness, had to admit the fronts were in disarray and burst into tears. ‘Lenin left a state and we’ve fucked it up,’ said Stalin, returning to his mansion for two days to collect himself and, like Ivan the Terrible, test the loyalty of his boyars. On the third, his grandees arrived to insist that he take command. The Georgian ex-choirboy who, like Hitler, believed he was a born soldier, assumed the title Supremo and, mustering Russia’s unparalleled resources of human and industrial power, fielding an awesome 4.2 million troops, rallied his own people with a mix of patriotism, terror and Marxism to engage Hitler in a ‘life-and-death struggle’.

‘Brothers and sisters, my friends!’ Stalin began, addressing his people. ‘History shows there are no invincible armies.’ Hitler disagreed.

‘The war is fundamentally won,’ the Führer told Goebbels a week later. ‘The Kremlin will fall.’ He assured the Japanese ambassador that ‘Resistance won’t last longer than six weeks.’ Stalin’s interference in the war was disastrous: he lost 3.5 million men and most of European Russia in just over a year. Occupied territories were divided into Ukraine and Ostland. Hitler’s plan was that ‘Moscow will be wiped off the face of the earth.’ The Russian population of 194 million would be starved until there were just thirty million left; his German empire would extend to the Urals; German governors would live in palaces, German farmers would live in beautiful villages in Ukraine, Crimea and the Baltics while enslaved Slavs toiled, with the rest driven into Siberia. Nazi invaders instantly started to murder large numbers: out of 5.7 million PoWs, 3 million were starved, the greatest crime of the war after the killing of European Jews. ‘I’m approaching this matter ice-coldly,’ Hitler said. ‘I feel myself to be but the executioner of the will of history. Once we are the lords of Europe, we will hold the dominant position in the world.’

Roosevelt, surveying a broiling world from the serenity of the White House, concentrated first on London, sending his devoted aide Harry Hopkins, cadaverous yet buoyant, who promised a tearful Churchill, ‘Whither thou goest, I will go.’ Hopkins flew on to Moscow to meet Stalin and promise aid, then back (exhausted) to join FDR for his summit with Churchill on board the Prince of Wales in Placentia Bay off Newfoundland.

‘At last we’ve gotten together,’ said FDR to Churchill, later writing to Daisy Suckley, ‘He’s a tremendously vital person. I like him.’ After agreeing a Wilsonian programme of democracy later (the Atlantic Charter), both were moved when at a Sunday morning service on the great battleship, the Protestant aristocrats sang the rousing hymns of their boarding schools with the (doomed) crew. It was the first of many meetings.

In September, Hitler’s Army Group Centre was approaching Moscow, but Soviet resistance was intensifying, winter stirring, and Russia had still not collapsed ‘like a house of cards’. When it dawned on him that his Blitzkrieg could fail, Hitler became quieter, more short-tempered, as he forced his generals to seize the rich resources of the south and Leningrad in the north, delaying the storming of Moscow. In the south, Kyiv fell, trapping 665,000 Soviet troops, while in the north he besieged Leningrad, where a million civilians starved to death, planning to raze it:^* ‘The nemesis of history,’ he ranted.

‘This,’ crowed Goebbels, ‘will be the biggest drama of a city in history.’ Keen to avoid ‘the second Mongolian storm from a second Genghis Khan’, Hitler ordered ‘the greatest battle in world history’, the storming of Moscow. But the temperature plummeted; Soviet fighting stiffened; then came a thaw; vehicles languished in mud. Hitler told Count Ciano that winter heralded ‘a repetition of Napoleon’s fate but for Russia not Germany’. In Moscow, on 16 October, Stalin evacuated the main commissariats to the rear; disorder broke out; his train was packed with his library – but on the 18th he stayed to fight. On the 30th the Germans halted. On 7 November, Stalin presided over the October Revolution parade and summoned Zhukov to take command. Stalin had a reserve that Hitler had not registered: his Far Eastern army of a million men, 17,000 tanks, to cover against Japanese attack.

Hirohito too was agonizing over strategy. In July 1940, with Hitler’s acquiescence, the Japanese, overstretched by their war in China, occupied French Indo-China. President Roosevelt punished Tokyo, banning iron and steel supplies and some fuel. Just after Barbarossa, the Japanese Imperial Conference had leaned against any more fighting with Russia, signing a neutrality treaty with Stalin. If America threatened oil supplies, Japan would have to fight the USA as well as attack Dutch and British colonies. ‘Our empire won’t be deterred by war with Great Britain and USA,’ said Prince Konoe, though ‘If the German–Soviet war should develop to the advantage of our empire, we will settle the northern question.’

The hawkish war minister, General Tojo, had a clear plan – and simplicity is often mistaken for lucidity. This general’s son, nicknamed the Razor, a veteran of the Russian civil war, then commander in Manchuria, was a humourless disciplinarian who routinely slapped the faces of his officers as a means of instilling bushido. He proposed attacks on the USA and Britain.

‘Do you have any plans for a protracted war?’ retorted Hirohito. Tojo had to win at once – or not at all. His Southern Plan would send 185,000 men to seize oil and resources in the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya. But first the Japanese had to knock out America, so they were planning an attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor in the tradition of the 1904 raid on Port Arthur. To cover themselves they would also have to take the American Philippines and Guam, an expansive offensive across the Pacific, with a second operation advancing to Australia. But their best admiral, Yamamoto Isoruku, a veteran of Tsushima, warned it ‘wouldn’t be enough if we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco’, and wondered if Tojo and the hawks had ‘confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices’.

‘The Japs are having a real drag-down,’ said FDR, who hoped to avoid provoking Tokyo, ‘trying to decide which way they’re going to jump. No one knows what the decision will be.’ Prince Konoe suggested negotiations; FDR agreed, but by September 1941 the shortage of oil threatened to incapacitate Japan altogether. Konoe proposed ‘to start a war if by early October we can’t achieve our demands through negotiations’. He asked Hirohito to make a decision: he could have refused to go to war, negotiated with America and made temporary concessions, while awaiting developments in the European war. Prince Konoe consulted Admiral Yamamoto.

‘I’ll run wild considerably for the first six months or a year,’ replied the admiral, ‘but I’ve utterly no confidence for the second and third years.’ Konoe preferred negotiation but, as he recalled, ‘His Majesty … leaned towards war.’ In an astonishing conversation, Hirohito, now forty-four, and his commanders decided to risk everything rather than give up any of their expansionist ambitions.

‘If we open hostilities,’ asked Hirohito, ‘will our operations have a probability of success?’

‘Yes,’ answered General Hajime Sugiyama, his chief of staff.

‘At the time of the China Incident [invasion] the army told me we’d achieve peace after one blow. Sugiyama, you were army minister then.’

‘We met unexpected difficulties …’

‘Didn’t I caution you?’ asked Hirohito. ‘Are you lying to me, Sugiyama?’

‘Your Majesty?’ asked naval chief Admiral Nagano.

‘Proceed.’

‘There’s no 100 per cent probability of victory … Assume there’s a sick person and we leave him; he’ll die. But if the doctor’s diagnosis offers 70 per cent survival if we operate, then don’t you think we must try surgery? And if after surgery the patient dies, one must say it was meant to be.’

‘All right.’

Stalin, desperately holding out in Moscow, was waiting to see what Hirohito would do. ‘The possibility of a Japanese attack, existing until recently,’ the spy Sorge reported to Stalin on 14 September, ‘has disappeared.’ It was the most decisive jewel of intelligence in the Second World War.^* Stalin took notice, secretly bringing his fresh Siberian army to Moscow.

Konoe opened negotiations with America, but Roosevelt still demanded withdrawal from China and Indo-China. ‘If we yield to America’s demands,’ warned Razor Tojo, ‘it will destroy the fruits of the China Incident’ – the Chinese empire. On 17 October, Konoe resigned and Hirohito appointed an ‘absolutely dumbfounded’ Tojo. ‘I’m just an ordinary man possessing no shining talents,’ said the Razor. ‘Anything I’ve achieved I owe to hard work and never giving up.’ But he accepted. It was war. ‘If the Emperor said it should be so,’ said the Razor, ‘then that’s it for me.’

‘Now next,’ said Hirohito, ‘when does the navy plan to open hostilities?’

‘On 8 December,’ said Admiral Nagano.

Razor compared the risk to jumping off a cliff with his eyes closed: ‘There are times when we must have the courage to do extraordinary things.’

Razor checked with Hitler whether he would join the war against the USA. Hitler had no obligation but America was ‘a mongrel society’ of Jews, black people and Slavs that ‘couldn’t possibly create an indigenous culture or operate a successful political system’. He believed he was already at war with Roosevelt. Besides, ‘the Soviet Union was finished’, his spokesman announced.

‘Never before,’ Hitler told his veteran comrades, ‘has a gigantic empire been so quickly smashed.’ But the frosts came again; the Germans halted again, just outside Moscow. On 6 December, Zhukov counter-attacked. Moscow was indeed ‘the greatest battle in world history’ – the decisive battle of the war that marked the end of Hitler’s winning streak.

Two days later, before dawn on X-Day, 8 December, Japanese planes took off for Pearl Harbor, Singapore and Guam while the army invaded British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. ‘Throughout the day, the emperor wore his naval uniform and seemed in a splendid mood’ as the first reports came in from the War of Greater Asia. At dawn, 353 Japanese planes hit Pearl Harbor, aiming to destroy four battleships and, especially, the three aircraft carriers. The battleships were sunk and 2,467 men were killed, but the carriers were at sea. The planes returned without finding them. Hirohito celebrated, but Yamamoto realized that Japan had not done enough.

Shaken and ashen, Roosevelt addressed Congress on this ‘date which will live in infamy’, but he was still not at war with Hitler. On 11 December, in the Reichstag, Hitler declared war on America, accusing Roosevelt of leading ‘the Jews in all their satanic treachery’. He looked triumphant, but that moment was the beginning of the American Century. Outside Moscow, Zhukov pushed the Germans back. Their generals panicked. Hitler ordered them ‘not to retreat a single step’. The generals begged him to permit retreat. ‘Do you think Frederick the Great’s grenadiers died gladly? They’d have liked to stay alive but the king had every right to demand the sacrifice.’ Hitler claimed that if he had ‘shown weakness even for a moment, a catastrophe that would have far overshadowed Napoleon’s would have been at hand’. But as he told the Danish foreign minister in November, ‘If the German people prove not strong or willing enough to make sacrifices and shed their blood for the sake of their existence, they deserve to die out and be destroyed by another stronger force.’

In January 1942, the other overconfident, autodidactic supremo, Stalin, insisted on a multifront offensive that, overstretching his armies, allowed the Germans to recover. And the failure of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg accelerated the tragedy of the Jews.

I SEE ONLY ONE OPTION – TOTAL EXTERMINATION: HITLER AND THE HOLOCAUST

Returning to his ‘prophecy’, Hitler declared that ‘The result of this war will be the destruction of Jewry.’ The murder had started not with Jews but with Germans.

In spring 1939, Hitler had ordered the liquidation of the elderly, the mentally ill and the deformed to ensure ‘survival of the fittest’. Hitler had often talked at dinners of his plan ‘to eradicate the incurably ill and not just the mentally ill’. He commissioned his personal doctor Karl Brandt and a Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Major Genetic Disease and Suffering, made up of radicalized doctors, to create a secret system denoted T4 (Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin – headquarters of the euthanasia programme). In September 1939 Hitler ordered ‘mercy killings of ill people deemed incurable’, using Luminal, or Phenobarbital, then, at the suggestion of the SD, carbon monoxide. Over 65,000 were killed.

Although there were only 200,000 terrified and impoverished Jews left in Germany, there were 1.5 million in Hitler’s Poland. He planned to deport them to French Madagascar, where many would presumably perish, but in the meantime, in 1940, the Germans started to wall up ghettos in Polish cities, entrapping over 400,000 Jews. But the Russian war provided the fatal arena for slaughter. At a conference in December 1940, Himmler announced that Eichmann had calculated there would soon be 5.8 million Jews in Nazi hands, offering the chance for a Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. In early 1941, Hitler asked Heydrich to produce ‘a proposal for a final solution’. In May just before Barbarossa, with Hitler’s agreement, Himmler created four Einsatzgruppen that were to follow the Army Groups, each led by trusted RSHA officers. Göring ordered Heydrich to make ‘all preparations’ for ‘a total solution to the Jewish question’. So far ‘Jews who occupy Party and state positions’ were the victims, but the Einsatzgruppen immediately started to kill all Jews, including women and children, in the Baltics and Ukraine, assisted by Lithuanian, Latvian and Ukrainian fascists^* – and enthusiastically joined by the Romanians.

In June 1941, Antonescu ordered, ‘Cleanse Ias¸i of its Jewish population: 13,000 Jews were butchered. When Odessa, the great cosmopolitan Black Sea city, entrepôt of Russian grain, fell in October after a siege that exposed Romanian ineptitude, the Romanians killed 30,000 Jews in the streets, while the surviving 200,000 were concentrated at Bogdanovka and murdered so chaotically that Himmler and Eichmann became vexed. Cooperating with German Einsatzkommandos (Einsatzgruppen units) and Ukrainian Germans, the Romanians killed over 300,000 Jews and were responsible for more Jewish murders than anyone except the Germans.

Himmler and Heydrich visited the sites of the massacres and approved them, including the burning by Order Police of 500 women and children in a synagogue in Białystok. On 29–30 September 1941, at Babi Yar, near Kyiv, Einsatzgruppe C, aided by Ukrainians, killed 33,771 Kyivan Jews. ‘The action itself proceeded smoothly,’ said the official report. ‘The Wehrmacht welcomed the measures.’ Army officers registered the Jews, marked them with white armbands and concentrated them, providing trucks for transportation, cordoning off execution zones, even participating in the slaughter themselves. By the end of the year Einsatzgruppen had killed 500,000 Jews in Ukraine and the Baltics.^*

That August, Himmler had attended an execution, which may have been filmed by Hitler’s personal cameraman, though it is unknown if the Führer watched it, after which he asked the Einsatzgruppe commander Arthur Nebe to find a less ‘psychologically burdensome’ means than mass shootings. Nebe turned to the doctors who had euthanized Germany’s disabled and who were now free since Hitler had cancelled the programme when the Bishop of Münster denounced it.

In November 1941, SS-Standartenführer Walther Rauff tested gassing by carbon monoxide in special trucks which were then provided to Einsatzgruppen. In October, Himmler had ordered SS police chief Globocnik to create a death camp at Belzec – as Hitler ordered all Jews to wear yellow stars and decided to deport all Jews from Germany. The RAF’s bombing of German cities and, above all, the failure of the Russian war justified this path towards physical extermination. At meetings with his paladins, Hitler constantly called for the liquidation. As Goebbels recorded, ‘The Führer has decided on a total clean-up. He prophesied to the Jews that if they started a world war they would experience their own destruction. This is not just a turn of phrase … the destruction of Jewry must be the result.’ At a meeting with Hitler on 18 December, Himmler noted: ‘Jewish question. To be exterminated as partisans.’ Himmler later remembered that ‘The Führer placed the execution of this very difficult order on my shoulders.’ It is likely that the decision to launch the Holocaust was taken by Hitler between 12 and 18 December 1941 – the moment the Russian counter-attack was revealing that the war might not be won.

On 20 January 1942, at a lacustrine SS villa at Wannsee in Berlin, Heydrich held a meeting with fifteen civil servants (from the Interior, Justice, Foreign and other ministries) and SS and Nazi Party officials, including Eichmann of the RSHA Jewish Department to decide ‘a consistent approach among the central organs’ to the ‘final solution’. After reminding everyone pompously that Göring had given him and Himmler responsibility for this ‘Endlösung’, Heydrich reported that of eleven million Jews in Europe the able-bodied could be worked to death, ‘eliminated by natural causes’, while the rest, the strongest, would have to be ‘treated accordingly’ since they would be ‘the product of natural selection and if released act as a seed of a new Jewish revival’. The representative of the General Government suggested that his 2.5 million Jews should be liquidated immediately, then Heydrich explained that the rest of the Jews would be transported to ‘transit ghettos from which they would be transported to the east’ – a euphemism for mass murder. Jews would be gathered across Europe, transported to death camps and ultimately killed. Afterwards, Heydrich invited Eichmann for a cognac.

Five days later, at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler told Himmler and others, ‘This has to be done quickly … The Jews must leave Europe … I see only one option: complete extermination …’ On 14 February, he told Goebbels, ‘No sentimental feelings. The Jews deserve the catastrophe they’re now experiencing … We must accelerate this process with unemotional ruthlessness.’ Three days later the first victims, Jews from Lublin, were gassed at Belzec. In a month 70,000 were killed. New killing camps were built at Sobibor and Treblinka, where by autumn 1942 a total of 1.7 million Polish Jews had been murdered.^* A new killing camp, Birkenau, was added to the existing Auschwitz complex, where in September 1941 a new poison, Zyklon-B gas, was tried out on Russian prisoners.

On 27 May 1942, Heydrich, now protector of Moravia, whom Hitler was planning to appoint as French governor, was being driven out of Prague when his Mercedes was struck by grenades, thrown by brave Czech commandos. Fragments of the car seat peppered his spleen. Although penicillin, being developed in America, would have cured him in a week, he died days later. But the Final Solution continued.

THE SLAVE MASTERS: KRUPP

Auschwitz-Birkenau became the killing and slavery centre for European Jews outside Poland and the USSR. Heydrich’s system called for local police to register their Jews, then summon them for entraining for ‘evacuation to the east’, yet the reaction of Hitler’s vassals was unenthusiastic and defiance was entirely possible: Mussolini had passed Racial Laws but refused to deport any Italian Jews; the Hungarian regent Horthy, who had persecuted Jews through a series of Nazi-style Jewish Laws from 1938 and was fully informed about the Final Solution, sent 100,000 Jews to the killing camps but refused to surrender the majority of his large Jewish community. There were 300,000 Jews in France plus another 400,000 in Algeria. Few were touched in Algeria, but in the metropolis, ordinary French police rounded up 75,000 Jews and sent them to the killing camps, where virtually all were killed, a particularly horrific record in the home of the Enlightenment. The Danes managed to hide virtually all their Jews, saving 90 per cent by spiriting them to Sweden. The Dutch on the other hand cooperated with the killing: 107,000 out of 140,000 Jews were deported and virtually all were killed – a higher proportion than in any other country in western Europe including Germany.

On arrival at Auschwitz, the Jews faced the ‘selection’ by an SS doctor, Joseph Mengele, who determined who could be forced to work and who should be exterminated at once. Mengele, an elegant ghoul who conducted vicious ‘experiments’ on Jewish children, would send children, women and elderly to the ‘showers’ (sealed and fitted with invisible gas siphons) where they were stripped of their belongings and clothes, then gassed, their bodies dragged out by Jewish slave workers who, after extracting gold teeth, fed them into the crematoria that coughed sickly smoke out of towering chimneys.^* In July 1942, Himmler watched Mengele make a selection of Dutch Jews in total silence before dining with the commandant in ‘the finest, radiant mood’. One Viennese family personifies the intricate scale of trans-European murder: four of Sigmund Freud’s elderly sisters were now dispatched on death trains to be slaughtered in distant killing camps – Mitzi and Paula Freud were gassed at Maly Trostenets (Belarus), Rosa at Treblinka, and Dolfi was starved at Theresienstadt.

Between 5.9 and 6.1 million Jews were killed in total, including the near million murdered by Einsatzgruppen. An entire world was destroyed, a culture vanished. Romani and Sinti (denounced as ‘mongrel Gypsies’) were also targeted: 500,000 were killed in the Porajmos (Devouring) along with 5,000–15,000 homosexuals and several million Gentile Poles and Russians. Although trains and barbed steel had made possible vast deportations and concentration camps since 1890s, and although other regimes particularly Stalin’s in Russia and later those in Communist China and Cambodia killed many, none did so on such a scale and using industrial means. It was a crime, based on race, unequalled in history, for which no word existed: in 1944, a Jewish Pole invented ‘genocide’ to describe its enormity – a word that like the Holocaust itself should never be misused.

There is always money in mass murder: Nazi viceroys living in luxury enjoyed sadistic and sexual control over innocent people whose property they looted. But they also enforced slavery on Slavs and Jews. The Krupps, consuming businesses all over conquered Europe, were typical of the German businesses that embraced this diabolic order. Krupp owned factories in twelve nations from Dnepropetrovsk (Dnipro) in Ukraine to Paris where he seized Jewish firms, colluding in sending one of their owners to the death camps. In April 1942, visiting Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, Krupp praised the liquidation of Jews, ‘but could see no reason they shouldn’t contribute before they went’, requesting an assignment of slaves and offering the SS a commission per slave.

In three years, twelve million slaves – Poles wearing ‘P’ on their clothes, Russians ‘SR’ (Soviet Russian) or ‘OST’ (for Ostarbeiter – eastern worker) and Jews ‘Judenmaterial’ (Jewish property), later superseded by the yellow star – were imported to the Reich or worked in slave camps. Some 30,000 Slavic women toiled in German military brothels. The numbers are imprecise but colossal. After the war, 5.2 million slaves were repatriated to Russia and Poland.

In July 1942, Krupp worked closely with Speer, armaments minister, and history’s greatest slave master accepted ‘45,000 Russians, 120,000 prisoners, 6,000 civilians’ for his steelworks and coal mines. But this was just the start. Krupp got Hitler’s permission to use Auschwitz’s Jewish slaves to build the Berthawerk factory (named after his mother) in Silesia and soon more arrived in Essen, where signs read: ‘Slavs are slaves’. Corporate memoranda openly reported that ‘slaves’ had arrived from the ‘slave market’, with Alfried Krupp designated the Sklavenhalter – slave owner. Krupp controlled thirty-eight camps guarded by SS and his own Kruppstahl guards with blackjacks. ‘You must be careful History doesn’t call you a slave trader,’ warned one of his directors.

In October 1942, Krupp opened a gun-fuse factory at Auschwitz ‘to make use of the people there’, the details worked out by Krupp and the commandant Rudolf Höss. ‘As regards the cooperation of our technical office in Breslau, I can only say that, between that office and Auschwitz, the closest understanding exists,’ wrote Krupp in September 1943, ‘and is guaranteed for the future.’ Right to the end of the war, noted one of his managers, ‘Krupp considered it a duty to make 520 Jewish girls, some of them little more than children, work under the most brutal conditions in the heart of the concern, in Essen.’

These crimes were made possible by the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people, each of whom bears precisely the same guilt as Hitler himself. It was quickly known to the leadership and most of the German public via events on their streets, if not via the stories of soldiers. Many who should have known better did nothing; Pope Pius did scarcely anything. Yet there were many brave people, many but not enough, who protected Jews, some of them rogues – the profiteer Oskar Schindler saved 1,400 Polish Jews – but most were ordinary people of courage, and some were royal. In Romania, King Mihai visited Odessa with Antonescu, impotently protesting against the massacres. But when Himmler ordered the killing of all Romanian Jews, he and his mother Queen Helena refused to countenance it. ‘By 1942,’ Mihai said, ‘I was convinced something had to be done.’

‘Keep quiet,’ barked Antonescu, ‘you’re still a child.’ But Mihai won the release of Romanian Jewish leaders and stopped the deportations to Belzec, a notable achievement in the midst of the appalling Romanian crimes.^*

Meanwhile Hitler had a more immediate concern. ‘If I don’t get the oil of Maikop and Grozny,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to liquidate this entire war.’

HITLER’S BATTLE FOR OIL

That summer of 1942, Hitler was planning Operation Blue, an offensive against Russia to secure Stalingrad on the Volga and the oilfields in Baku, Maikop and Grozny. The capture of Russian fuel depots did not help: Russian tanks ran on diesel, German on gasoline. Stalin was the master of industrial production, moving entire industries eastwards: his T-34 tank, simple and manoeuvrable was, agreed German generals, ‘the best tank in the war’, its largest factory in Leningrad being totally moved to Chelyabinsk which became Tankograd (Tank City), soon producing 1,300 a month, outstripping German production under Speer.^* But it all depended on oil.

In June, General Erwin Rommel forced the surrender of thousands of British troops in Tobruk, and his forces were soon heading for Egypt. If Hitler seized the Caucasus, he would secure the oil in Iraq and Iran – and win the war. Palestinian Jews were afraid as Rommel approached Egypt.^* British forces, aided by Jewish fighters, including the young Zionist Moshe Dayan, had seized Syria from the Vichy French: Dayan lost an eye in the battle. Churchill took no risks with his oilfields. In Iraq, where King Faisal’s grandson Faisal II, aged six, was too young to rule, the British had overthrown a pro-German general. In Iran, Reza Shah tried to play Britain off against Germany, but in August 1941 Stalin and Churchill invaded, swept aside his vaunted army (at which the shah beat his general with his cane) and forced his abdication and exile, replacing him with his son Mohammad Reza, now twenty-one.

In July 1942, Hitler arrived at his Ukrainian HQ in Vinnitsa – Werewolf – to launch Blue, which again wrongfooted Stalin and achieved astonishing advances, as the Axis forces, having mopped up Crimea,^* charged across the sweltering steppes, reaching Stalingrad in September. While Churchill sought a winning general to stop Rommel, Stalin, ordering ‘Not one step back’ and placing blocking units to execute any retreating troops, turned the ruins of Stalingrad into a fortress. As the German Sixth Army fought its way into the city, the Soviets held out in a cauldron battle. Sensing he was close to victory, Hitler determined to take it: ‘a battle of the giants’ was what Goebbels called it. Stalin barely slept, spending the night on a sofa in the Little Corner, as the Russians fought ferociously, an astonishing resistance encouraged by terror but truly inspired by the quasi-sacred cults of patriotism, sacrifice and heroism. ‘Za Rodina, za Stalina!’ they cried as they fought. ‘For Motherland, for Stalin!’ Soviet losses in the entire war were unparalleled: twelve million soldiers and over fifteen million civilians perished.

Roosevelt, far from the grim, micromanaging intensity of Hitler’s and Stalin’s headquarters, was hosting Churchill in his idiosyncratic White House, which FDR grandly called ‘the backyard’. There, theatrically wielding his cigarette holder, he faced global decisions on a vast scale, tempered by the mixing of martinis and the company of resident cronies Harry Hopkins, the pretty young Crown Princess Märtha of Norway and his devoted cousin Daisy Suckley, along with Fala the Scottish terrier: ‘You’re the only one I don’t have to entertain,’ FDR flattered Daisy and often talked of retiring with her to his cottage at Hyde Park. The pressure was astonishing. ‘I’m going over to the office and will spend the day blowing various people up,’ FDR told Daisy, to whom he found time to write indiscreet letters. His guest, Churchill, who had suffered a minor heart attack during an earlier White House stay in December 1941, reeled from British military disasters, the fall of Singapore and defeat at Tobruk. But over the next weeks, he and FDR delayed any invasion of France and agreed instead to land in north Africa and attack Hitler’s ‘soft underbelly’ in Italy. Churchill flew to Moscow to inform Stalin there would be no invasion of France. Stalin accused him of cowardice – but the two warhorses ended up drinking together into the night.

Hitler boasted that Stalingrad was about to fall and ‘No one will drive us from this place again,’ adding, ‘The Jews once laughed at my prophecies … I can assure you they’ll choke on their laughter everywhere.’

In the Pacific, Tojo was celebrating a roll of victories, sinking the British battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales, taking Malaya and Hong Kong from Britain, the East Indies from Holland, Guam and the Philippines from America. In February 1942, British Singapore had surrendered. The Japanese bombed Australia and the Imperial Navy had proposed an Australian invasion. Tojo preferred to attack the British Raj, starting with Burma. Backed by the Thais and by insurgents led by an anti-British nationalist Aung San, Tojo conquered most of the country, cutting Allied supplies to China. Aung was typical of Asian nationalists who embraced Japan’s Pan-Asian policy against European empires.^* But Japanese cruelty exposed the reality; Allied prisoners suffered slave labour, death marches, torture, beheadings and starvation. One in four Filipinos were killed. In China, the Japanese killed four million civilians in their ‘Burn to Ash Strategy’, known as the ‘Kill All, Burn All, Loot All’ policy, signed off by Hirohito. Overall during the war, fourteen million Chinese died.

MAO AND THE SHANGHAI ACTRESS

FDR decided ‘Europe First’, which called for limited aid to Chiang, who he hoped would tie down 700,000 Japanese troops. Roosevelt sent a peppery American general, ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, who soon loathed Chiang (whom he called Peanut); Chiang hated him back. Incapable of understanding China, Stilwell resented Chiang’s dictatorship, enforced by a secret-police chief, Dai Lai, who threw prisoners into cauldrons. Madame Chiang flew to America to address rallies and win over FDR, charming the Americans with her Wellesley accent and chic cheongsam. As British and Indian forces retreated in Burma, Stilwell demanded that Chiang help; Chiang sent troops, but they were routed. In the comfortable caves of Yen’an, his rival Mao Zedong fought a guerrilla war against the Japanese, deploying new units north into Manchuria – among the cadres a young Korean, Kim Il-sung, whom the Japanese nicknamed Tiger on account of his small-scale but ferocious attacks.

Revelling in Chiang’s defeats, Mao launched a Rectification Campaign, a Stalinesque terror of what he called ‘pain and friction’ managed by Kang Sheng, a sadistic myrmidon who always wore a black tunic and boots and rode a black horse. Kang had escorted Mao’s two sons to be educated in Moscow, where in 1937 he had helped Stalin’s hatchet man Yezhov liquidate Chinese Trotskyites. Now attaching himself to Mao, with whom he enjoyed talking about sex and terror, sharing erotica and devising tortures, he tortured and shot thousands while staging the ‘struggle and confession’ sessions that would characterize Maoist terror.

Mao played mahjong, read history books and frolicked with a harem of Shanghai actresses until a dazzling film star, Jiang Qing, twenty-seven-year-old daughter of a concubine and an alcoholic innkeeper, arrived in Yen’an. In Shanghai she had been arrested for Leftism but had flirted if not slept with her KMT interrogators. Mao’s comrades criticized his ‘imperial concubines’, but, addressing a meeting, he spotted her in the front row and lent her his coat. Later she arrived at his residence to return the coat and stayed the night. Mao abandoned his respected wife, who had endured the Long March, and insisted on marrying Jiang Qing, backed by Kang Sheng, whose alliance with her lasted until the 1970s. Mao’s son Anying now arrived back from Russia, with a pistol given by Stalin, joining his four-year-old sister Li Min in their troglodytic ménage. In 1940, Jiang Qing gave birth to a daughter, Li Na, but family was always at the mercy of power. Mao declined to rescue his brother Zemin, who was excuted by the KMT; Jiang meanwhile denounced Li Na’s nanny for poisoning their milk, shrieking, ‘Poison! Confess!’ Mao recognized that Jiang Qing was ‘as deadly poisonous as a scorpion’: one day she would almost rule China.

After Rangoon fell, the Japanese threatened India where Nehru, charming, quicksilver, elegant, had emerged as the leader of Congress, respectfully following his ‘Bapu’ Gandhi. In 1928, Nehru had declared, ‘India must sever the British connection and attain Purna Swaraj – total independence.’^* Nehru was in jail when his wife Kamala died of TB. He had devoted himself to politics – admitting, ‘I almost overlooked her’ – though she had been jailed for her campaigning. It was their daughter, Indira, often alone while her father was in jail, who became his political confidante.^*

Nehru and Gandhi, frustrated by years of British obfuscation, disagreed on the war: Gandhi, a pacific pragmatist, wanted neutrality; Nehru, an internationalist socialist, supported Britain against fascism. But the British refusal to promise post-war independence reunited them again. ‘Some say Jawaharlal and I were estranged,’ said Gandhi. ‘It will require much more than difference of opinion to estrange us … Jawaharlal will be my successor.’ But many Muslims as well as Hindus volunteered to fight for Britain, increasing the size of the Indian army tenfold to 2.5 million, and the British recognized Jinnah as representative of Indian Muslims: ‘After I was treated on the same basis as Mr Gandhi, I was wonderstruck.’ In Lahore, Jinnah declared, ‘Muslims are a nation according to any definition of a nation and must have … their states.’ Gandhi was agonized by this dilemma.

Now Chiang Kai-shek, keen to help Britain but also to show Asian solidarity, flew to Delhi to meet Nehru and Gandhi, whom he urged to join the war. They both cordially ignored him.

In August 1942, they launched a Quit India campaign, which, far beyond civil disobedience, destroyed hundreds of police and railway stations, sabotaging railways and telegraphs. The British responded by deploying troops and mass arrests but the campaign failed. Indians continued to volunteer for Britain.

During Chiang’s visit, two famines were killing many in the two greatest Asian countries, both exacerbated by governmental incompetence and wartime priorities. Three million Indians died in a famine in Bengal.^* Six hundred miles to the east, in Henan, noted Chiang, ‘People are starving, dogs and animals are eating corpses.’ He added, ‘Our social reality is scarred. We’re exhausted after six years of the war.’ Two million Chinese died.

In May 1942, Razor Tojo was planning an extravagantly Japanese Pacific – as fantastical as Hitler’s visions – dominating China, giving eastern India to a new Burmese kingdom, ruling Australia, Hawaii, Alaska, even Canada. But Admiral Yamamoto resisted this ‘victory fever’, writing to his favourite geisha, ‘The first stage has been a kind of children’s hour and it will soon be over; now comes the adult’s hour.’

THE FUTURE OF MANKIND: ROOSEVELT, STALIN AND JACK KENNEDY

In June, Yamamoto and the fleet, including four carriers, sailed to take Midway Island, on the way to Hawaii, but instead the Americans, aided by breaking Japanese codes, sank all four, losing only one of their own. In April 1943, the Americans decrypted Yamamoto’s flight plan and shot down his plane. Now the initiative passed to the Americans, who launched their first offensive across the vast Pacific distances far to the south at Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands, where at 2.27 a.m. on 2 August a patrol torpedo boat, PT-109, commanded by Lieutenant Jack Kennedy, twenty-six-year-old son of the ambassador, was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. PT-109 exploded and sank, and two of his crew were killed instantly. Ten men survived, three badly burned. ‘Fight or surrender?’ he asked them. ‘You men have families … I’ve nothing to lose.’ They chose to fight. Kennedy had already endured much ill health, including Addison’s Disease (diagnosed after the war), and the incident damaged his back. He nonetheless rescued two others, towing them to the nearest island, then several times swimming miles until Polynesian scouts finally arrived to rescue and feed the starving crew. Ambassador Kennedy made sure Jack’s heroism was celebrated. ‘kennedy’s son’, the New York Times announced, ‘is hero in pacific’.^*

At the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler declared that Stalingrad’s fall ‘was only a matter of time’, boasting privately that he would advance into Iraq – ‘thoroughly within the realms of possibility’ – but his eagerness blinded him to a growing vulnerability. In Moscow, Stalin and Zhukov, looking at the map, saw an opportunity and, unusually, the ice-cold dictator shook hands with the harsh general. As the cauldron battle raged in Stalingrad, throughout October and November, General Montgomery mustered superior forces and defeated Rommel at El Alamein; on 8 November 107,000 Anglo-American troops landed in Morocco and Algeria, rolling up German, Vichy and Italian forces.

On 19 November, Zhukov sprang Operation Uranus, a million Russians in two pincers smashing through the weaker Romanians to surround Hitler’s Sixth Army around Stalingrad. ‘No matter what,’ shouted Hitler, ‘we’ll hold out at all costs.’ On 2 February 1943, the Sixth Army surrendered. The myth of Hitler’s invincibility was shattered. While Hitler believed he was a military genius, Stalin learned the art of command: find talented generals and work with them. He promoted himself and Zhukov to marshal. Ten million Soviet soldiers started their two-year multi-fronted, thousand-mile-long counter-offensive that, against stubborn resistance and at unspeakable cost, drove the Nazis out of the devastated motherland.^* On 9 July, Anglo-American troops landed in Sicily. After losing tens of thousands of men in Russia and Africa, Mussolini was crippled with stomach cramps. On 25 July, Victor Emmanuel dismissed and arrested Mussolini. Hitler immediately occupied Italy, and had the Duce rescued by commandos.

The road to victory had to be agreed in person. FDR, Stalin and Churchill travelled to Teheran – Stalin had never flown before. On 28 November FDR met Stalin for the first time, the two striking up an affinity, personal and strategic, at the cost of Churchill, the weaker player whose Indian empire seemed old-fashioned to the progressive American. Stalin persuaded FDR, who was staying at the US legation, that a Nazi assassination plot meant he must be protected in the more secure Soviet legation; keen to build on his relationship with Stalin, FDR agreed. Stalin naturally bugged FDR’s room.

‘In our hands, we have the future of mankind,’ said Churchill, opening their summit, ‘the greatest concentration of world power that has ever been seen in the history of mankind.’

‘History has spoiled us,’ Stalin acknowledged. ‘Let’s begin our work.’ They agreed that the Anglo-Americans would invade France in May 1944 (later delayed by a month) and that Stalin could keep the three Baltic states, given to him by Hitler. At dinner Stalin suggested that 50,000 German officers be executed. FDR agreed. When Churchill walked out, Stalin insisted he was joking.

The least important leader in Teheran was the young shah of Iran. Churchill did not bother to visit him; Stalin visited. The shah already craved Iranian power and asked for tanks; Stalin agreed, provided Russian troops operated them. The king collected cars, learned to fly and chased girls. Unhappy with his Egyptian wife, Fawzia, he depended on his mystical-poetical Swiss adviser, Perron, now promoted from gardener to royal secretary. But he had learned the meaning of power.

On D-Day – 6 June 1944 – 156,000 Anglo-American troops under the American Dwight Eisenhower landed in Normandy – Operation Overlord.^* By the end of the month 850,000 troops were ashore, breaking out into France as other forces fought their way up through Italy. The D-Day landings marked an even greater victory: the infections of its wounded were treated with a new miracle drug, penicillin.^*

As Anglo-American forces fought their way up through Italy and across France, Hitler ordered that Paris ‘must not fall into the enemy’s hands except lying in complete debris’, but his generals disobeyed him. Dodging German snipers, de Gaulle marched through Paris, celebrating ‘Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!’ He was determined to restore ‘la grandeur’ of ‘France éternelle’ with himself as a republican monarch.

Stalin’s armies burst into Poland; days later, on 20 July, Hitler was leaning over his maps in the wooden operations hut at the Wolf’s Lair when a bomb exploded.

Among the shattered walls and dead officers, Hitler had a cut leg and a burst eardrum, but he was alive, protected by the table leg. Exhilarated at this further evidence of providence, Hitler learned that the assassin was a decorated colonel who had just left the hut: Count Claus von Stauffenberg, who had lost an eye and a hand in the war which he, like most Junker officers, had supported, with all its horrific atrocities, until Russian defeat. Yet he was one of the courageous few who dared resist Hitler. Hearing the explosion, Stauffenberg escaped from the Wolf’s Lair and, convinced that Hitler was dead, flew to Berlin to find his coup falling apart. The Führer proved he was alive by talking on the phone to the key conspirator, who then arrested and shot Stauffenberg to save his own skin. Himmler then rounded up suspects, whom Hitler ordered to be ‘hanged like meat’, their agonies filmed – and possibly later watched by the dictator. Already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and stimulated by a pharmaceutical cornucopia injected by his quack Theodor Morell (who had made millions from his own branded delousing ‘Russia Powder’ issued to the army), including Pervitin (a methamphetamine) and Eukodal (the opioid oxycodone), Hitler had been injured, his cuts filled with splinters from the bomb. Morell saved his life by administering penicillin found on captured American troops. Hitler had deteriorated, and now he was red-eyed, deathly pale, limping, his leg and arm shaking. Although he tightened his grip on Germany through his campaign of vengeance, he was losing allies fast as the Red Army approached his borders.

In July, Stalin halted his forces near Warsaw as 20,000 Polish resistance fighters launched their uprising, timed to establish themselves before the Soviets arrived. Obsessed like all Russian leaders with the danger of an independent Poland and keen to establish his own Communists in power, Stalin called their bluff and did not help, leaving Hitler’s SS and assorted Ukrainian auxiliaries of diabolical depravity to slaughter 15,000 Polish rebels and 200,000 civilians and raze Warsaw itself.

‘I planned a coup,’ King Mihai of Romania told this author, ‘against Marshal Antonescu.’ The Soviets were on his border. On 23 August 1944, the Hohenzollern invited Red Dog for an audience and ordered an armistice. Red Dog raged. Mihai drew his pistol. Four officers disarmed Antonescu. At gunpoint, the king ‘led him into the king’s safe where my father used to keep his stamp collection. I locked him in there’ and sued for peace. It was Mihai’s finest moment, but it was too little too late.

Next door in Bulgaria, Hitler had already poisoned a reluctant ally, Tsar Boris III. In Hungary, Horthy also attempted an anti-Nazi coup at which Hitler’s commandos kidnapped the regent’s son, who was held hostage to force Horthy to relinquish control. In the wake of German troops came Eichmann, who organized the deportation of 400,000 Jews in just three months. Most were murdered at Auschwitz.

In February 1945, after American bombers shattered the Berlin Chancellery, and Allied forces converged from east and west, Hitler, accompanied by Eva Braun, moved into the nearby Führerbunker just as Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill set off for a conference at Yalta in Crimea, once the tsar’s holiday palace, recently liberated. In the twilit, dank concrete gloom of the Berlin bunker, Hitler’s mother’s portrait hung in his bedroom; his tiny office was dominated by a portrait of Frederick the Great whose last-minute reprieve on the death of Tsarina Elizaveta obsessed him. ‘He too was cut out not for the Seven Years War,’ murmured Hitler, ‘but for dalliance, philosophy and flute-playing, yet still had to live up to his historical mission.’ Frederick’s coat was always covered in snuff stains. Eva Braun noticed mess on Hitler’s grey tunic. ‘You don’t have to copy everything to do with Old Fritz!’ she teased him.

His afternoons were spent in meetings, meals were taken with Braun; his four secretaries still had to endure ‘tea’ until 4 a.m. as the supine dictator droned on – a routine interspersed with embers of hope and spasms of rage.

FDR AND THE THREE KINGS

On 4 February, Stalin, travelling in Nicholas II’s train carriage, arrived at Yalta, as in Berlin, Eva Braun, determined to remain and if necessary die with Hitler, celebrated her thirty-third birthday with her lover and his courtiers upstairs in an intact section of the Chancellery.

In the tsar’s white palace of Livadia, Stalin presided with calm, gleeful and inscrutable potency, master of his brief though weary after years of sixteen-hour days. FDR, the youngest of the three, was exhausted, having just been elected president for an unprecedented fourth time. But he now suffered arteriosclerosis and felt ‘tired and listless’, his mouth sometimes gaping. Churchill too was worn out, ‘woollier than ever’, complained a participant; but even past his best he was still better than most. Revelling in his new power, Stalin was moved by FDR and suspicious of Churchill. FDR, accompanied by his daughter Anna and a depleted Hopkins, leaned towards Stalin, naively believing their progressive powers could remake a post-imperial world; Churchill craved his old partnership with FDR. But Britain, bankrupt and overstretched by imperial obligations, was overshadowed by the new superpowers. The Three decided that Germany must surrender unconditionally; they would create a stronger international organization called the United Nations. Stalin would enter the war against Japan. But that grim realist, whose armies were liberating eastern Europe, already knew that ‘Borders will be decided by force,’ and was sending in cohorts of local Stalinists to be his vassals. Only in Yugoslavia and Albania did local partisans seize power without Soviet troops.^*

FDR told Stalin he was a Zionist and asked if he was one. ‘In principle,’ replied Stalin. Talking of Palestine, FDR joked that he had ‘three kings waiting for him’.

‘I’m a bit exhausted but really all right,’ FDR told Eleanor before sailing from Yalta on USS Quincy. Moored in the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt, sitting on deck in a dark cape, he met the epicene young Egyptian king Farouk, descendant of Mehmed Ali, then Haile Selassie, now rebuilding Ethiopia after Italian depredations; finally Abdulaziz ibn Saud arrived, conveyed on USS Murphy with a herd of sheep to slaughter and guards wearing scimitars. Abdulaziz was lame. President and king sat together on deck in their wheelchairs. Citing German atrocities, FDR asked him to approve rising Jewish migration to Palestine. ‘Jews and Arabs could never cooperate,’ replied Abdulaziz. ‘Give the Jews the best German lands.’ FDR’s voyage home took nine days.

On 19 March Hitler ordered the destruction of all German infrastructure, the Nero Decree, but in many areas reasonable officials were already ignoring fanatical orders; across the sinking empire, SS guards blew up the killing camps and forced starving prisoners westwards on death marches. On the 20th, Hitler emerged from the bunker to review young fighters of the Hitler Youth – one was twelve – pinching cheeks, tweaking ears as he moved down the line, his last appearance on film. Goebbels retained Hitler’s favour, while Göring dreamed of the succession and Himmler tried to trade Jewish lives in secret negotiations.

‘Well, who’s going to take Berlin?’ Stalin asked his top commanders in the Kremlin on 1 April, ‘we or the Allies?’

‘It’s we who’ll take Berlin,’ barked bullet-headed Marshal Konev.

‘Whoever breaks in first, let him take Berlin,’ ordered Stalin. Konev and Zhukov raced for their planes to fly to the front.

While the Soviets were marshalling their vast forces, FDR was with Daisy Suckley at Hyde Park but he ‘looks terribly badly – so tired … He just can’t stand this strain indefinitely.’ Boarding the train to Warm Springs (the Little White House) with Daisy, he was ‘joking and laughing as usual’, perhaps because Lucy Mercer was joining him. On 12 April, sitting with Daisy and Lucy, FDR raised his hand to his head, saying he had a headache, and died.^*

‘The great miracle!’ cried Hitler, convinced this was the replay of Frederick the Great’s reprieve. ‘Who’s laughing now? The war’s not lost.’

WE CAN STILL WIN: HIROHITO’S OFFENSIVE

Stalin was strangely moved by the president’s death: ‘Roosevelt was clever, educated, farsighted,’ even if ‘he prolonged the life of capitalism’. At the White House, minutes after Eleanor heard the news, the vice-president Harry Truman, an obscure but loyal Missouri senator, arrived for a drink. She placed her hand on his shoulder: ‘Harry, the president is dead.’

Pause.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ Truman asked Eleanor.

‘Is there anything we can do for you?’ she replied. Later Truman placed a placard on his Oval Office desk: ‘The buck stops here!’

On 16 April, Zhukov and Konev unleashed 2.5 million men, 41,000 guns and 6,250 tanks against Berlin, with the former given the honour of taking the city. When Zhukov was delayed by German resistance, Stalin rang Konev: ‘Turn your tank armies on Berlin.’ A cauldron battle was fought, street by street, as they converged on the Chancellery. In Germany alone, an estimated two million girls were raped by Russian soldiers.^* Down in the bunker ‘The artillery fire can already be heard,’ wrote Eva Braun, who practised pistol shooting in the garden. As Soviet tanks reached the outskirts, Hitler celebrated his birthday with Göring, Himmler and Goebbels. When they flew out of the city, he insisted on dying there. That night, Eva Braun had a party for him upstairs, dancing, singing and drinking champagne. But at the next day’s meeting he learned that his order to SS-General Steiner to counter-attack had been disobeyed, at which a flushed, foam-flecked Hitler denounced the treachery before collapsing in his chair: ‘The war is lost, but if you believe I’m leaving Berlin, gentlemen, you’re sadly mistaken. I’d rather put a bullet in my head.’ His SS doctor recommended a ‘pistol and poison’ combination for his suicide.

Outside Berlin, Göring claimed the succession and was dismissed, while Himmler was disgraced for talking to the Allies. Himmler’s representative, Hermann Fegelein, married to Eva Braun’s sister, was found drunk with a mistress and shot in the garden. The Russians captured Vienna; the Americans took the Ruhr, arresting Alfried Krupp at Villa Hügel. Russian tanks were closing in. The Goebbels family now moved into the Bunker with their five children. Eva Braun wrote a letter, a ‘final sign of life’, to her best friend; as death drew ‘perilously nearer’ she was suffering ‘because of the Führer. Maybe everything will turn out all right but he’s lost faith …’

On the night of 28 April, Hitler and Eva married – he wearing a grey tunic with medals, she a dark silk dress. She signed the certificate, ‘Eva Hitler née Braun’, and celebrated with champagne as the groom retired to dictate ‘my political will’, in which he blamed ‘Jewish interests’ who had been ‘made to atone for their guilt albeit through more humane means’, an oblique reference to the Holocaust. As the couple sat up until 4 a.m., the staff partied wildly. ‘An erotic fever seemed to take possession of everyone,’ recalled Hitler’s secretary. ‘Everywhere even in the dentist’s chair I saw bodies interlocked in lascivious embraces. The women had discarded all modesty … freely exposing their private parts.’

Rising late, Hitler learned that Russian tanks were just 500 yards away. In Milan, Mussolini and his lover had been shot and hung upside down by their feet. After lunch on 30 April, Hitler tested his cyanide on his Alsatian dog Blondi, who died instantly; he then shook hands with his staff and the Hitlers withdrew into their study. The staff waited until the sounds of partying upstairs were interrupted by a shot. The valet peeped inside, then re-emerged. ‘It’s happened,’ he said. Eva Hitler sat, legs drawn up, on the sofa, suffused with the smell of almonds, a sign of cyanide, while Hitler leaned the other way, a finger of blood at his forehead, pistol at his feet, blood spattered on the wallpaper. The bodies were wrapped in a carpet, carried out and burned in the garden as Russian shells exploded nearby. Just over twelve hours later, Zhukov phoned Stalin’s Kuntsevo mansion.

‘Comrade Stalin’s just gone to bed,’ said the bodyguard.

‘Wake him,’ ordered Zhukov.

Stalin picked up the phone. ‘So,’ said Stalin, ‘that’s the end of the bastard. Too bad we couldn’t take him alive. Where’s Hitler’s body?’^*

Germany surrendered three days later as Stalin sent Soviet and Mongolian armies to attack the Japanese in Korea and north China. As American forces fought their way across the Pacific, Hirohito repeatedly demanded Japanese counter-attacks. ‘There’s no sign of any attacks. Why aren’t you carrying them out? Isn’t there some way some place we can win a real victory over the Americans?’ he asked. ‘Do this for me so I can have peace of mind.’

As American bombers immolated Japanese cities in frequent air raids, Hirohito criticized his generals: ‘We have to do the attacking.’ In January 1944, his troops had attacked India unsuccessfully; in April, his Ichigo offensive, deploying 700,000 Japanese troops, shook Chiang’s government; but in July he dismissed Razor Tojo, promising his new premier that he would ‘remain in this divine land and fight to the death’. In October, when the Americans under General Douglas MacArthur landed in the Philippines, Hirohito demanded resistance. ‘I agreed to the showdown battle of Leyte,’ he admitted afterwards, a decision that cost the lives of 80,000 Japanese troops. In early 1945, he consulted his ex-premiers, all of whom favoured fighting on except Konoe. ‘If we hold out long enough,’ said Hirohito, ‘we may be able to win.’ Konoe complained that ‘Considering our kokutai, unless the emperor assents to it, we can do nothing.’ The ex-premiers were ‘madmen’. In June, Hirohito was so nervous, he fell ill. ‘I desire that concrete plans to end the war be swiftly studied,’ he ordered, ‘and efforts made to implement them.’ But the Allies demanded unconditional surrender.

On 17 July, as the Americans approached Japan, Stalin travelled by train to meet Harry Truman and Churchill (the latter had just faced a general election) in Wilhelm II’s mock-Tudor Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam.^* They agreed on partitions and population transfers that confirmed Stalin’s annexation of Lviv and south-western Poland – added to Soviet Ukraine – and Moldavia and the Baltics.^* 11.5 million German refugees trudged westwards. The three men were masters of a new world, although none yet understood that their dominion would be overshadowed by a new force. On 17 July, Truman learned that a baby had been born: ‘Doctor has just returned most enthusiastically and confident that the little boy is as husky as his big brother.’ But it was not a baby: it was a bomb.

* It is said that two Japanese officers Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda of the Japanese 16th Division held a public contest with shin gunto¯ swords to see who could behead 100 Chinese first before the city fell: by the time Nanjing had fallen, Noda had killed 105, Mukai 106, and they started another race to 150.

* The shah’s potentate Teymourtash started the negotiations. But Reza increasingly distrusted the minister. Teymourtash privately criticized Reza’s ‘suspicion of everyone and everything’, and the shah’s secret-police chief, probably channelling British disinformation, suggested that Teymourtash was a Soviet spy. In 1933, Reza suddenly arrested him and had him murdered in prison by a prison doctor, Ahmadi, using air injection.

* Abdulaziz gathered a trusted court: it was now he met a young Yemenite, a porter in Jeddah, rough, uneducated but capable, who started to organize building work at the shrines, winning the king’s trust. The builder became the richest contractor in Arabia: Muhammad bin Laden. The king’s doctor, Muhammad Khashoggi, became so trusted that he too brokered deals: later his son Adnan would become the richest man in the world, while his grandson Jamal, a journalist, would fatally cross the House of Saud.

* Philby was a poisonous but creative maverick – explorer, socialist, antisemite, a man of masks who promoted the Saudis as Lawrence did the Hashemites. Philby, who delighted in his duplicity, had named his eldest son Kim after Kipling’s spy. At Cambridge, Kim and his circle were attracted to Communism. Several of them joined the diplomatic service. In 1934, in Regent’s Park, London, Kim was introduced by his Austrian girlfriend, a Communist, to a mysterious ‘man of importance’ who recruited him as a Soviet agent. He became a journalist for The Times, covering the Spanish civil war. Then in 1940, thanks to the help of one of his Cambridge friends who was now a British diplomat and Soviet agent, he joined British intelligence, MI6, and became one of the most significant Soviet assets.

* Freud’s patient, friend and fellow psychoanalyst Princess Marie Bonaparte, descended from Napoleon’s brother Lucien, rich thanks to her grandfather, the casino king of Monaco, and married to the gay Prince George of Greece, begged him to leave. After exploring her sexuality in a spree of affairs with the French premier (among others) during the First World War, she had consulted Freud in 1925 for her inability to achieve orgasm in the missionary position. ‘The great question that has never been answered,’ said Freud to Marie, ‘is “What does a woman want?”’ She became a psychoanalyst and sexual researcher. Now, when Freud’s daughter, Anna, forty-three, was arrested, Freud agreed to leave, his escape and ransom paid by Marie Bonaparte. Freud settled in London near his architect son, Ernst, whose son Lucian was starting to study art. Sigmund Freud died in 1939. Marie Bonaparte tried to rescue Freud’s elderly sisters – but in vain.

* Stalin annexed the three Baltics (which became Soviet republics) and forced Romania to hand over Bessarabia (taken from Russia after the First World War, which became the Soviet republic of Moldavia). Beria’s secret police deported 140,000 people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. But the Finns, until 1918 a Romanov grand duchy, refused to hand over the territory Stalin demanded. Stalin invaded, calling the war a mere policing operation. But the Finns routed the huge Soviet army, killing 131,476 troops before they finally succumbed. Stalin ordered reforms of his army but the humiliation convinced Hitler that the USSR would collapse fast.

* Stalin invaded eastern Poland, where Soviet depredations were equally bleak. Soviet forces arrested and deported 400,000 Poles; 22,000 elite prisoners were imprisoned in camps near Katyn Forest. On 5 March 1940, Stalin and the Politburo ordered Beria to execute these ‘nationalists and counter-revolutionaries’, who were then buried in the woods.

* Krupp, joined by Ferdinand Porsche and his son, developed the gigantic Panther, Leopard and Tiger tanks demanded by Hitler.

* Sitting with some cronies (who included the future president Lyndon Johnson) FDR phoned Kennedy: ‘Joe, how are ya? Just sitting here with Lyndon thinking about you. I want to talk to you, my son. Can’t wait … Make it tonight.’ Then he hung up the phone smiling at Johnson: ‘I’m gonna fire the sonofabitch.’ Kennedy helped win FDR the Irish vote, backing him in the election, only realizing later that he had been handled. He placed his own presidential hopes in his eldest son, Joe Jr, who had visited Germany where ‘Hitler’s building a spirit in his men that could be envied in any country.’ His second son Jack had also travelled around Europe, preparing for a political career, but questioned his father’s pro-German politics. Both studied at Harvard and the LSE. While Kennedy was despised as a defeatist, his children had charmed the British: his daughter Kick would soon marry Billy, marquess of Hartington, the heir to the duke of Devonshire.

* ‘The Ustashe have gone raving mad,’ reported Nazi plenipotentiary General Edmund von Horstenau. The guards at the Jasenovac camp preferred to kill using hammers, axes and specially designed Srbosjek (Serb-cutter) knives strapped to the hand, indulging in demoniac tortures, eye gougings, impalings and castrations. Visiting the village of Crkveni Bok near the Jasenovac camp, Horstenau reported the ravages of teenaged Ustashe torturers: ‘People were killed everywhere, women raped then tortured to death, children killed … I saw in the Sava River the corpse of a young woman with her eyes dug out and a stake driven into her sexual parts … aged twenty when she fell into the hands of these monsters. All around, pigs devoured unburied human beings.’

* Not as cosmopolitan as Napoleon’s Grande Armée, they were mainly Germans but also included 500,000 Romanians (the largest contingent), 300,000 Italians, 200,000 Hungarians and 18,000 Spaniards.

* Among those struggling to survive was Maria, a factory-worker and the wife of a working-class submariner, Vladimir Putin. The couple, married in 1928 in their twenties, had two sons. They had already lost one child to the epidemics of the 1930s. Now as Vladimir, son of an NKVD servitor, served in an NKVD punishment battalion (later transferred to a regular Red Army unit), Maria lost her two-year-old son to starvation or diphtheria in besieged Leningrad. Vladmir was wounded but survived the war, later becoming a foreman and Party committee secretary of a train-making factory. It was only at forty-one that Maria gave birth to a lastborn son: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

* It was Sorge’s last service to Moscow. Shortly afterwards, the Kenpeitai, Japanese military intelligence, arrested him and rolled up his network. He was hanged in 1944. Among his lovers was his German fellow agent Ursula Kuczynski, who having moved to London, codename Agent Sonja, handled the nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, one of the Soviet spies who helped Stalin get the Bomb.

* Around 35,000 Ukrainians, many of them members of the OUN, the Ukrainian Nationalist Organization, joined the Ukrainische Hilfspolizei or Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, who wholeheartedly murdered Jews. The OUN was founded in 1929 in Poland, splitting into rival factions, one (OUN-M) under Andriy Melnyk, another (OUN-B) under the younger Stepan Bandera. Melnyk was an old-fashioned nationalist, Bandera a radical nationalist with fascist tendencies. Both were armed by the Nazis after the invasion of Poland. At the start of Barbarossa, Bandera followed the Nazi invaders with two German-supported units of militia, the Nachtigall (under his lieutenant Roman Shukhevych) and Roland battalions, and declared Ukraine independent. In Lviv, in early July 1941, Bandera’s OUN and Nachtigall henchmen killed over 5,000 Jews with Einsatzgruppe C, followed by another carnival frenzy, the Petliura Days, in which militias and farmers used guns and farm tools to kill 2,000 Jews. In September, Bandera, refusing to retract the declaration of Ukrainian independence, fell out with the Germans, was arrested and was sent to a concentration camp. Shukhevych and many of the members of the Ukrainian battalions enrolled in German Schutzmannschaft 201, an auxiliary police battalion – part of the Ukrainische Hilfspolizei who killed tens of thousands of Poles – and joined the Nazi killers in the murder of more than 200,000 Jews.

A typical operation took place in the industrial town of Kryvyi Rih, where the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police murdered most of the Jews, including members of a typical Jewish family, the Zelenskys. There were four Zelensky brothers. Semyon Zelensky escaped to join the Soviet army and, rising to colonel, fought all the way to Berlin. In 2020, on a visit to the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel, his grandson, Volodymyr Zelensky, called this a ‘story of a family of four brothers. Three of them, their parents and their families became victims of the Holocaust. All shot by German occupiers. The fourth survived. Two years after the war, he had a son, and thirty-one years later he had a grandson. In forty more years, that grandson became president [of independent Ukraine] and he is standing before you today.’

* A million Jews were murdered in Ukraine, but that was part of a multifaceted bloodbath. Over five million Ukrainians –one in six – were killed, including Jews. The butchery was made more complex by a three-way war: in March 1943, many Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, who had aided the Nazi killing, as well as other patriots, joined Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) under Shukhevych and launched an insurgency against the Nazis, killing Jews, Poles and Germans. As the Nazis retreated, they fought the Soviets. Between 1918 and 1950, Ukraine was the most murderous place on earth.

* The vast data on Jews and their transport by rail to Auschwitz and Treblinka was tabulated by a computing company that used hole-punching machines. It was called Dehomag, a wholly owned subsidiary of an American company, IBM.

* ‘As I arrived with my parents, the Jewish kapos [camp trusties] whispered to me, “Say you’re Catholic” because I was blond and blue-eyed,’ a Hungarian Jewish boy, Yitzhak Yaacoby, then aged thirteen, told this author. ‘I remember so well how Mengele looked at me. “Are you Jewish?” he asked. “Catholic,” I said. “Pah! Go on then!” laughed Mengele, hitting me with his baton, but not sending me to the “showers”.’ Yaacoby survived.

* In Greece, Princess Alice (mother of Prince Philip, later duke of Edinburgh) hid a Jewish family and was honoured at Yad Vashem as a ‘righteous Gentile’. Even the countries where there was most collaboration with the Nazis, there were also people of great courage and decency: the most ‘righteous Gentiles’ were in Poland (7,177), Holland, France and Ukraine (2,619), but also include two Arabs, the Egyptian doctor Dr Mohamed Helmy and the Tunisian farmer Khaled Abdelwahhab who saved Jews in Vichy north Africa.

* It was only now that Hitler grasped the scale of Stalin’s industrial achievement that would win the war: ‘they have the most monstrous armament humanly conceivable – 35,000 tanks!’ Hitler told the Finnish Marshal Mannerheim on 4 June 1942, in his only private conversation to be recorded. ‘If a general of mine had told me a state could have 35,000 tanks, I’d have said, “That’s crazy! You’re seeing ghosts!”’ But they were real.

* The leader of the Palestinian Arabs, Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, travelled to Berlin where he met Hitler and Himmler and backed the Holocaust. In summer 1943, Himmler boasted that the Nazis had ‘already exterminated more than three million [Jews]’ – which astonished Husseini. ‘It’s the duty of Muslims generally and Arabs in particular to drive out all Jews,’ said the mufti in November. ‘Germany … has very clearly recognized the Jews for what they are and has resolved to find a definitive solution for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that Jews represent in the world.’

* The taking of Sebastopol in July 1942 was aided by a giant cannon with a twenty-five-mile range built on Hitler’s personal orders by Krupp. ‘My Führer,’ wrote Alfried Krupp, delivering the letter in person at the Wolf’s Lair, ‘the big weapon manufactured thanks to your personal command has proved its effectiveness … Krupp gratefully recognizes the confidence displayed in the family by you, my Führer … Following an example of Alfred Krupp in 1870, my wife and I ask the favour that the Krupp Works may refrain from charging for this product … Sieg Heil!’ In 1943, at Gustav’s request, Hitler passed a special Lex Krupp to ensure that the firm remained within the dynasty.

* In the Dutch East Indies, a charismatic teacher’s son and trained architect, Sukarno, who had served four years in Dutch jail for his nationalist activities, joined the Japanese to promote his vision of a new national concept based on the European colony: Indonesia. But not all nationalists followed this path: Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh resistance, which encompassed Communist and nationalist elements, fought the French and then the Japanese, winning the aid of the USA and Britain.

* The British responded with the Roundtable Conferences of 1930–2 – attended at times by Gandhi and Jinnah – which led to the limited elections, mocked by Nehru as ‘a machine with strong brakes but no engine’. The process outraged Churchill, who fulminated, ‘It’s alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.’ Nonetheless, following the 1935 Government of India Act, there were elections in 1937 leading to the establishment of provincial Indian governments – though the viceroy still ruled. When the Second World War began, the process of negotiations was abandoned altogether.

* Both men disagreed with the president of Congress, Subhas Chandra Bose, a wealthy lawyer and a socialist who favoured a Hindu–Muslim alliance in Bengal – until he was defeated by Gandhi. Now he escaped to Germany before emerging from a Japanese submarine to lead an Indian National Army of 60,000 which fought against the British in Burma.

* In rural Bengal, run by an elected Indian government, a catastrophic shortage of rice came about as a result of a cyclone, the fall of Burma (which had exported rice to India), the destruction of coastal boats to prevent them falling into the hands of the Japanese and widespread hoarding by speculators and merchants. Relief efforts were hampered by both intra-Indian politics and the incompetence, negligence and lethargy of the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. Churchill and the London cabinet, whose priority was to feed the army, failed to act until it was too late. The famine was not intentional but Britain as the imperial power bore responsibility. Similar famines raged in Japanese-occupied Vietnam (where two million died) and in newly liberated Greece and Netherlands.

* JFK was still undergoing treatment for his back injuries when, in August 1944, his elder brother, Joe Jr, a bomber pilot, was killed on a mission.

* Stalin was obsessed with treason: 600,000 Hilfswilliger – Russian auxilaries – known as Hiwis or Askaris (Africans) fought for Hitler, while 120,000 formed a Russian Liberation Army under German command. In 1943–4, Stalin punished potential traitors with deportations of entire smaller peoples – Muslim Tatars, Chechens, Kalmyks, Karachays, Volga Germans, Ingush. Out of 480,000 Chechen deportees, 30 to 50 per cent died. When the survivors returned to Chechnya, they nurtured a deep hatred, inbred from their long insurgencies the century before, for Russian rule.

* On his return to Washington, FDR secretly sought out his lover, Lucy Mercer, who had just lost her long-time husband, Winthrop Rutherford. He had written to her all along but they had only met once during her long marriage. He asked his daughter Anna to arrange their meetings, some of them in the White House, others in Georgetown. Lucy and his daughter became friends, but Eleanor was furious when she discovered.

* Penicillin had been discovered sixteen years earlier by a British scientist, Alexander Fleming. Keeping a messy laboratory, Fleming had returned to find his experiments overgrown with a fungus which had destroyed bacteria; using the fungus and the tears and snot of his assistants, he developed penicillin, the first natural antibiotic. ‘One sometimes finds what one isn’t looking for,’ he said, yet it was not really an accident as he was an enthusiastic innovator: ‘I play with microbes.’ He published his findings, but no one appreciated it until 1939, more than ten years later, when a Jewish-German refugee, Ernst Chain, and his colleague Howard Florey at Oxford infected eight mice with streptococci and gave four of them penicillin. Those four lived. In 1941, they tried it on a patient dying of infection, who then recovered. Now realizing its potential, they flew to New York where the Rockefeller Foundation created a team, backed by the US army, which included a scientist, Mary Hunt (nicknamed Mouldy Mary), who found penicillin in a rotting cantaloupe, which formed the basis of streptomycin. Antibiotics changed the world: people no longer died of minor infection, and the drugs later enabled doctors to limit infection even after massive surgery.

* When told that Pope Piux XII was concerned about Polish independence, Stalin quipped, ‘How many divisions has the pope?’ Pleased with his definition of hard power, Stalin repeated it on other occasions. ‘You may tell my son Josef,’ Pius later joked, ‘he’ll meet my divisions in Heaven.’

* To avoid scandal, Lucy quickly packed and left the Little White House.

* ‘You have of course read Dostoevsky?’ Stalin said to a Yugoslav Communist leader, Milovan Djilas, who confronted him with the Russian army’s mass rapes. ‘Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul? … Well, then imagine a man who fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade … And what is so awful about his having fun with a woman after such horrors?’

* On 4 May, SMERSH military intelligence found the charred remains, identified from Hitler’s jawbone, which along with fragments of his skull are in Moscow. In 1970, the rest of the body was secretly and anonymously buried under a Soviet military base in Magdeburg.

* Among the press covering the conference was Jack Kennedy, whose father got him the job working for Hearst.

* There was talk among Polish Stalinists of Poland joining the USSR. Stalin never considered this, partly because of the importance of Poland to the Allies. But like the tsars before him Stalin was determined to control Poland. Stalin was granted the great Prussian city of Königsberg, renamed after Stalin’s puppet president Kalinin and ethnically cleansed of Germans; it became a Soviet enclave. In Ukraine, as the war ended, Bandera managed to escape from German captivity and with US support settled in Munich, while his ally Shukhevych led a multi-year war against the Soviets, winning some victories (in February 1944, he killed top Soviet general Vatunin); 130,000 Ukrainians and over 30,000 Soviets were killed, until in 1950 Shukhevych was finally trapped and killed. In Munich in 1959, the KGB managed to assassinate Bandera. In the Baltics, anti-Soviet insurgents known as the Forest Brothers fought on for ten years. Stalin orchestrated massive purges of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, so by 1950s the GULAG camps reached their peak of 2.5 million enslaved labourers. In his new west Ukraine, Stalin executed around 200,000 and deported 400,000. Between 1940 and 1953, around 10 per cent of the Balts were deported. One could argue that Stalin, Marxist pontiff and Russian imperialist, fatally overreached by consuming the Baltics. In 1990–1, it was the Balts, even more than the Georgians, who accelerated the break-up of the Soviet Union. Had Stalin not consumed these territories, one wonders if the USSR would have survived in 1991.