For Davies, the war was ‘a fight to the death between gangsters’ without any rules. The principal winner was the criminal with the biggest battalions in the biggest country, Stalin. Most of the fighting took place in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, waged by one side that wanted lebensraum to carry out its monstrous racial experiments, and the other, an equally ghastly totalitarian regime which wanted an extended European empire to conduct its social experiment in enforced communism. The main victims were those, civilians for the most part, who had the misfortune to live in the contested territory of Poland, Byelorussia and Ukraine. These were lands where up to a quarter of the population died in the slaughter, compared to Britain, which suffered civilian casualties of 0.1 per cent.
Davies wins the mathematical argument hands down. Incontestably the war in the East was bloody. But he is guilty of the same selectivity he rails against in others. For example, in his determination to grant victim status to countries which ended the war as vassal states of Stalin, he glosses over the willing executioners Hitler possessed in large parts of Eastern Europe. He writes as though Poland and Ukraine had not themselves had long records of anti-Semitism. He does not mention that Hungary enthusiastically invaded the Soviet Union with German forces soon after Barbarossa in 1941, or the name Ferenc Szalasi, head of the Arrow Cross and leader of Hungary for two murderous months in which about 100,000 Hungarian Jews were shot and thrown into the Danube.
Take pleasure in Davies the story-teller, but his interpretation is not always entirely balanced. He tilts at windmills that fell into disuse some years ago.
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