One man and his dogma

‘The second world war lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years.’ This neat summary is characteristic of the way Andrew Roberts uses statistics to bring home to the reader the enormity, the waste and the horror of that terrible conflict. The book is long, but it is tightly written, every page packed with terse comment, well-organised facts and, often, telling details.

It has a thesis: Hitler lost the war essentially because he was a Nazi, and allowed his race theories and ideological cruelty to get in the way of rational decision-taking. It is not true, Roberts says, that German atrocities began only in the closing stages of the war. On 27 May 1940, 97 British prisoners of war of the Royal Norfolks were massacred in cold blood by the SS, and the following day 90 POWs of the Warwickshire were slaughtered by grenades and rifles, the killers being from the Adolf Hitler Regiment. At the same time Hitler was allowing his political views to prevent the annihilation of the British Expeditionary Force. We originally calculated that the Dunkirk operation could save at most 45,000 troops. Thanks largely to Hitler’s interference, between dawn on Sunday 26 May and 03.30 on Tuesday 4 June 1940, 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued, the largest military evacuation in history.

At the beginning of 1941, Hitler was master of Europe. By the end of the war he was doomed. He and his ideology were entirely responsible for his two greatest mistakes: to invade Russia, and to declare war on America. In both cases he hugely underestimated the power of the states he voluntarily made his mortal enemies.