By April’s end, the Germans held Greece. Some 43,000 of Wavell’s troops had been evacuated, leaving behind a further 11,000 who became prisoners, together with all their transport and heavy equipment;

The Danes, alone among European societies, refused to participate in the deportation of their Jews, almost all of whom survived.

The Norwegians displayed implacable hostility to their invaders. Even when compelled to acknowledge subjection, they were unimpressed by explanations. Ruth Maier heard three German soldiers tell a cluster of Oslo residents that 60,000 German civilians had been murdered by the Poles before the Wehrmacht intervened to save their ethnic brethren.

Some nations which played only a marginal military role lost many more people than the Western Allies: China’s ordeal at Japanese hands between 1937 and 1945 cost at least 15 million lives;

but also to ensure that no initiative or preemption of German action revealed Allied foreknowledge. If a prospective naval target was located at sea through cryptanalysis, whenever possible reconnaissance aircraft overflew the enemy before an attack to mask Ultra’s role.

At last, on 30 August, Hitler gave the attack order. At 8:00 the following evening, the curtain rose on the first, appropriately sordid, act of the conflict. Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujocks of the German Sicherheitsdienst (security service) led a party dressed in Polish uniforms, and including a dozen convicted criminals dismissively code-named

Both the Germans and the Japanese made a critical strategic mistake, to which fuel famine contributed, by failing to allocate resources to sustain a flow of proficient pilots.

The Soviet Union on the eve of Hitler’s invasion was the most rigorously regulated and policed society in the world. Its machinery of domestic repression was much more elaborate, and in 1941 had killed far more people, than that of Nazism: 6 million peasants perished in the course of Stalin’s programme of enforced industrialisation, and vast

The Balkans were incorporated wholesale into the Axis empire, much to its own detriment. Italy initially accepted responsibility for occupying the region,