Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

More than 2 million Russians died of hunger during the war in territories controlled by their own government.

IN BERLIN on 28 November, a conference of industrialists chaired by armaments supremo Fritz Todt reached a devastating conclusion: the war against Russia was no longer winnable. Having failed to achieve a quick victory, Germany lacked resources to prevail in a sustained struggle. Next day, Todt and tank-production chief Walter Rohland met Hitler. R

Poland became the only nation occupied by Hitler in which there was no collaboration between the conquerors and the conquered. The Nazis henceforth classified Poles as slaves, and received in return implacable hatred.

A minimum of 5 million people in Southeast Asia died in the course of the war, many of them in the Dutch East Indies, either at Japanese hands or as a result of starvation imposed by Tokyo’s diversion of food and crops to feed its own people.

not have survived as prime minister through 1941. Franco deserved no gratitude from the Allies, because cautious Spanish diplomacy was driven by self-interest; he held back only because he overvalued his own worth to the Axis. But the outcome was much to the advantage of both Britain and Spain.

“The Australians regarded themselves as the best fighters in the world,” wrote a British officer. “They were.” He added that their units were held together by “mateship,” almost always a stronger motivation for successful soldiers than any abstract cause.

Jewish victims, which later went unclaimed because the owners perished.

THE STRUGGLE FOR the Balkans began with a black farce precipitated by Mussolini. Having considered a takeover of Yugoslavia, instead, on 28 October 1940 he launched 162,000 men into Greece from Albania, an operation only revealed to Marshal Graziani in North Africa by Rome Radio’s news broadcasts.

Germany lost 6.9 million dead, 5.3 million of these military. The Russians killed about 4.7 million German combatants, including 474,967 who died in Soviet captivity, and a substantial further number of civilians, while the Western Allies accounted for around half a million German troops and more than 200,000 civilian victims of air attack.