‘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.
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