The world in arms

The long summer that led up to the last days of peace in Europe in 1939 — the vigil of Hitler’s assault on Poland and the subsequent Phoney War — gave little hint of the storm to come. As German troops engulfed Poland, however, Britain at last declared war on Hitler. Infamously, the Nazi science of massacre was put to the test in occupied Poland. Within two months of Hitler’s invasion, over 5,000 Jews were murdered behind the Polish lines. One year into the occupation a ghetto was established in Warsaw as a holding place for Jews prior to their deportation and death. A total of 265,000 of the city’s Jews were gassed over a single summer at Treblinka nearby. It was the largest slaughter of any single community in the second world war.

Historians are still trying to understand Hitler’s war against the Jews. There have been other massacres in recent times but none was so ferocious, so total in effect, as that willed by Hitler’s Germans in the heart of ‘civilised’ Europe. Aided by the indifference of most Germans, Hitler and his race-engineers were able to create ruthless new ideals of totalitarian dominance. Overall, the second world war claimed the lives — Jewish and non-Jewish — of over 50 million people. It was the most catastrophic war mankind has ever known.

Several large, one-volume histories of the 1939-45 conflict have appeared in recent years. The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts was a smoothly readable volume which presented the standard British narrative of the war built round the rise and fall of Hitler (‘a world-class know-all’) and the dictator’s attempts to assert hegemony over Europe. Correspondingly little analysis was made of the Pacific theatre of operations, though the war in the Far East inevitably influenced the war in Europe.