The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

by Nicholas Stargardt

If the German armies had disintegrated like Napoleon’s Grande Armée in the winter of 1941, and the Third Reich had sued for peace, most of the soldiers and civilians who were to die in the Second World War would have lived. Germany’s cities and the country’s infrastructure might have emerged virtually unscathed from the bombing; as in 1918, the battles had been fought beyond its own borders. There would have been tales of Nazi atrocities: of the gassing of German and Polish psychiatric patients, mass shootings of Poles and Jews, the burning of Russian and Ukrainian villages and towns and the starving to death of 2.5 million Red Army prisoners. This would already have taken Hitler’s war beyond any precedent, but far greater destruction was to come. At the beginning of 1942, most of Europe’s Jews were still alive; by the end of the year, the majority were not.