The Second World War

Hitler's earliest written statement calling for the removal of Jews predates his rise to power by fourteen years, and historians now largely agree it grew out of a specific wartime myth rather than any lifelong conviction.

He edited a socialist newspaper to a circulation of a hundred thousand before turning against everything it stood for, and the party that expelled him for supporting the war never got the chance to see what he became instead.

A fictitious army group commanded by a general who wasn't actually leading it convinced German high command the real invasion would land at Calais, weeks after it had already landed at Normandy.

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He negotiated the deal that made him briefly one of Britain's most popular prime ministers, and a single book published the same year Hitler invaded France was enough to make his name a byword for weakness ever since.

American commanders at Pearl Harbor were so convinced Japan would strike Wake Island or the Philippines instead that the record says there was no meaningful plan at all for defending Hawaii's own airspace.

1945

1940

Two respected Soviet casualty analysts, working from the same war, arrive at figures more than two hundred thousand deaths apart, a gap that says as much about how armies count their dead as about the battle itself.

Historians still cannot agree whether the 1943 Bengal famine came from an actual shortage of rice or from wartime policy distributing a barely reduced supply catastrophically, and the death toll swings by a factor of five depending which you accept.

Only four in every hundred Londoners actually used the Underground as a shelter, which means the famous image of a city sheltering together night after night describes a small minority of the people who lived through it.

1945

No written order from Hitler authorising mass murder has ever been found, which means historians reconstructing exactly when the decision to exterminate Europe's Jews was made are working from bureaucratic traces rather than a single smoking gun.

Roosevelt built the United Nations around a partnership between four great powers he did not live to see tested, and the Cold War tested it almost immediately.

Historians still argue over exactly when Hitler decided to murder every Jew in Europe, a question the record calls unresolved even though it agrees an explicit order existed by the war's later years.

Germany staged a fake Polish attack on its own radio station to justify a war it had already secretly agreed to split with the Soviet Union, and the order Hitler gave his forces going in left no doubt the killing was meant to go beyond soldiers.

Hitler compared the Soviet Union to a rotten structure that would collapse the moment Germany kicked the door in, and by the time the door actually held, Germany had lost eight million combatants trying to prove him right.

1938

The same charter that let judges reject a defence comparing Nazi camps to Allied detention centres also barred prosecutors from examining Soviet purges and deportations, a legal boundary drawn to protect the court's own authors as much as to convict its defendants.

Hitler wanted Czechoslovakia's factories more than its territory, and the occupation's relative restraint compared to Poland reflected that economic calculation as much as any racial theory.

Voters who had just won the war under him removed him from office within weeks of victory, a rejection that fits awkwardly beside the near-unanimous later verdict that he was among the greatest prime ministers Britain ever had.

Historians cannot even agree when World War II began, with credible starting dates ranging from 1931 in Manchuria to 1939 in Poland, a six-year spread for the deadliest conflict in history.