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Although he slept late and rarely sat at a desk, he was capable of sustained concentration, whether dictating speeches to several secretaries simultaneously or later directing the war. Vegetarian and teetotal, an obsessive germophobe with bad teeth, rotted by Bavarian cakes, which later caused eyewatering halitosis, he was most relaxed with certain families, his early patrons and friends in Munich, followed by the Wagners, later the Goebbelses and Eva Braun. But he increasingly embraced the ultimate test of power: the dictator’s reversal of time. Hating solitude, he treated his retainers to long monologues that first fascinated and later bored them. Armed with his autodidact’s omniscience and the adventurer’s braggadocio, he despised experts and always knew better. ‘My life,’ he said, ‘is the greatest novel in history.’

LONG KNIVES; GREAT TERROR; MASS MOMENTUM AND PERSONAL POWER: HITLER AND STALIN

‘In God’s name,’ exclaimed Hitler. ‘Anything’s better than this waiting around. I’m ready!’ On 30 June 1933, the killing started small. Hitler approved the death lists compiled by Himmler and Heydrich, giving the codeword Hummingbird to Goebbels, who telegraphed it to Göring and Himmler in Berlin.

Hitler flew to Munich. Röhm was arrested in bed (with a male lover) by a splenetic Hitler, holding a whip; several other SA leaders were also caught in homosexual clinches, much to Hitler’s horror. All were then shot by the SS; in Berlin, Schleicher (and his wife) and Nazi rivals were killed; perhaps 180 died altogether. Hindenburg was shocked by the killing of the Schleichers, but Hitler apologized, claiming the general had drawn a pistol. Hindenburg, now dying of cancer, approved.

Hitler arrived back in Berlin, revelling in the drama: ‘Brown shirt, black tie, dark brown leather coat, high black military boots, everything dark upon dark,’ wrote a witness. ‘Above it all, bareheaded, a chalkwhite, sleepless, unshaven face … from which a pair of extinguished eyes stared through some clotted strands of hair.’ Next morning, Hitler told his secretary, ‘I’ve just had a bath and feel like I’ve been born again.’ On 2 August, Hindenburg died, leaving letters pleading for the restoration of the monarchy – and praising Hitler’s ‘historic mission’. Hitler now combined the presidency with the chancellorship; the army swore allegiance to him as ‘Führer of the German People’.^*

‘That Hitler is quite a fellow,’ said an unexpected admirer, Stalin, to his Kremlin epigones, impressed by the Night of the Long Knives. A born extremist, backed by a murderous secret police, now called the OGPU, and a network of concentration camps, the GULAG, Stalin mastered the propulsive politics of the Mass Age, mobilizing millions of people, particularly the young, in the Bolshevik project to destroy the old and build a new, more just world in the thrilling drama of revolution. But he also appreciated that modernity was a struggle of geopolitics, driven by mass weapons, mass killing, mass production and mass spectacle. He combined his Marxist mission with his own personal power and Russia’s exceptional imperial destiny. The more he mobilized the masses, the less power they had and the more he wielded – the irony of mass politics. Stalin had embarked on a radical and colossal gamble to industrialize Russia at breakneck speed, using American advisers and technology to collectivize agriculture in Ukraine and other regions, mercilessly collecting grain to pay for the industrialization. Initially the Bolsheviks had promoted Ukrainian culture, as part of their policy of korenizatsiia (indigenisation), providing Moscow was paramount. But when the peasants in Ukraine resisted, Stalin ‘broke their backs’ by repression and famine. Remembering the Polish invasion and fearing that ‘We may lose Ukraine’, he cracked down on Ukrainian language and culture, arresting, shooting or deporting 4–5 million people. Yet neither the repression nor the famine were limited to that republic: the starvation also hit the lower Volga, the north Caucasus and Kazakhstan. Later Stalin casually told Churchill ten million had starved, and demographic research confirms the vanishing of eight and a half million people. Four million peasants died of starvation in Ukraine – one in eight people – the atrocity today known as the Holodomor (‘Death by Hunger’) that was, writes Serhii Plokhy, ‘a man-made phenomenon, caused by official policy’, resulting from ‘policies with a clear ethnonational coloration’. Simultaneously, it was part of a wider Soviet famine – 1.2 to 1.4 million Kazakhs starved to death: ‘This,’ writes Stephen Kotkin, ‘was the highest death ratio in the Soviet Union.’ Stalin’s self-made calamity could have destroyed the USSR, but instead the cruel gamble paid off: the USSR emerged with collectivized farms worked by 100 million farmers as oppressed as serfs – and modern industry that could soon outproduce Germany.