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The shah, rushing to arrange his son’s marriage, chose an Egyptian princess: the House of Mehmed Ali was the oldest dynasty in the region, even though it was Sunni. In March 1939, at Abdeen Palace in Cairo the crown prince was married to Princess Fawzia, sister of young King Farouk of Egypt, before the ceremony was repeated in Teheran in the presence of the shah. Fawzia, whose mother Queen Nazli was part French, had ‘a perfect heart-shaped face and strangely pale but piercing blue eyes’; raised in the hedonistic luxury of Egypt, she was horrified by the uncouth shah, bored by the bourgeois parochialism of the Persian court and unhappy with her awkward husband. Sensing the coming war, the shah hoped to secure his kingdom by balancing Britain against Germany.

To the south, on 3 March 1938, an American oil company struck oil at the Dammam 7 well in the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Until then, the rise of Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his Wahhabis had been a minor security issue for the British, defending their Hashemite kings in Iraq and Transjordan. Now Arabia joined Iran and Iraq as increasingly potent masters of oil.

The king depended on pilgrim tolls in Mecca, but his revenues sank during the Depression. The Ikhwan had made him, but now they threatened him and he had to destroy them. In March 1929, at Sabilla, Saudi machine-gunners, aided by RAF planes, mowed down several hundred cameleteers, ending the Ikhwan as a force. On 23 September 1932, Abdulaziz declared himself king of a new country, Saudi Arabia.^* The rewards emerged immediately: his engineers fitted out his new Murabba Palace with electricity and lavatories, the start of the transformation of the Saudis from desert warlords into international potentates. Encouraged by a byzantine Englishman, St John Philby, a former British diplomat who on converting to Islam was named Sheikh Abdullah by the king, western oil companies (all of them paying Philby) started to prospect for oil.^* In Riyadh, Philby played the sheikh, in the clubs of St James’s, the British civil servant. Now he negotiated the first Saudi oil concessions, signed in 1933 with SoCal, joined in 1936 by Texaco, in a joint venture with Abdulaziz’s Aramco. As international tensions rose, every power – but particularly Germany and Japan, which controlled no oilfields – sought ‘the prize’.

THAT’S HOW IT’S DONE: HITLER’S PLAN

On 20 April 1937, his forty-eighth birthday, Hitler revealed his real vision for empire to his two confidants: Albert Speer, a suave young architect, presented him with a model of his gigantomaniacal new capital, Germania (Berlin). ‘Do you understand now why we plan so big?’ asked Hitler as he, along with Goebbels, admired a People’s Hall that was seven times the size of St Peter’s, designed to hold 180,000 people; the fortress-like Führer Palace; a 260-foot Victory Arch to dwarf the Arc de Triomphe; and a station bigger than New York’s Grand Central. ‘I did these sketches ten years ago,’ Hitler had said when he commissioned Speer. ‘I knew some day I’d build them.’ Speer planned to complete Germania in 1950. Afterwards he showed his father. ‘You two have gone completely mad!’ his father said. But now Hitler confided in Speer that Germania would be ‘the capital of the Germanic empire’. Later he told Goebbels of his imminent plans for Austria and Czechoslovakia: ‘We’ll get them … Hence the Führer’s great construction plans.’ At a secret gathering, Hitler explained, ‘I always go to the extreme of what I feel I can risk and no further … I say, “I want to destroy you. And now I’ll ask my wits to help me manoeuvre you into a corner so that you can’t lash out at me because you would suffer a fatal blow to the heart.”’ And then he bellowed: ‘That’s how it’s done.’

Hitler started to increase the pressure on Austria, summoning its chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg in February 1938 to threaten invasion. ‘My task is preordained,’ he told him. ‘Surely you don’t think you could put up even an hour’s resistance? Who knows? Maybe I’ll be in Vienna tomorrow morning like a spring storm.’ Schuschnigg tried to beat Hitler at his own game, calling a referendum on independence which provided Hitler’s pretext for massing the Wehrmacht on Austrian borders.

In Vienna, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild was unsure whether he should leave or not, but his wife, an elegant Englishwoman named Clarice Sebag-Montefiore, heard from her lover in the Foreign Ministry that the Nazis already had a list of Jews to arrest. They packed up their car and drove into France. The eighty-two-year-old Sigmund Freud refused to leave. ‘In the Middle Ages, they’d have burned me,’ he insisted. ‘Now, they’re content with burning my books.’