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Weeks later, after the shooting of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jew, Hitler and Goebbels organized an anti-Jewish pogrom, Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), across Germany. On 9–10 November, Jews were beaten, around 100 were killed and 30,000 were arrested and sent to camps; 1,000 synagogues were burned, Jewish shops smashed. Hitler discussed ‘the Jewish question’ with Goebbels. ‘The Führer wants to drive the Jews entirely out of Germany. To Madagascar or somewhere like it.’ On 30 January 1939, speaking to the Reichstag, Hitler linked the fate of European Jews to the war he was planning to start. ‘I’ve very often in my lifetime been a prophet and been mostly derided,’ he said. ‘I want today to be a prophet again: if the international Jewish financiers … succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’

In March, he summoned the old Czech president Emil Hácha to force the surrender of the rest of Czechoslovakia. Hácha suffered a stroke. German troops then occupied Prague, now capital of Hitler’s Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while a Slovak client state under a Fascist priest was granted independence. Hitler gave the Škoda works to Krupp. Days later he forced Lithuania to hand over the Baltic port of Memel. Finally Britain and France, realizing their mistake in appeasing Hitler, guaranteed the borders of his next target, Poland. Hitler had delivered a streak of successes. ‘It’s the miracle of the age that you found me among so many millions,’ he told a rally. ‘And that I have found you is Germany’s great fortune.’ Believing war was inevitable and desirable, he turned to the other anti-Versailles power that had lost its Polish lands, led by his Bolshevik enemy Stalin. Only the Soviet dictator could prevent Hitler fighting a war on two fronts.

In May, as Hitler brooded at the Berghof, Ribbentrop, his foreign minister, played him footage of Stalin in Moscow reviewing the May Day military parade from Lenin’s Mausoleum. Stalin, said Hitler, ‘looked like a man he could do business with’.

It was mutual – but always temporary.

Stalin had been sending signals of detente for some time. The Terror was spinning out of his control. On 25 November 1938, Yezhov, sinking into binges of drinking and fornication with both sexes and trying to cover up his own excesses, was replaced by a highly competent myrmidon, Lavrenti Beria, a toadish Georgian, a sadist and rapist, who oversaw a last spasm of killing that now included Yezhov himself. ‘I die with Stalin’s name on my lips,’ said Yezhov, before he was shot. Stalin, facing a resurgent Hitler in Europe and an aggressive Japan in Asia but master of a terrified Party and weakened state, entertained the approaches of both the Nazis and the Anglo-French democracies. Distrusting the British, who had long tried to destroy Soviet Russia and ‘want to use us like farmhands’ to ‘pull their chestnuts out of the fire’, Stalin had no illusions about Hitler’s ultimate hostility. He had read Mein Kampf in translation but found Hitler’s detente more plausible, and more profitable. As for Hitler, never forgetting his promise in Mein Kampf to eradicate Judaeo-Bolshevism, he ordered war against Poland – a decision that was dependent on an alliance with Stalin. Courted by all contenders, time was on Stalin’s side.

In August 1939 Hitler sent a telegram to Stalin suggesting Ribbentrop’s immediate flight to Moscow. When Stalin’s reply was brought in to Hitler at dinner, he banged the table: ‘I have them!’ As the Führer briefed his generals that Germans would now get their ‘living space’, Ribbentrop flew to Moscow and drove to Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, the Little Corner, where the general secretary was ready to negotiate the carve-up of eastern Europe. While Stalin was hosting Ribbentrop, he was directing battles against the Japanese on the Mongolian border. Two days before Ribbentrop arrived, Stalin’s newly promoted commander, Georgi Zhukov, attacked the Japanese with 50,000 troops at Khalkhin Gol. The battle would decide the future of the world war every bit as much as the conversations in the Little Corner.

At the Berghof, Hitler dined with Eva Braun and retinue, then stayed up with Goebbels, sleepless, hollow-eyed, almost feverish. At the Little Corner, Stalin and Ribbentrop traded quickly – one advantage of dictatorship. ‘Germany and Russia will never fight again,’ exulted Ribbentrop, toasting Stalin with champagne.