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Antonescu was a vicious antisemite. ‘Satan is the Jew,’ he told his cabinet. ‘Ours is a life-and-death struggle. Either we win and cleanse the world or they win and we’ll be their slaves.’ Antonescu keenly embraced Hitler, who even allowed Red Dog to lecture him on Romanian history. Antonescu promised troops for Barbarossa. Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia joined Hitler’s Axis, until a pro-British coup in Belgrade threatened to delay his Russian invasion.

Hitler, enraged, ordered a war of ‘pitiless harshness’ to ‘destroy Yugoslavia’, dividing it to create an independent Croatia under the ultra-nationalist Ustashe, led by Ante Pavelic´. Once in power – nominally under an Italian king Tomislav II – Pavelic´, assuming his own Führeresque title Poglavnik, unleashed a frenzy of killing, supported by Catholic priests. Aiming to kill all Croatian Jews plus a third of all Serbs, his butchery exposed the hatred of intimate neighbours: 300,000 Serbs, 30,000 Jews and 20,000 Roma were killed in such ghoulish bedlam that the Nazis called the Ustashe ‘monsters’^* and Himmler complained to the Poglavnik.

Yugoslavia delayed Barbarossa by a few key months. ‘In four weeks,’ said a euphoric Hitler, now ensconced at the Wolf’s Lair, a gloomy, mosquito-infested headquarters of hulking concrete bunkers at Rastenburg, East Prussia, ‘we will take Moscow …’ At 3 a.m. on 22 June, three million soldiers^* and 3,000 tanks crossed the border.

THE GREATEST BATTLE IN HISTORY: HITLER’S WAR OF ANNIHILATION; HIROHITO’S GAMBLE

The surprise was almost total. The day before, Stalin listened tensely to growing reports of massing German forces and his generals’ unease. Allowing only minor preparations, he had scarcely fallen asleep at his home, the Nearby dacha when he was awoken by the phone. Zhukov reported that the Germans were attacking on all fronts.

It was the biggest mistake of Stalin’s career. Intelligence had poured in from his superb espionage network in Berlin and Warsaw, as well as from Churchill and even Mao, but particularly from his spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, a raffish half-German, half-Russian playboy. Sorge, best friends with the German attaché whose wife was one of his many lovers, learned the date of the invasion. ‘There’s this bastard who’s set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June,’ sneered Stalin. ‘Are you suggesting I believe him too?’ Dictatorship and Terror can suppress priceless intelligence and common sense. ‘Send your source to fuck his mother,’ he wrote on one report. Stalin could be as mulishly obtuse as he was lupinely astute and felinely flexible. ‘An intelligence officer,’ he said, ‘ought to be like the devil, believing no one, not even himself.’ In this case, the devil out-devilled himself. He knew that Hitler was his enemy and that war would come but believed the pact would delay it until 1943. As tension rose, he should have probed an alliance with Britain. His mistake was to regard Hitler as a conventional statesman, while in fact the Führer was the self-declared ‘sleepwalker’ who sought wars of annihilation.

Rushing to the Kremlin, Stalin ordered counter-attacks on all fronts. They were disastrous, drawing millions of Soviet soldiers into German encirclements, as the Germans powered forward, taking Minsk, then Smolensk. When Stalin and his retainers visited headquarters and demanded the latest reports, Zhukov, a general of adamantine hardness, had to admit the fronts were in disarray and burst into tears. ‘Lenin left a state and we’ve fucked it up,’ said Stalin, returning to his mansion for two days to collect himself and, like Ivan the Terrible, test the loyalty of his boyars. On the third, his grandees arrived to insist that he take command. The Georgian ex-choirboy who, like Hitler, believed he was a born soldier, assumed the title Supremo and, mustering Russia’s unparalleled resources of human and industrial power, fielding an awesome 4.2 million troops, rallied his own people with a mix of patriotism, terror and Marxism to engage Hitler in a ‘life-and-death struggle’.

‘Brothers and sisters, my friends!’ Stalin began, addressing his people. ‘History shows there are no invincible armies.’ Hitler disagreed.