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On D-Day – 6 June 1944 – 156,000 Anglo-American troops under the American Dwight Eisenhower landed in Normandy – Operation Overlord.^* By the end of the month 850,000 troops were ashore, breaking out into France as other forces fought their way up through Italy. The D-Day landings marked an even greater victory: the infections of its wounded were treated with a new miracle drug, penicillin.^*

As Anglo-American forces fought their way up through Italy and across France, Hitler ordered that Paris ‘must not fall into the enemy’s hands except lying in complete debris’, but his generals disobeyed him. Dodging German snipers, de Gaulle marched through Paris, celebrating ‘Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!’ He was determined to restore ‘la grandeur’ of ‘France éternelle’ with himself as a republican monarch.

Stalin’s armies burst into Poland; days later, on 20 July, Hitler was leaning over his maps in the wooden operations hut at the Wolf’s Lair when a bomb exploded.

Among the shattered walls and dead officers, Hitler had a cut leg and a burst eardrum, but he was alive, protected by the table leg. Exhilarated at this further evidence of providence, Hitler learned that the assassin was a decorated colonel who had just left the hut: Count Claus von Stauffenberg, who had lost an eye and a hand in the war which he, like most Junker officers, had supported, with all its horrific atrocities, until Russian defeat. Yet he was one of the courageous few who dared resist Hitler. Hearing the explosion, Stauffenberg escaped from the Wolf’s Lair and, convinced that Hitler was dead, flew to Berlin to find his coup falling apart. The Führer proved he was alive by talking on the phone to the key conspirator, who then arrested and shot Stauffenberg to save his own skin. Himmler then rounded up suspects, whom Hitler ordered to be ‘hanged like meat’, their agonies filmed – and possibly later watched by the dictator. Already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and stimulated by a pharmaceutical cornucopia injected by his quack Theodor Morell (who had made millions from his own branded delousing ‘Russia Powder’ issued to the army), including Pervitin (a methamphetamine) and Eukodal (the opioid oxycodone), Hitler had been injured, his cuts filled with splinters from the bomb. Morell saved his life by administering penicillin found on captured American troops. Hitler had deteriorated, and now he was red-eyed, deathly pale, limping, his leg and arm shaking. Although he tightened his grip on Germany through his campaign of vengeance, he was losing allies fast as the Red Army approached his borders.

In July, Stalin halted his forces near Warsaw as 20,000 Polish resistance fighters launched their uprising, timed to establish themselves before the Soviets arrived. Obsessed like all Russian leaders with the danger of an independent Poland and keen to establish his own Communists in power, Stalin called their bluff and did not help, leaving Hitler’s SS and assorted Ukrainian auxiliaries of diabolical depravity to slaughter 15,000 Polish rebels and 200,000 civilians and raze Warsaw itself.

‘I planned a coup,’ King Mihai of Romania told this author, ‘against Marshal Antonescu.’ The Soviets were on his border. On 23 August 1944, the Hohenzollern invited Red Dog for an audience and ordered an armistice. Red Dog raged. Mihai drew his pistol. Four officers disarmed Antonescu. At gunpoint, the king ‘led him into the king’s safe where my father used to keep his stamp collection. I locked him in there’ and sued for peace. It was Mihai’s finest moment, but it was too little too late.

Next door in Bulgaria, Hitler had already poisoned a reluctant ally, Tsar Boris III. In Hungary, Horthy also attempted an anti-Nazi coup at which Hitler’s commandos kidnapped the regent’s son, who was held hostage to force Horthy to relinquish control. In the wake of German troops came Eichmann, who organized the deportation of 400,000 Jews in just three months. Most were murdered at Auschwitz.

In February 1945, after American bombers shattered the Berlin Chancellery, and Allied forces converged from east and west, Hitler, accompanied by Eva Braun, moved into the nearby Führerbunker just as Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill set off for a conference at Yalta in Crimea, once the tsar’s holiday palace, recently liberated. In the twilit, dank concrete gloom of the Berlin bunker, Hitler’s mother’s portrait hung in his bedroom; his tiny office was dominated by a portrait of Frederick the Great whose last-minute reprieve on the death of Tsarina Elizaveta obsessed him. ‘He too was cut out not for the Seven Years War,’ murmured Hitler, ‘but for dalliance, philosophy and flute-playing, yet still had to live up to his historical mission.’ Frederick’s coat was always covered in snuff stains. Eva Braun noticed mess on Hitler’s grey tunic. ‘You don’t have to copy everything to do with Old Fritz!’ she teased him.