Читаем The World полностью

* Stalin annexed the three Baltics (which became Soviet republics) and forced Romania to hand over Bessarabia (taken from Russia after the First World War, which became the Soviet republic of Moldavia). Beria’s secret police deported 140,000 people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. But the Finns, until 1918 a Romanov grand duchy, refused to hand over the territory Stalin demanded. Stalin invaded, calling the war a mere policing operation. But the Finns routed the huge Soviet army, killing 131,476 troops before they finally succumbed. Stalin ordered reforms of his army but the humiliation convinced Hitler that the USSR would collapse fast.

* Stalin invaded eastern Poland, where Soviet depredations were equally bleak. Soviet forces arrested and deported 400,000 Poles; 22,000 elite prisoners were imprisoned in camps near Katyn Forest. On 5 March 1940, Stalin and the Politburo ordered Beria to execute these ‘nationalists and counter-revolutionaries’, who were then buried in the woods.

* Krupp, joined by Ferdinand Porsche and his son, developed the gigantic Panther, Leopard and Tiger tanks demanded by Hitler.

* Sitting with some cronies (who included the future president Lyndon Johnson) FDR phoned Kennedy: ‘Joe, how are ya? Just sitting here with Lyndon thinking about you. I want to talk to you, my son. Can’t wait … Make it tonight.’ Then he hung up the phone smiling at Johnson: ‘I’m gonna fire the sonofabitch.’ Kennedy helped win FDR the Irish vote, backing him in the election, only realizing later that he had been handled. He placed his own presidential hopes in his eldest son, Joe Jr, who had visited Germany where ‘Hitler’s building a spirit in his men that could be envied in any country.’ His second son Jack had also travelled around Europe, preparing for a political career, but questioned his father’s pro-German politics. Both studied at Harvard and the LSE. While Kennedy was despised as a defeatist, his children had charmed the British: his daughter Kick would soon marry Billy, marquess of Hartington, the heir to the duke of Devonshire.

* ‘The Ustashe have gone raving mad,’ reported Nazi plenipotentiary General Edmund von Horstenau. The guards at the Jasenovac camp preferred to kill using hammers, axes and specially designed Srbosjek (Serb-cutter) knives strapped to the hand, indulging in demoniac tortures, eye gougings, impalings and castrations. Visiting the village of Crkveni Bok near the Jasenovac camp, Horstenau reported the ravages of teenaged Ustashe torturers: ‘People were killed everywhere, women raped then tortured to death, children killed … I saw in the Sava River the corpse of a young woman with her eyes dug out and a stake driven into her sexual parts … aged twenty when she fell into the hands of these monsters. All around, pigs devoured unburied human beings.’

* Not as cosmopolitan as Napoleon’s Grande Armée, they were mainly Germans but also included 500,000 Romanians (the largest contingent), 300,000 Italians, 200,000 Hungarians and 18,000 Spaniards.

* Among those struggling to survive was Maria, a factory-worker and the wife of a working-class submariner, Vladimir Putin. The couple, married in 1928 in their twenties, had two sons. They had already lost one child to the epidemics of the 1930s. Now as Vladimir, son of an NKVD servitor, served in an NKVD punishment battalion (later transferred to a regular Red Army unit), Maria lost her two-year-old son to starvation or diphtheria in besieged Leningrad. Vladmir was wounded but survived the war, later becoming a foreman and Party committee secretary of a train-making factory. It was only at forty-one that Maria gave birth to a lastborn son: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

* It was Sorge’s last service to Moscow. Shortly afterwards, the Kenpeitai, Japanese military intelligence, arrested him and rolled up his network. He was hanged in 1944. Among his lovers was his German fellow agent Ursula Kuczynski, who having moved to London, codename Agent Sonja, handled the nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, one of the Soviet spies who helped Stalin get the Bomb.