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have shown itself consistently their superior. Part of the answer must lie in the supreme professionalism of the officer corps and its combat doctrine; through the ages Germany had produced formidable soldiers, and under Hitler their performance attained its zenith, albeit in an unspeakable cause. Beyond this, the role of compulsion became almost as important as it was in Stalin’s armies. German soldiers who fled a battlefield or deserted knew they were liable to execution, a sanction imposed with increasing frequency as the Nazi empire crumbled. The Wehrmacht shot nothing like as many of its own men as did the Russians, but by 1945 penal executions ran into tens of thousands. Allied commanders, desperate to persuade their own men to try harder, often lamented their inability to impose deterrent capital sentences on deserters.

But more important to residual German resistance was the contribution of a core of fanatics, notably Waffen SS formations. A decade of Nazi indoctrination moulded excellent junior leaders. Even when it was plain that the tide of war had turned irreversibly against Hitler, many Germans made extraordinary sacrifices to preserve their homeland from Russian retribution. Not every member of the Wehrmacht was a hero: in 1944–45, a growing number showed themselves willing and even eager to surrender. But the ethos of Hitler’s army – like those of Russia and Japan – differed importantly from that of the British and American forces. The price of allowing men to retain some civil liberties and freedom of choice, and of forgoing brutal sanctions upon the weak, was that the Western armies were obliged to compensate by firepower and patience for their soldiers’ lesser willingness to accept sacrifice.

2 HOME FRONTS

Nikolai Belov of the Red Army wrote in his diary at the end of 1942: ‘Yesterday I received a whole bunch of letters from Lidochka. I sense that she isn’t having an easy time back there with the little ones.’ Captain Belov understated his wife’s predicament. In many societies, civilians suffered more than soldiers. Romanian Mihail Sebastian never saw a battlefield, but wrote in December 1943: ‘Any personal balance sheet gets lost in the shadow of war. Its terrible presence is the first reality. Then somewhere, far away, forgotten by us, are we ourselves, with our faded, diminished, lethargic life, as we wait to emerge from sleep and start living again.’ Although statistics are drastically distorted by the mortality in Russia and China, it is notable that globally more non-combatants perished between 1939 and 1945 than uniformed participants. It is hard to use the phrase ‘home front’ without irony in the context of Russia’s war, in which tens of millions found themselves in the condition described by Ukraine partisan Commissar Pavel Kalitov in September 1942, at the hamlet of Klimovo: ‘A pale, thin woman sits on a bench with a baby in her arms and a girl of about seven. She is weeping, poor wretch. What are her tears about? I would do anything to be able to help these miserable human beings, to ease their pain.’

Three weeks later, he described a similar scene in Budnitsa: ‘What is left of it? Heaps of ruins, chimneys sticking out, scorched chairs. Where there were roads and paths, there are thorns and weeds. No sign of life. The village is under constant artillery fire.’ Shortly afterwards, Kalitov’s unit received an army order to clear all civilians from a fifteen-mile zone behind the front; they were to be permitted to take their belongings, but no forage or potatoes. Kalitov wrote unhappily: ‘We’ve got to work with the civilians, to prepare them so that they do this without resisting. It’s a tough business: many people are living almost entirely off potatoes. To demand that they leave these for the troops means sentencing them to terrible hardships, even death. A family of refugees stands in front of me now. They are so thin and gaunt, one can see through them. It is especially hard to look at the little ones – three of them, one a baby, the others a little older. There is no milk. These people