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Further east, large numbers of Ukrainians and citizens of the Baltic states enlisted in the Wehrmacht, disliking Stalin’s Soviet Union more than the Nazis. Ukrainians provided many of the guards for Hitler’s death camps, and in February 1944 Nikolai Vatutin, one of Stalin’s best generals, was killed by anti-Soviet Ukrainian partisans who attacked his vehicle. In occupied Yugoslavia, the Germans exploited ethnic animosities, deploying Croat Ustaše militia against the Serbs. The Ustaše, together with Cossacks in German uniforms, committed ghastly atrocities against their fellow countrymen. In the later war years, the Germans recruited soldiers of any subject power willing to serve in their uniform – Cossacks, Latvians, even a few Scandinavians, French, Belgian and Dutch troops.

Perhaps the most exotic formations in Hitler’s armies were the 13th and 23rd SS Divisions, largely composed of Bosnian Muslims under Croatian rule, and led by German officers; for parade appearances, these men wore the tasselled fez. Himmler described the Muslim Waffen-SS as ‘among the most honourable and true followers of the Führer Adolf Hitler due to their hatred of the common Jewish-English-Bolshevik enemy’. This was an exaggeration, since 15 per cent of the formations’ men were Catholic Croats, but Himmler promoted Muslim support by establishing a special mullah military school in Dresden, and the Mufti of Jerusalem created an ‘Imam School’ in Berlin, to educate SS officers about shared Nazi and Muslim ideals. One of the Muslim formations’ commanders, a bizarre figure named Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig who liked to address his soldiers as ‘children, children’, asserted that ‘The Muslims in our SS divisions … are beginning to see in our Führer the appearance of a Second Prophet.’ But Sauberzweig was removed from command of 13th SS Division after it performed poorly in Yugoslavia in 1944, and Muslim recruits contributed scant combat power to Hitler’s forces.

Guerrilla war against the Axis occupiers, promoted by Allied secret organisations, has been romanticised in post-war literature, but its strategic impact was small. Resistance groups were seldom homogeneous in motives, make-up or effectiveness, as Italian Emanuele Artom – later executed by the Germans – noted in his diary in September 1943: ‘I must record reality in case decades hence psuedo-liberal rhetoric applauds the partisans as purist heroes. We are what we are: a mixture of individuals – some acting in good faith, some political arrivistes, some deserters who fear deportation to Germany, some driven by a yearning for adventure, some by a taste for banditry. In the ranks are those who perpetrate violence, get drunk, make girls pregnant.’

So it was among Resistance movements all over occupied Europe. Both sides acted with considerable brutality: there was embarrassment in SOE’s French Section when a courier, Anne-Marie Walters, denounced her British chief in south-west France, Lt. Col. George Starr, for implication in the systematic torture of collaborators and prisoners. During subsequent investigations in Britain, senior SOE officer Col. Stanley Woolrych wrote that, despite his admiration for Starr’s achievements in the field, ‘I feel that his record has been somewhat marred by a streak of sadism which it is going to be extremely hard to ignore … There is no doubt … that they tortured prisoners in a fairly big way.’ Walters’s allegations were hushed up, but they highlighted the passions and cruelties that characterise irregular warfare.

It is unsurprising that only small minorities supported resistance, because the price was so high. Peter Kemp, an SOE officer in Albania, described a 1943 episode when he and his British party sought refuge in a village after ambushing a German staff car. Stiljan, their interpreter, conducted a long argument with an indignant figure at a half-open door, which was finally slammed in his face. ‘He will not have us,’ explained Stiljan. ‘They have heard the shooting