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threat before again turning west for a final settlement with Britain and the United States; third, he identified economic arguments. Ironically, Russia’s vast deliveries of raw materials and commodities following the Nazi–Soviet Pact – which in 1940 included most of Germany’s animal-feed imports, 74 per cent of its phosphorus, 67 per cent of its asbestos, 65 per cent of chrome ore, 55 per cent of manganese, 40 per cent of nickel and 34 per cent of oil – convinced Hitler that such a level of dependence was intolerable. That summer, a poor German harvest made necessary the import of huge quantities of Ukrainian wheat. He became impatient to appropriate the Soviet Union’s cornbelt, and thirsty for the oil of the Caucasus. Only late in the war did the Allies grasp the severity of their enemies’ fuel problems: petrol was so short that novice Wehrmacht drivers could be given only meagre tuition, resulting in a heavy military vehicle accident rate. Even in 1942, the worst year of the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain imported 10.2 million tons of oil; meanwhile, German imports and synthetic production never exceeded 8.9 million tons. Thus it was that Hitler made seizure of the Caucasian oil wells a key objective of Operation Barbarossa, heedless of the handicap this imposed on operations to destroy the Red Army, by dividing Germany’s forces. He envisaged the invasion of Russia as both an ideological crusade and a campaign of economic conquest. Significantly, he confided nothing of his Russian intentions to the Italians, whose discretion he mistrusted. Throughout the winter of 1940–41, Mussolini continued to nurse happy hopes of a victorious peace following his own conquest of Egypt. It was a striking characteristic of Axis behaviour until 1945 that while there was some limited consultation between Germany, Italy and Japan, there was no attempt to join in creating a coherent common strategy for defeating the Allies.

In the last weeks of 1940, therefore, while the British people supposed themselves the focus of the Nazis’ malignity and headlines around the world described the drama of the blitz, Hitler’s thoughts were far away. His generals began to prepare their armies for a struggle in the east. As early as November, an Estonian double agent told the British SIS representative in Helsinki that he had learned from an Abwehr officer ‘German command preparing June campaign against USSR.’ The SIS man commented dismissively on the implausibility of such an indiscretion, saying, ‘Possibly statement made for propaganda purposes.’ Even had this report been believed in London, the British could have done nothing to shake Stalin’s complacency and promote Soviet preparations to meet the threat.

Save for a small force dispatched to North Africa in June 1941, for a year following France’s surrender, scarcely a single German soldier fired a shot in anger. There was a protracted lull in ground operations, a loss of impetus unapparent at the time but critical to the course of the war. Hitler took no meaningful steps towards converting the largest military conquests in history into a durable hegemony. The German navy was too weak either to support an invasion of Britain or to sever its Atlantic lifeline; the Luftwaffe’s campaign against Britain had failed. It seems flippant to suggest that Hitler determined to invade Russia because he could not think what else to do, but there is something in this, as Ian Kershaw has observed. Many more Nazi battlefield triumphs lay ahead, but some generals privy to their Führer’s intentions already understood the Third Reich’s fundamental difficulty: anything less than hemispheric domination threatened disaster; yet Germany’s military and economic capability to achieve this remained questionable.

Hitler’s Continental triumphs caused the democracies to overrate Germany’s strength, while persuading his own nation rapturously to rejoice in their victories. The German people had entered the war full of misgivings, which by the winter of 1940 were largely dispelled. The Luftwaffe’s failure against Britain troubled