‘History always emphasizes terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war. He hated the idea that the early achievements of Hitler’s regime would be obscured by its final collapse. Yet Speer, like other prominent Nazis, refused to recognize that few things reveal more about political leaders and their systems than the manner of their downfall. This is why the subject of National Socialism’s final defeat is so fascinating, and also so important at a time when teenagers, especially in Germany, are finding much to admire in the Third Reich.

The Nazis’ enemies had first been able to visualize their moment of vengeance just over two years before. On 1 February 1943, an angry Soviet colonel collared a group of emaciated German prisoners in the rubble of Stalingrad. ‘That’s how Berlin is going to look!’ he yelled, pointing to the ruined buildings all around. When I read those words some six years ago, I sensed immediately what my next book had to be. Among the graffiti preserved on the Reichstag’s walls in Berlin, one can still see the two cities linked by Russians exulting in their revenge, forcing the invaders from their furthest point of eastward advance right back to the heart of the Reich.

Hitler too remained obsessed with this decisive defeat. In November 1944, as the Red Army was grouping beyond the Reich’s eastern frontiers, he pointed back to Stalingrad. Germany’s reverses had all begun, he said in a major speech, ‘with the breakthrough of Russian armies on the Romanian front on the Don in November 1942’. He blamed his hapless allies, under-armed and ignored on the vulnerable flanks either side of Stalingrad, not his own obsessive refusal to heed the warnings of danger. Hitler had learned nothing and had forgotten nothing.

That same speech demonstrated with terrible clarity the distorted logic in which the German people had allowed themselves to become ensnared. When published, it was entitled ‘Capitulation Means Annihiation’. He warned that if the Bolshevists won, the fate of the German people was destruction, rape and slavery, with ‘immense columns of men treading their way to the Siberian tundra’.