Sublime

Front were so enormous that peremptory

Nowhere was this Nazi attitude towards the Eastern Front more evident than in the Warsaw Rising of August 1944. An Allied capital containing nearly a million people had risen against

Poland lost more lives in the war than any other single nation on earth, including Germany.

An important geographical distinction also operated. When Poland was attacked, in 1939, the Führer made a point of ordering his generals to act with ‘the harshest cruelty’. In effect he was inviting the Wehrmacht to ignore the conventions of civilized warfare when fighting in the East. He repeated the injunction in 1941 before the attacks on Yugosl

It appears to be possible, therefore, that the Red Army’s self-inflicted losses exceeded the total number of battle deaths of the British and US armies combined (see pp. 106–7).26

Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old.

This vast realm of geographical ignorance reduced European activity in the Outer World to an archipelago of settlements, mines and trading depots connected by a skein of pathways kept open only by constant effort.