In Europe

the United States, belong in that row of historical errors precipitated by ‘groupthink’: decisions made by small groups of policy-makers who see themselves as all-powerful, and who dismiss all problems by refusing to admit any undesirable information from outside. Leaders great and small – the phenomenon has been seen at all levelsand in every age – can in this way create for themselves a fictitious world that will, sooner or later, but inevitably, come crashing down.
    Hitler's commanders had only rarely, if ever, visited the front, Albert Speer complained after the war. ‘They knew nothing about the Russian winters and the quality of the roads during that season … They had never witnessed the damage caused to the cities by the enemy's bombs … Hitler never visited a single bombed city in the entire course of the war. As a result of this ignorance, the way things were represented during the daily staff meetings became increasingly inaccurate.’
    This mentality was reinforced even further by Hitler's retinue, from which almost every critical and independent spirit had been removed in the course of time. The level of Hitler's discourse at Berlin and Obersalzberg in no way approached that of Churchill's discussions at Chartwell, or the thorough reports delivered to Roosevelt day after day. In his memoirs, Speer – Hitler's closest acquaintance of long standing – hammers on and on about the all-pervasive provincialism of those with whom Hitler spent his days. Almost none of those around the Führer had ever seen anything of the world. In June 1940, Hitler had spent three hours driving through Paris in the early morning hours: that was almost the sum of what he had seen of France. Speer: ‘If someone had taken a holiday in Italy, that was discussed at Hitler's table as a happening, and the person in question acquired the reputation of having foreign experience.’
    For Hitler and those around him, the war in this way remained a German war, and not a world war. The Third Reich's relationship with allies like Italy, Finland, Rumania and Hungry was only fair. While the British and the Americans carefully coordinated their activities, the Germans proved incapable of any form of cooperation with their most vital ally, Japan. Hitler and the most important Japanese leaders never even met. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union without ever consulting Japan; the same applied, conversely, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet both attacks served to determine the further course of the war.
    It was also during winter 1941 that the first leading German figures began to realise that the Reich was on course for disaster. Germany's success depended entirely on quick victories. The country did not have the reserves to accommodate long campaigns in the field, and was utterly unprepared for a war with distant America. The German fleet could barely go to sea,the few battleships Germany had were no match for the combined British and American navies, and its air force – with all the technology available to it – could barely get further than England. Germany, in other words, was not even capable of reaching the territory of its greatest foe.
    As early as 29 November, 1941, Hitler and the Nazi high command had been warned that the Soviet Union was producing more tanks than Germany, and that the military balance would be thrown even further off kilter if America entered the war. At the meeting held that day, Fritz Todt, the minister responsible for Germany's arms production, concluded that ‘the war can no longer be won by military means’.
    One month later, after a troop inspection, Speer found this same Todt in an exceptionally sombre mood: ‘Later I would recall his words, and the extreme sadness on his face, when he said that we would probably not win the war.’ Shortly afterwards, Todt was killed in a plane crash.
    Brigadier General Alfred Jodl wrote from his cell in Nuremberg that, in winter 1941–2, Hitler had already grasped that victory was no longer possible. ‘Before anyone else in the world, Hitler sensed and knew that the war was lost. But can a person surrender an empire and a people before matters have truly come to an end? A person like Hitler could not.’
    Following the debacle outside Moscow, the Germany Army moved on in spring 1942, many hundreds of kilometres into Russia. Wolf Siedler observed that the atmosphere of triumph had disappeared completely in Berlin; even so, Hitler still enjoyed the