LAURENCE REES: And the biggest single mistake made in the war?

ROBERT DALLEK: Well, it was certainly made by Hitler, opening his Second Front against Russia; the conviction that he could conquer the world, so to speak. But that was the dynamic of Nazism. Hannah Arendt once said that the dynamic of Nazism was that it needed to maintain a kind of level of fighting sentiment, of nationalistic intensity. And, in a sense, one might say it was doomed from the beginning. Now, I mean, that’s too easy in the sense that so much sacrifice had to be made, 50 million people had to die. But there was a dynamic in Nazism that would bring it down, the way it was true of Soviet Communism, there was a dynamic there that was eventually going to bring it down.