LAURENCE REES: Can we point to a single greatest turning point of the war?

DAVID CESARANI:  I don’t think there was a single turning point, I think there were a series of bad decisions each of which had within it a turning point. Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union was a turning point but it only became a negative turning point after the decision not to pursue the advance to Moscow but instead to occupy the Ukraine and defeat Russian armies in the Ukraine. Even then the situation probably could have been redeemed if the attack on Moscow hadn’t been weakened by the diversion of resources to Leningrad, etcetera, etcetera. The war might have been redeemed for the Nazis in 1942 if they hadn’t split their advance between Stalingrad and the Caucuses and so forth.

LAURENCE REES: You don’t believe that the whole thing was doomed from the start because the Nazis simply never had the economic resources to be able to win this war?

DAVID CESARANI: You don’t need economic resources to win a war. What the defeat of France showed is that a second rate power can take on first rate powers and knock them out if those first rate powers are badly led and if their military is incompetent. I think it was a damned near run thing, and time and time again it could have swung the wrong way.