ladies and gentlemen it's a great honor to be invited to address you this afternoon and thank you very much indeed uh col tce for those kind remarks uh it's perfectly true uh that my book got to number two on the bestseller list beat only by a book about Michael Jackson in the course of um writing the storm of war and its predecessor Masters and commanders it became very clear to me that the primary reason why the Germans lost the second world war a war that they could have won is that Adolf Hitler whenever the best interests of the Nazi party bated from those of the verar always took the former route he always prioritized his fascism his Nazism over and above the best interests of the German Reich he also saw the second world war entirely in ideological terms rather than in the grand strategic terms that an earlier German leader such as bismar or an earlier Chief of Staff such as helmet Von muler would have done and you see this happening so often it's so UB ubiquitous in the key decision-making moments of the second world War as to be a pattern for his War fighting and an explanation for his defeat right at the beginning of the war at the time of operation sea lion the uh the projected German invasion of Britain in 1940 Hitler had only 43 operational OTS as against 46 63 at the time of the end of the second world war in May 19 at least in the war in Europe in May 1945 had he had 463 OTS at the beginning of the war had he started to build his ubot capacity from the moment he came to power in January 1933 he would have been able to have strangled uh Great Britain right off at the beginning of the war but he never thought it was necessary never thought it would be necessary for one Anglo-Saxon Nation to fight against another Anglo sa Nation even though of course he himself had fought in the Great War across the uh no man's land from British regiments this was uh a classic example of his uh of placing his Nazism his uh his belief in the uh importance the Vital Center of importance of race as opposed to any of the other major considerations uh necessary he um didn't even work out what would happen were he to need to invade Britain the various plans for the invasion of Britain operation San were still being uh still being perfected at the time of the Battle of Britain and afterwards um when there was at that point after the defeat in the Battle of Britain Hitler had no uh realistic chance of invading this got to the point that when the SS Drew up a list of 2,820 uh Britain who were going to be arrested and shot on site the list was uh so haphazard and last minute that it included Sigman Freud who had died two years beforehand uh it had aldus Huxley who had come to live in America in 1936 and when uh the whole list was published in um uh after the end of the war once it was captured Dame Rebecca West telegraphed to NL coward both of them appeared on the list saying my dear the people we should have been seen Dead with on the 25th of August 1940 a lone hanle 111 bomber which had in fact got lost from the uh rest of its uh Squadron dropped some bombs on the East End of London Winston Churchill used this opportunity to uh the very next night respond with a allout attack on Berlin this was at the height of the um of the Battle of Britain at a time when the Royal Air Force was absolutely on its last legs uh the command and control systems had been blown to smithin the holes in the runways uh and uh and the ability for RAF squadrons to take off were deeply damaged the uh RAF was Absolut abolutely um within days of being operationally incapable of continuing to defend Britain and yet instead of keeping to this uh to this uh luffer plan to uh to destroy the airway the um the aerodromes Hitler again entirely due to ideolog ideology o to the fact that he had promised the German people that no bomber would ever get through to bomb Berlin this went totally against his concept the Nazi concept of the fura principle that uh the fura was infallible and he had been proved to be fallible by uh Churchill's immediate response to this lone 1111 bomber and so he on the 7th of September turns the luffer attack from the aerodromes to the bombing of London to the civilian bombing the East End bombing trying to knock out the British docks and this ladies and gentlemen gave the ra F the absolutely crucial time that it needed in order to fill the holes in the runway to repair the commands and control systems and to put ourselves in a position to win the Battle of Britain by the 15th of September again ideology you see in the three Central reasons for Hitler's invasion of Russia um on the 22nd of June 1941 ideology Trump General uh and Grand strategy every time the first was to build laban's realm living space in the East uh for the German um Uber mench the uh the uh Superman and this was intended to grab uh hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory in Eastern Europe and um use it for uh the German writing and for it to be act for the for the work to be done by the unch the subhuman slaves who Hitler believed he was going to be able to destroy in quick order again racial ideology as the primary motivating uh Factor but the other two factors were also had very little to do with indeed nothing to do with grand strategy um the political one of course was for his desire to win um a uh the what he called the final struggle against the Bolsheviks ever since the 1920s he had been a street fighter against bolshevism he wanted what he called what he told Geral would be the final Reckoning against the Bolsheviks when we kick in the door he says uh the whole rotten edifice will collapse and um again this was not uh driven by strategy this was driven by a by a political loathing and also of course uh in 1941 over half of Europe's Jews lived in the USSR and he wanted to have uh a chance to have a final solution of an opportunity to destroy them and so these three great driving forces behind what uh was and uh and presumably um always will be the uh the biggest invasion in world history over three million men cross the uh Russian Border in 1941 in June 1941 uh 186 divisions in all were uh were uh flung into operation Barbarosa and uh it was not thought out properly in the Strategic sense the uh initial um victories were astonishing indeed on the first day of barbarasa on the 22nd of June no less than 40% of the the red bomber Force the ussr's bomber force was destroyed on the ground didn't even have a chance to take off uh its Commander leftenant General Ivan copet shot himself um that afternoon which uh in Stalin's Russia was a sensible career move what um happened next was a serious uh refusal on the behalf of the fura to take advice from generals who were far more strategically um impressive uh far far better strategic thinkers than uh than he um people who had of course gone to Staff College who had leared about strategy who had fought as officers as opposed to uh non-commissioned officers in the Great War uh men like win roml and Hines Garian and Eric gon manstein and gerd runed he would listen to these people we know uh we know how long he would listen to them sometimes up to an hour he would listen to these uh to these generals um we know because from the December of 1942 uh right the way through to the end of the war uh and his death in April 1945 we have the verbatim accounts of the uh fur conferences taking place in uh most of the in the vul shansa in eastern Prussia um it's still there you can go to visit it in uh in what is modern day Poland of the fabulously uh fascinating Sinister Place uh including the uh remains of the hut that they uh attempted to kill him in on the 20th of July 1944 and he spent over half of the war at the vul shansa and we know every word that was said at the meetings and uh so we know that yes he would listen to garan and and rumel and others but he would um then at the end of the meeting uh decide to do precisely what he'd intended to do right at the beginning of the meeting he was a um uh he he he would he admired his generals until of course in July they 44 they tried to blow him up um but he uh would constantly be moving them around from different theaters um myddle had to take command in the calendar year 1944 myddle had to take command of the army Group North Army group Center and army group South um at different stages he would move uh he moved run dead backwards and forwards sacking him three times in the course of the second world war gadarian was effectively sacked uh as well at one point uh and roml of course was forced to commit suicide these uh these men had um uh were never certain that they were going to stay in the job for very long um because he could never keep the same um General in place it was uh it went against his nature the idea that Adolf Hitler had as um his propagandists such as um Dr Joseph Geral his Minister for culture and public Enlightenment told the German peoples he had a will of iron he didn't all Hitler would constantly change his mind in some very important aspects uh such as the um uh the jet aircraft the uh which he turned from being a fighter to a bomber and back to a fighter again he actually created industrial bottlenecks through his changes of mind that turned out to be uh disastrous um he was also again because of his ideology um um completely incapable when it came to the uh the turn of the war in the Autumn of uh 1942 uh totally incapable of seeing strategic withdrawals in anything other than a political sense he assumed that because this uh great um uh this great uh um drive across Europe had been so successful in 1930 9 to 1941 that the the German people if they saw any strategic withdrawals would um consider that to be the equivalent of uh of defeat and yet the Germans were superb at strategic withdrawals when they were allowed to do it the only drawback was that he constantly refused the generals the right to we're always taught as historians now at least I was at University never to use the word inevitable because nothing is inevitable in history um and that's true uh except for German Counterattack uh German Counterattack when one looks at kazarin pass when one looks at K when one looks at anzio when one looks at solero when one looks at the the Battle of the Bulge the classic example of this a 39 divisional attack coming out of the Arden uh forests and mountains um conducted in the dead of night through three feet of snow with search lights bounced across against the um against the uh clouds to turn night into day with messages only being um handed out by motorcyclists and never by radio it was an astonishing uh Counterattack almost got to the m River um that is the capacity for the germs for Counterattack and uh and yet um Hitler consistently hobbled the uh High command in their attempts to um uh to undertake them uh he would also as the war progressed and especially of course after the uh bomb plot appoint generals on the basis of their political loyalty uh to him personally and their Nazism rather than on their capability as uh as generals you see this with Sherer with rendel with Krebs various uh G German generals who uh frankly weren't um Top Class um soldiers but were fanatical Nazis and he would appoint them sooner than the um the less political uh but better soldiers another example as as I say of uh of ideology trumping um the best interests of the verar you also see it in the uh operation Barbarosa with the way in which he treated the baltics and the Ukraine the Ukraine is a classic example of a part of the Soviet Union which loathed the Bolsheviks in Moscow understandably so as uh something like 2 million ukrainians had been deliberately starved to death in the uh in the Great Famine of the the artificial Great Famine of the late 1920s early 1930s by the Bolsheviks and yet yet um he could not he constitutionally could not allow genuine Slavic autonomy when the um verar rolled into uh Ukrainian Villages the elders came out with their traditional uh welcome of bread and salt um had he turns the Ukraine against the um against the Moscow government then pretty much anything might have been possible possible in the um operation Barbarosa but he could not genuinely do that he couldn't give genuine autonomy to the uh to the Slavic unman she had to see it in terms of um ideology and so you come to the um horrific moment of course in the winter of 194 uh2 I'm so sorry in 1941 when the Russian winter closes in and the assumption that had been made um again on ideological grounds that the Soviet Union would collapse uh after the door had been kicked in that after only a five month campaign Russia would um be uh flung out of Moscow that Leningrad would fall um was put to the test and because of this over this Assumption of Victory uh rather than the long War you had the situation where where um German soldiers were not properly provided for when it came to winter clothing and the results I um I mention in uh in my book always display the product um there was an Italian journalist called Kio malap who in his um autobiographical book um called kaput refers to the time when he was waiting in the um in the eura cafe in Warsaw it's still there in fact it's just across the road from the railway station and um and he started seeing the uh the German wounded coming off the um coming off the uh trains and um before I read to you about what that was like here's a quotation from Hitler um on the 12th of August 1942 he was having dinner with um the head of the SS H kimla at the berus Garden um at uh on that day and um they were talking about how how cold Russian Winters could get and he said this having to change into long trousers was always a misery to me he was boasting about how um how great he was in the and how Hardy he was in the cold arguing also that his uh his army could be just as Hardy having to change into long trousers was always a misery to me even with a temperature of 10 below zero I used to go about in ler hosen the feeling of Freedom they give you is wonderful uh abandoning my shorts was one of the biggest sacrifices I had to make anything up to 5 degre Below Zero I didn't even notice quite a number of young people of today already wear shorts all the year round is just a question of habit in the future I shall have an SS Highland Brigade in lerosen uh of course it wasn't minus5 orus 10 some including the windchill factor the um the weather got down to minus 30 degrees and uh and the result was that Kio malap partti saw this um as he's sitting in the cafe watching the troops come off the train suddenly I was struck with horror and realized that they had no eyelids I'd already seen Soldiers with lidless eyes on the platform of the Minsk station a few days earlier on my way from smolin the ghastly cold of that winter had the strangest consequences thousands and thousands of soldiers had lost their limbs thousands and thousands had their ears their noses their fingers and their sexual organs ripped off by the frost many had lost their hair many had lost their eyelids singed by the cold the eyelid drops off like a piece of dead skin and their future was only lunacy when it comes to the explanation for Hitler's other classic massive blunder um his decision to go to war against you on the 11th of December 1941 to declare war against an uninvadable country you see there too the influence of ideology over any kind of um of um Grand strategic sense his Assumption of course was that having been attacked 4 days earlier at Pearl Harbor the entire might of the United States Army was going to Army Navy and Air Force were going to uh be concentrated against the uh against the Japanese first he had no inkling uh of the what for me represents the most farsighted strategic decision of the 20th century which was that of um General Marshall uh and the Roosevelt administration and of course Dwight Eisenhower to put Germany first uh the Germany first policy which was um the very which was the fundamental framework for um American uh victory over the fascist powers in the uh second world war in my view um what instead he based his assumptions were was the uh idea that because he believed that America was ruled by blacks and Jews that therefore they would not be able to uh to fight successfully in the second world war quite apart from the fact that he obviously hadn't studied the Personnel of the Roosevelt administration um it uh made absolutely no sense constantly to underplay the uh abilities of the Americans to fight not least because he himself as a uh as a Corporal in the trenches of the Bavarian 16th Bavarian list regiment in the Great War had been um across no man's land from American divisions so he was he was putting his ideology before the actual experience of his own um of his own life an astonishing concept none of the uh none of the senior Nazis knew America the only single one of them that had ever come here uh was yoakim Von ribbon trop who in the 1920s had attempted to sell unsuccessfully at champagne in New York uh that was the uh that was the entire extent of the Nazis personal knowledge of America and so when um ribbon shop talked about America he listened to they listened to him um even Hitler and this is what he told a delegation of Italians in 1942 he said this about America I know them I know their country a country devoid of culture devoid of Music above all a country without soldiers a people who will never be able to decide the war from the air when has a jefi nation like that ever become a race of Fighters and flying Aces and Hitler himself um told molotov in 1940 that the earliest that the Americans would be able to um deploy any serious amount of troops in the western theater would be in the year 1970 uh as it was needless to say ladies and gentlemen I don't have to tell any of you that uh by November 194 2 under Operation Torch uh you had landed a quarter of a million men in the North African um theater and then of course we're going to go on in July 1943 to Sicily then Across The Straits in September 1943 to Italy uh and then the day after taking Rome you were going to cross the Channel with uh with massive preponderant forces the another Central statistic for me of the second world war is that in the calendar year 1944 this is something the Nazis could never get their mind round because they never truly appreciated the massive productive power of the United States in the calendar year 1944 when Britain produced 28,000 war planes and Germany and Russia produced 40,000 war planes each the United States produced no fewer than 98,000 warplanes as much as the whole of the rest of the world put together effectively and so this was something that that they were um that the Nazis were for ideological reasons incapable of understanding the um non-nazi perfectly well understood uh you had the um uh had serious uh and substantial figures in the uh German war production uh Ministries including Albert Spar who did understand that if America was to as Roosevelt make made sh he did in the State of the Union Address of um January 1942 turn the entire productive peacetime productive um capacity of the United States into a wartime military uh capacity then anything was possible in fact you had one person in one of the German Ministries shoot himself uh as soon as he heard that America had uh had entered the war because he knew that effectively the game was up in the great attack on Russia the Barbarosa attack um which took place in June 1941 um which of course was entirely came from the uh from the West had Hitler managed to coordinate with Japan and had Japan managed to attack from the East it was in a pos position to from Manchuria had they moved into Siberia at that time uh then it would have been impossible for the uh for the Russians to have defended Moscow on the 18th of October 1941 Stalin made his personal train ready to take him bit back beyond the urals um to uh to Y cinberg and uh had it not been for the 16 Siberian divisions that were taken from Beyond the urals to defend Moscow in that key moment in mid 19 in mid October 1941 um then the demoralization of the Soviet Union would have been incalculable if they had leared that Stalin had left Moscow when one thinks in the north the Nazis the Germans subjected Leningrad to a grueling 850 long day day long Siege 850 days which cost a total of 1.1 million soldiers and civilians uh but nonetheless held out and then down in Stalingrad in the south um which is somewhere that I hugely recommend you to go to the modern day vulgar grad immensely moving place where some of the buildings that they have that were fought over the old uh tractor factories that were fought over in Stalingrad where there are there's literally a bullet in every single brick uh of these um of these buildings uh and that of course was taken by the Germans but uh but was then taken back um at the time of these great sieges had Moscow Fallen then um then anything could have happened but the fact is that the Germans and the Japanese effectively fought two completely separate Wars uh they just happened to be happening at the same time the um they didn't help each other they didn't coordinate they didn't uh they didn't even exchange um information about anti-tank Weaponry um and uh this was again can very largely be put down to the fact that uh although in 1937 when the Japanese entered the anti-com pact um German scientists uh were sent out to measure to get Japanese skulls from German museums and to measure them with calipers and to uh deduce from this that actually the Japanese were an Aryan people uh it was nonetheless um not something that was believed by anybody in the Nazi hierarchy and uh and so fortunately certainly for the British in the Indian Ocean there was no effective uh interaction between the uh the two most powerful Axis Powers um one thinks of course also at the time of the um of the uh middle part of the second world war of the amazing decision by Hitler to um and indeed in many ways the classic decision of him placing his fanatical narcissism before the best interests of the Reich um of his decision to undertake the Holocaust at the time he didn't in the way he did whilst between 1939 and 1945 the number of um people working in German war production factories fell one might say collapsed uh from 39 million to 29 million a of 26% now at that exact time Hitler decided to kill 6 million of his most intelligent hardworking and well educated um people uh it made absolutely no sense whatsoever in military terms in strategic terms in in uh in the terms of war production but it meant everything to him because that ultimately was what uh the war was about for him I um and and and in the course of that of course uh he ured in the course of his anti-semitic um uh actions which of course had taken place since before he became fura but certainly uh after he became fura in January 1933 um one of the classic and most important aspects of that was that he lost all of the scientists not just the Jewish scientists but uh but liberal-minded men who uh UL were to come here to Los anamos uh um and uh and create the nuclear bomb which did after all end the second world war um and when uh when one thinks of when goes down the list of the names uh that uh of people that Robert Oppenheimer brought together at um in New Mexico one sees again and again these uh these brilliant men um many many of them uh most of them indeed uh refugees from from Europe between 1901 and 1932 the number of people who were awarded Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry in um Germany was 16 and in uh America it was only five between 1950 and the year 2000 the people who won those Nobel prizes were in Germany seven and in America 67 that is the size of the massive brain drain that took place as a result of Nazi um ideology I once uh interviewed in the course of writing my first book about 20 years ago I once interviewed uh uh General serrian Jacob who was the military secretary to uh Winston Churchill and sorry the assistant military secretary to Winston Church Churchill and I said to him at the end of uh of lunch uh so um so why why ultimately do you think the uh that we won the war rather than the Germans because he's he explained quite how the Germans could have and he said you know it always comes back for me to the fact that um our German scientists were cleverer than their German scientists to conclude um I'd like to take you back to the um bearoff again where uh on the fourth of February 1942 Adolf Hitler was entertaining hinr kimla um again the conversation rather weirdly got round to Shakespeare it was probably Hamlet and King Lea to which the fura was referring when he said that it was a misfortune that none of our great writers took his subject from German Imperial history our Shiller found nothing better to do than to glorify a Swiss crossbowman the English for their part had a Shakespeare but the history of his country had supplied Shakespeare as far as heroes are concerned only with imbeciles and madman the assumption that uh Hitler was either an imil or a Madman is wrong Hitler had quite a high IQ um it is thought he had uh he was he was rather like I don't know if you have the same expression in America rather like a train spotter uh in that he would be he was a great expert on the gauges of Railways on the speed of tanks on the displacement of ships and the uh and the um fuel capacity of um of planes and so on uh when it came to the uh to the nitty-gritty details of numbers and uh and details like that um Hitler was a mine of information um nor was he if he he wasn't an imbecil and and he wasn't mad until the uh Point towards the very end of the war say March or February historians will disagree when he was certainly going to lose and certainly going to die then of course um the uh the ranting became uh became um uh well we've all seen that magnificent Bruno Gant movie downfall uh which uh which captures him as well as any historian can uh and all historians of of uh of Hitler uh when that movie came out said this was this is the closest we're going to get to a accurate portrayal of of the man um and so when one looks at um at this uh um creature one doesn't assume that he was either an imbecile or a Madman no what he was was something different and it was the reason that he lost the war he was an inable un regenerative Nazi thank you very much indeed