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the initial successes in the Soviet Union, had as a consequence the transition of the original intention for a territorial solution to the Nazis’ self-imposed Jewish problem to an exterminationist one. Even as the Ostheer began to struggle against its Soviet opponent, however, the murderous activities of the Einsatzgruppen coalesced with efforts to implement the hunger policy and Generalplan Ost, with the result being a stunning level of violence directed against the occupied peoples of the Soviet Union. Having unleashed a war of annihilation, Hitler now redoubled his efforts to see it through, characteristically perceiving a short window of opportunity for action. If Germany could defeat the Soviet Union in 1942 or at least render it incapable of further resistance, the vast resources of European Russia would be available for use in a global war of attrition against the Anglo-Americans.
    Fleeting, perhaps, as it was, Hitler in 1942 had one last chance to achieve some sort of triumph that might have allowed a stalemated war, at least until the United States developed the atomic bomb. Militarily and economically, then, 1942 was the key year of the war. Hitler, however, in late July squandered whatever slim chances he had for achieving victory militarily in Russia by splitting his already inadequate forces in the vain hope of achieving simultaneously goals that could have been attained only sequentially, if at all. Economically, too, Germany wasted its apparent advantage, finding itself not only being outproduced by the Anglo-Americans, which was perhaps to be expected, but also being overtaken by a truly stupendous effort on the part of the Soviet Union. The Russians ultimately could not sustain this superhuman effort, and, by 1944, the German war economy had pulled even with Soviet production, but by then it was too late, for American output alone swamped the Germans. Unfortunately, 1942 proved decisive in the other war as well: the success of the Ostheer through much of the year provided the opportunity to complete the Final Solution as the Nazis made a concerted effort to kill the Jews in their sphere of influence. The systematic murders of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, the often ad hoc killings at the local level in many areas of occupied Europe, and the efforts of Nazi bureaucrats at the RSHA and the Foreign Office to get allies and satellite nations to hand over their Jews merged to produce a crash program of mass murder undertaken under the cover of German military success. By the autumn of 1943, even as the war had turned decisively against the Reich, Himmler could boast that the Jewish problem had largely been solved in the areas under German control and that what remained was primarily a mopping-up operation. 13
    That same year, 1943, witnessed an increasing interaction of the various fronts—eastern, Mediterranean, Atlantic, the skies over Germany—that pressured even further the already strained German resources. With Hitler unable or unwilling to mobilize the German people as ruthlessly as Stalin had in the Soviet Union, the German economy became increasingly dependent on forced labor from the east and slave workers from the concentration camps. By 1944, Hitler’s last remaining hope was to defeat the anticipated Anglo-American invasion in the west and then, in a repeat of the scenario of 1940–1941, turn once more to the east. This meant a reversal in the priority of the fronts, with disastrous results. Because of constant, enormous Soviet pressure in the winter of 1943–1944, the Wehrmacht could never transfer sufficiently large forces to the west to ensure the defeat of the Allied invasion, while the Ostheer found itself with insufficient resources to stabilize the front in the east. Like a rubber band stretched too far, German defenses had to break, and they did so spectacularly in the summer of 1944. Even as Anglo-American forces struggled to escape the narrow confines of