History’s lessons - Brutal cost of failure

TODAY is the 70th anniversary of the German invasion of Russia, a central event in the ultimate defeat of Hitler’s Nazis and victory for European democracy.

History’s “what ifs” offer almost limitless speculation about what might have happened if something had been done differently, but it is almost certain that, had Hitler’s hubris not undermined his own generals in Russia, the course of World War II, the catastrophe that has, to this day, shaped our modern world, would have run very differently.

The invasion led to the most appalling savagery. Though the figures remain disputed, it is generally agreed that more than 25 million Russians soldiers and civilians and millions more Poles and Germans died in the ensuing carnage.

The three terrible years on the Eastern Front that followed that invasion, until Abdulkhakim Ismailov — who died just this February aged 93 — and his comrades raised the Red Flag over Berlin’s Reichstag, show what happens when societies fail. Let us hope it is a lesson that is never repeated.