From the third of February 1933, when he told his generals in the secret of his ultimate ambition to invade and conquer the East, to the third of September 1939, when he left the Berlin Chancellery for the Polish front, Adolf Hitler had one obsessive goal - to wage war and achieve German revenge and hegemony. It was, as the world knows, to be a war that would leave forty million dead, lay waste most of Europe and half of Asia,...