MY MUM told me how, as an 18-year-old worker in a Dunstable aircraft factory, she traced every advance of the Red Army on a map, illustrated with the image of Uncle Joe, on her bedroom wall. 

For her the threat of fascism was real. Throughout the war my grandparents housed a Dutch family, refugees from the Nazi invasion. My father, as a 21-year-old factory worker, was prepared by the Communist Party for clandestine work and was given a false identity in anticipation of a Nazi occupation. The party even bought up a local newspaper in preparation for the suppression of the Daily Worker.

In the working class there was tremendous opposition to war but a great fear of a Nazi invasion combined with a real sense that the ruling class was preparing to do a deal with the Nazis.

A diary entry by Tory MP Chips Channon, a prominent Franco supporter who held that Hitler could be persuaded to attack the Soviet Union, gives an insight into their thinking.

“I had a long conversation with Lord Halifax [the Foreign Secretary] about Germany and his recent visit.

“He described Hitler’s appearance, his khaki shirt, black breeches and patent leather evening shoes.

“He told me he liked all the Nazi leaders, even Goebbels, and he was much impressed, interested and amused by the visit. He thinks the regime absolutely fantastic, perhaps even too fantastic to be taken seriously. But he is very glad that he went, and thinks good may come of it. I was riveted by all he said, and reluctant to let him go.”

Now listen to Lord Halifax himself commenting on tensions around the contested, formerly German, port of Danzig: 

“Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force but I can’t feel that it’s either unnatural or immoral! I cannot myself doubt that these fellows [the Nazis] are genuine haters of Communism, etc.! And I daresay if we were in their position we might feel the same!”

These points are made not simply to record the fascist inclinations of the British elite but emphasise the fact that the eventual course that the war took – an anti-fascist military alliance of capitalist, indeed imperial powers and the socialist Soviet Union – was not pre-ordained.

Before the war there was collusion, appeasement and military co-operation (including material support for Hitler’s ally clerical fascist Finland in its border war with the Soviet Union).

There were behind the scenes approaches to Hitler for a de facto alliance against the Soviet Union. Britain, Italy and France entered into the September 1938 Munich Pact with Hitler, compelling Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. 

Poland, which had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1934, refused to allow the passage of the million Soviet troops that Stalin offered to defend the bourgeois Czechoslovak republic.

In the face of British obstructions and delays in negotiations about forming a diplomatic and military opposition to Hitler, the Soviet Union itself negotiated its own non-aggression pact with Germany which allowed for the creation of a large buffer zone in a divided Poland. 

The dilemma for imperial Britain, and France, was whether a successful imperialist expansion of Germany to the east would eventually enable a thus strengthened German empire to renew its strategic threat to their imperial interests.

For the German bourgeoisie the consequences of defeat in the first world war had been an humiliation. Germany was forced into ceding its African colonies to Britain and the allied Austro-Hungarian empire was dissolved. 

The Nazi conception of Germany’s imperialist expansion east entailed the planned extermination of the Jewish and Roma peoples. In addition, Generalplan Ost envisaged the extermination of the Slavic peoples, of mass deportation to Siberia, Germanisation, particularly of the Baltic states, enslavement, and genocide. As a precedent there was the colonial pillage Germany carried out in its African colonies that was no less bloody than that of their Belgian, French and British rivals.

The target were the rich mineral deposits and extensive grain fields of Soviet Ukraine and Byelorussia (Belarus), the oil fields of the Soviet Caucasus republics and every resource along the way. 

The shared anti-communism of the European elites was fused in Hitler’s imagination with a symptomatic anti-semitism. In a speech six years after he came to power Hitler said:

“Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the Earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! (My emphasis NW).

In the British ruling class the balance of forces tipped in favour of a bid to resist Germany’s ambitions and when — on 1 September 1 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, Britain was at war.

The Phoney War ensued without much actual fighting. After eight months hostilities intensified and a six-week Battle of France ended in the Dunkirk evacuation.

Hitler no longer faced an armed force on the continent and now thought he could attack the Soviet Union. When this eventually took place – on June 22 1941 – the character of the war changed in a moment. The more realistic elements in the British ruling class quickly understood the advantages of a strategic, if temporary, alliance with the Soviets.

We tend to think of the end of the war in Europe as an anti-fascist triumph. In the popular imagination this it became.

The Nazi defeat was an enormous setback for the German bourgeoisie which, in its great majority, had invested everything in Hitler even beyond the point at which ultimate success could be envisaged.

Faced with failure in this project elements in the Nazi intelligence apparatus targeted on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union reached an agreement with the United States.

These Nazi intelligence assets passed to the US and their commander – Reinhard Gehlen – became a CIA employee empowered to continue employing hundreds of former Nazis. He eventually became head of West Germany’s spy agency the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).

When we evaluate the situation at the end of the war we see large parts of the USSR and Europe – excluding fascist Portugal and Spain – devastated and Britain indebted to the US.

The US emerged with its productive and consumer economy greatly strengthened, its military both enlarged and present in Europe and parts of Asia.

Everywhere the Soviet army advanced the local balance of class power shifted to the working class and the domestic economies were transformed while co-operative, collective and socialist forms of ownership began to predominate.

Everywhere where the US and British armies advanced capitalist economic relations predominated even in countries where the communist parties — through their role in the Resistance ­— were present in government.

Looking back we can see that to deal with the threat that Germany represented it had became necessary to represent the war as essentially and objectively anti-fascist. But it was something much more complex and as soon as the Nazi threat was negated a new, anti-socialist project emerged in which there could be no impediment to mobilising fascism’s human resources.

As the Cold War was promoted the newly established Nato collaborated with criminal, fascist and military elements to set up – in every western European state – a secret military network (Gladio) nominally to resist a Soviet advance but practically as a weapon against the working-class movement.

There was an attempted assassination of the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti – designed to provoke a premature uprising – and in Belgium the communist leader Julien Lahaut was assassinated. In 2015, evidence emerged that this was carried out by military intelligence officers.

The fascist character of the Spanish and Portuguese regimes proved no problem to integration into the new Nato alliance formed to confront the socialist states. The British army intervened in Greece to suppress the communist-led popular army which had fought the Nazi occupiers.

At the initiative of Winston Churchill – in May 1945 – Britain and the US devised a plan for a surprise attack on the Soviet forces in Europe. Operation Unthinkable had the purpose of imposing “the will of the United States and British empire upon Russia.”

The plan was to involve British, US and Polish forces and ten rearmed Nazi divisions.

We can speculate about the willingness of the British conscript soldiers to fight alongside rearmed Nazi troops against their erstwhile allies in the Red Army. However the Chief of Army Staff concluded: “It would be beyond our power to win a quick but limited success and we would be committed to a protracted war against heavy odds,” and the plan was abandoned.

Instead it was disguised as measures to resist an imaginary Soviet attack following the anticipated withdrawal of US forces.

Instead of withdrawal the US took command and a wartime alliance to defeat German imperialism was transformed into a confrontation between two opposed systems with 800 US bases in more than 70 countries. Britain has 145.