World War II rises in its vastness and complexity over the rest of human history. A number of victims difficult to conceive, never surpassed by any other conflict; the masses of men, women and resources mobilized in a conflict that shook even the most remote ends of the planet; the ideological battle between totalitarianism and democracy, between fascism and communism, the passions and hatred that it aroused; the unimaginable horror and fanaticism of the Holocaust; geopolitical games; the repetition of World War I on an even more dire scale. The war was a gigantic melting pot of violence, power, and ideology that will leave an indelible scar on human history. This Diary of the Second World War has been able to cover all facets of the conflict and is a fundamentally empirical work, which narrates events as they occurred, rejecting value judgments, and therein lies its value: it is an insurmountable encyclopedia on war.
