The nearly simultaneous Allied offensives from the east and west during early 1945 were wreaking catastrophic destruction on the German armed forces, and the capture of territory was severely interrupting the German economy, as well as the ability of the remaining forces to maintain a sound defence. In February 1945, the Wehrmacht forces on the western front had been whittled down to an estimated 65 infantry and 12 Panzer divisions; in the east, 103 infantry and 32 Panzer and Panzer Grenadier divisions faced the massive Red Army fronts, whose reserves alone outnumbered them several times. German losses in the east were estimated by the Soviets to be 295,000 dead, 86,000 prisoners, 15,000 guns and mortars, 2995 tanks, 26,000 machine guns, 34,000 motor vehicles and 552 aircraft. By the end of March, the only territory west of the Rhine still held by the Germans was the rapidly diminishing salient near Landau in the Palatinate, north-west of Karlsruhe. In the east, Kurland and East Prussia, with 51 divisions between them, had effectively been written off, cut off and surrounded by the Soviets.

Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and Minister for Armaments and War Production - one of the most intelligent and practically-minded of the Nazi inner circle - delivered a memorandum to Hitler on January 1945, in which he stated quite bluntly: 'The war is lost.' With the Ruhr in ruins from the continual bombing and Silesia now under the Soviets, Speer reported, Germany had at best a two-week supply of coal for railways, factories, and powerplants; production capabilities for 1945 were one quarter what they had been in 1944 for coal, and one sixth for steel. Fuel was in such short supply that a fighter group with over 37 aircraft stationed at Krefeld could fly only sorties of 100km (60 miles) one out of three days, and then with only 20 of its planes. Speer told of seeing a column of 150 trucks from the 10th Army in northern Italy in October 1944 being pulled by oxen. In his memorandum, Speer concluded: 'After the loss of Upper Silesia, the German armaments industry will no longer be able even approximately to cover the requirements of the front for ammunition, ordinance, and tanks ... From now on, the material preponderance of the enemy can no longer be compensated for by the bravery of our soldiers.' Most of the major German cities were subjected to terrifying air attacks and Berlin was almost constantly bombed, from the Americans during the day and the British at night.

While the German leadership was quite accurate in their perception of geopolitical tensions between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, the degree of willful blindness on Hitler's part about the anti-German alliance is revealed in Fuhrer conference notes from 27 January, the day Zhukov's Belorussian Front reached and crossed the Oder:

Hitler: 'Do you think the English are enthusiastic about all the Russian developments?'

Goring: 'They certainly didn't plan that we hold them off while the Russians conquer all of Germany ... They had not counted on our ... holding them off like madmen while the Russians drive deeper and deeper into Germany, and practically have all of Germany now.'

JodI: 'They have always regarded the Russians with suspicion.'

Goring: 'If this goes on we will get a telegram [from the British] in a few days.'

The telegram never came. Instead, a number of elements within the German armed forces and some in the Nazi party hierarchy began efforts of their own to contact the British and Americans with peace proposals. The most notorious was R:wdolf Hess' rather bizarre, and still partly inexplicable, solo flight in a Messerschmitt 110 fighter to Scotland in May 1941. Since the turning of the military tide between 1942 and 1943, and now in the spring of 1945, with the Red Army almost literally at the gates of Berlin, the number of such plots increased. Two days before the Fuhrer conference, OKH Chief of Staff General Guderian had contacted Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and pleaded with him to attempt to secure an immediate armistice with the West, so that Germany's remaining resources could be diverted to the east, and Berlin spared. However, Ribbentrop quickly tattled on the general, which led to another of Hitler's frequent eruptions of vitriol against his treasonous general staff. Albert Speer, too, was by this time searching for a way to end the war before Germany was utterly destroyed and occupied by the Russians. So desperate was he that he actually initiated a scheme in mid-February - eventually abandoned - to assassinate Hitler, Goring, Hitler's personal secretary Martin Bormann, and Robert Ley, the head of the Party Political Organisation.

Such eleventh-hour efforts to end the war, of course, came to naught. The Allies insisted unanimously on Germany's unconditional surrender. There is perhaps some truth in the argument that by insisting so stubbornly on this principle, the West prolonged the war. But it is doubtful that, even in these dire straits, Hitler would have considered any of the necessary means to end the war and remove Germany as a military threat to the West. Never was the dilettantism and military incompetence of the Third Reich's highest leadership as apparent and disastrous as in this last phase of the war. Hitler, who had assumed overall command of the army in November 1941, liked to think of himself as a genius of the bold tactical thrust. In military studies, he spurned the professionals' and experts' advice to exercise caution or consider practical realities. His failed gambit in the Ardennes forests in Belgium and northern Luxembourg in December 1944 - ordered despite the warnings of his generals had left most of western Germany highly vulnerable, with its remaining forces stretched dangerously thin. Even more worrying, however, was the effect of the offensive's failure on the Eastern Front. Hitler's general staff had warned that an offensive of the size he demanded would mean committing huge numbers of reserve troops and tanks which, as well as risking them in a venture which could fail, would deprive the hard-pressed army groups trying to hold on to the Vistula and Narew in Poland and East Prussia of their much-needed reinforcements. A massive Russian offensive was expected at any time: 225 divisions and 22 armoured corps, estimated Guderian's chief of intelligence, Reinhard Gehlen. 'Who prepared this rubbish?' shrieked Hitler, according to Guderian. 'Whoever he is he should be shut up in a lunatic asylum!' At this point, Guderian lost his temper (a frequent event in those last months) and screamed back: 'If you want General Gehlen sent to a lunatic asylum then you had better have me certified as well!'

The first interpreter of the "street-lamp song" is Lale Andersen (1905-1972).

The most famous song of World War II, and the only one popular on both sides, was "Lili Marlene," a sentimental air in which a battleweary soldier on some far-off front recalls a woman who used to meet him "underneath the lamppost, by the barracks gate."

"Lili Marlene" had its origin in a poem written in 1923 by Hans Leip, a World War I veteran who had in mind a number of women he had known during the Kaiser's war. Several attempts were made to set the poem to music over the next few years, none of them very successful. Then in 1936 Norbert Schultze, a minor tunesmith, wrote new music. In 1939 the song was recorded by the Swedish-born singer Lala Anderson and it became moderately popular. Shortly after the occupation of Yugoslavia, a German armed forces radio station was established in Belgrade. One of the men assigned to the station had a close friend in the Afrika Korps who had been fond of the tune. So he played Lala Anderson's recording of "Lili Marlene" for his friend, airing it for the first time on the night of August 18, 1941. He soon made the song the signature of his musical program, playing it in full each night at 9:55, shortly before he went off the air.

German troops in North Africa picked up the song and were soon followed by their Italian comrades. It was not long before it became popular among British troops as well, since they too listened to Radio Belgrade, which played much better popular music than did BBC influenced British military radio. The British passed on their enthusiasm for the tune to their American cousins during the Tunisian campaign, and it became even more popular after the German but decidedly anti-Nazi Marlene Dietrich recorded it, and even starred in a film based on it. Eventually translated into several different languages (there are English, French, Italian, Spanish, and even Hebrew versions), "Lili Marlene" retained its popularity among veterans, particularly German veterans, after the war. Leip and Schultze were still collecting royalties of about $4,000 a year into the early 1970s.

For the Great War in Africa, although the product of European devices and desires, was fought principally by the Africans themselves. In all, somewhere over 2 million Africans served in the First World War as soldiers or labourers, and upwards of 200,000 of them died or were killed in action.4 By comparison with Europe such figures are low-the first represents between 1 and 2 per cent of the total population of Africa. But in a local context a comparison with twentieth-century industrialized nation states is inappropriate; never before in the history of Africa had manpower been mobilized on such a scale.

Both during the war and after it, British and French propaganda accused the Germans of militarizing Africa: they had, said Lloyd George on 24 January 1919, 'raised native troops and encouraged these troops to behave in a manner that would even disgrace the Bolsheviks'. Such rhetoric was fed by the ferocity with which the Germans suppressed the wave of resistance that struck their colonies with simultaneous force between 1904 and 1906. Genocide and famine were both deployed against the Herero in South-West Africa and the Maji-Maji in East Africa. Thereafter, however, German colonial administration became more liberal. Military responsibilities were circumscribed, commercial development promoted, and settlement doubled. As a result, the German colonial forces, the Schūtztruppen, could draw in more whites: from 1913 conscripts were allowed to complete their reserve service overseas rather than remain liable for recall to Germany. But the settlers themselves became increasingly reluctant to meet the costs of an inflated military establishment, and order on a daily basis was handed over to an expanded police force. Admittedly their armament was similar to that of the Schūtztruppen, and they could be, and were, incorporated with them. Nonetheless, the point remains that it was not so much Germany as the Entente which was responsible for arming the African.

The difficulties of supply, rather than the experiences of battle, did most to disseminate the impact of the Great War throughout the African continent. The numbers who experienced combat were few. The war in Africa was an affair not of 'big battalions' but of individual companies. A unit any larger than 100 to 120 men could not be readily supplied. Moreover, a company with its attendant porters mustered about 300 men and on the tracks of the equatorial rain forests of central Africa constituted a column 1,500 to 2,000 yards long; a formation any bigger was too large for effective, tactical control. The force-to-space ratio was, therefore, totally different from that of the western front. Small-scale actions in Africa settled the balance of power in territories as big as a whole theatre of operations in Europe.

One of the most striking differences was the almost total absence of artillery. Individually, heavy guns proved of value in the open grasslands of the northern Cameroons or northern Tanganyika. But collectively, guns had little opportunity. Even where draught animals were more readily available, in South-West Africa, the Germans were not able to turn a relative strength to advantage. Oxen moved slowly, and not at all in the midday heat. Mules were used for the transport of pack guns, but the lack of clear paths through the bush meant that they could take twice as long to cover the same distance as did the foot-soldier. Thus, the guns tended to arrive too late. In theatres where the tsetse fly ruled out animal draught, 300 porters could be required for a single Weld gun, without considering its likely shell consumption. In the jungle, even a smallcalibre mountain gun Wring at a high trajectory needed a clearing of 100 yards, as well as good telephone communications with forward observers, for indirect fire. Because none of the European powers had planned to fight each other, the guns possessed by each colony tended to be of varying calibres, obsolescent, and short of ammunition. In the Cameroons the Germans had fourteen guns of different types and 3,000 rounds. When used, their moral impact, particularly on black troops unaccustomed to artillery fire however light, outstripped their destructive effect. Fighting in Africa was therefore predominantly an infantry affair, the machine-gun being the heaviest and most significant weapon regularly deployed.

Thus, the individual was not tyrannized, as he was on the western front, by the industrialization of warfare. The division between war and exploration, between the dangers of the bullet and the snakebite, was unclear in many of the pre-1914 imaginings of the war: both were antidotes to bourgeois decadence. In Africa, unlike Europe, the distinction could remain obscure. A single cruiser, SMS Kōnigsberg, whose contribution to the balance of forces in the North Sea would have been negligible, acquired in East Africa a significance out of all proportion to her firepower. Her lair in the Rufiji delta was discovered by Pieter Pretorius, a big-game hunter whose skills and courage would have been, relatively speaking, nugatory in the trenches of Ypres or the Somme. Another big-game hunter, F. C. Selous, joined the 25th battalion, the Royal Fusiliers, the so-called Legion of Frontiersmen. His reputation as a naturalist and explorer was embroidered with stories that extended back to his schooldays at Rugby. His death in action in East Africa on 4 January 1917, at the age of 65, was of a piece with his entire life, not at odds with it; few other subalterns were as lucky.

The experience of Pretorius or of Selous was directly relevant. The major problems of the opposing sides were geographically determined. The Royal Navy knew that the Kōnigsberg was at Salale from signals intercepts, but Salale was not marked on the navy's charts; eleven days elapsed in late October 1914 before it was identified as being on the RuWji.44 Cursed with inadequate maps, intelligence efforts were devoted as much to establishing the nature of the country and its resources as to learning the enemy's whereabouts and strength. Both the climate, with its switch from dry to rainy seasons, and the insect life, with its impact on the health of livestock and humans, were strategically decisive. East Africa was home to the anopheles mosquito, the tsetse fly, the jigger flea, the spirillum tick, the white ant, the scorpion, the poisonous spider, the wild bee, and the warrior ant. The range of larger fauna provided more than an exotic backdrop to the fighting. Soldiers, if sick or sleeping, were liable to be eaten by lions or hyenas; both elephants and rhinoceroses were known to attack patrols, with fatal consequences. On the other hand, game provided an important supplement to the diet, hippopotamuses and elephants in particular being shot for their fat.

Although fought between European powers for objectives that were also European, the African campaigns of the First World War bore more relationship to the nineteenth-century campaigns of colonial conquest than they did to the Great War itself. In relation to the outcome of the war they were, as is too often remarked, sideshows. But neither observation should be allowed to trivialize their importance. The first demonstrates the danger of characterizing the war in terms appropriate to only one theatre, even one not fitted to the entire geographical span of the war. The second judges Africa in terms of that one theatre, instead of recognizing that relatively the impact of the war on the Dark Continent was as great as that on Europe, that few black families were unaffected, and that at the end the transfer of territory completed the partition of Africa commenced four decades earlier.

Hitler's Nazi troops were captured on camera parading through the streets of central London in a grim reminder of how World War Two could have ended.

By Harriet Alexander

An image from a Nazi state funeral in 1936, held within view of Buckingham Palace Photo: PRNewswire

The astonishing photo shows Nazi supporters saluting a procession through the heart of London, as Hitler's troops carry a coffin draped in the swastika flag.

Taken in 1936, the scene shows the funeral procession of German ambassador Leopold von Hoesch who was carried through Whitehall, in sight of Buckingham Palace, before being transferred to a gun carriage and transported down The Mall.

The black and white picture, seemingly Britain's worst nightmare, was shot three years before the outbreak of World War Two when governments around the world were still trying to avoid confrontation with Germany.

The Ambassador was not a supporter of Hitler's, and regularly disagreed with the Nazi leader. He was well-liked by the British government, and was a trusted friend of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.

After von Hoesch's death, the role of German Ambassador went to the notorious Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was later hanged for war crimes.

The building in the picture was the German embassy, which is now home to the Royal Society.

Executive Secretary Stephen Cox said: "It must have been striking to see Grenadier Guards and Nazi soldiers marching together down The Mall.

"They could easily have been facing each other on the battlefield only a few years later."

The image of the parade was uncovered by London cab drive and historian Harry Harris, as part of a Discovery Channel documentary on wartime London, due to be screened on Sunday.