It is chilling to imagine World War II being even worse than it actually was. Few events in history resulted in the deaths of more people than that global conflict: An estimated 45 to 60 million people died, both military and civilians. And while the battles were bloody, the millions of Jewish people and others from minority groups who died in the Holocaust brought the horrors of the war to another level.

So the idea of things going even worse is difficult to contemplate. But war is complicated and messy, which means there are any number of junctures where, had things gone a little bit differently, the outcome could have been disastrous. Add just a few of those "sliding doors" moments up over the course of the conflict and you could be looking at millions more deaths, the war dragging on

See Full Page