Pieces of foreign territory, political unions with closely related German territories, and the growth of German military power were seen by desperate British and French politicians as things that Germans might have legitimate grievances about, and thus they played along with the idea that Germany, and more to the point Hitler, might be appeased once those issues were addressed. This is the period remembered as “appeasement.” The term refers to the policy adopted by the French and British governments in giving Hitler what he wanted in hopes that he would not do it again. The political leadership of those nations did back down, repeatedly, until the invasion of Poland in September of 1939 finally proved to the world beyond a doubt that Hitler could not be stopped without war. In a sense, this period consisted of Hitler “playing chicken” with the rest of Europe: he would launch a dangerous and provocative initiative, then see if the rest of Europe (meaning primarily France and Britain) would respond with the threat of force or instead back down. By 1934, in secret, Germany began the process of re-arming, and then in 1935 it openly moved toward building a military that would dwarf even its World War I equivalent.īy 1938, Hitler felt that Germany was prepared enough that it could sustain a limited war by 1939 he felt confident that the German war machine was ready for a full-scale effort to seize the space he imagined for the new Reich. While the (pre-Nazi) German state had already suspended reparation payments, once the Nazis were in control they simply refused to negotiate the possibility of the payments ever resuming. Over the course of the 1930s, the Nazi government steadily broke with the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The years leading up to the start of World War II (which began in September of 1939) saw a series of bold moves by Nazi leadership. Britain, the US, the USSR, and their allies are referred to as “The Allies” in World War II.) Leading up to War (Note: Germany, Italy, Japan, and their allies are referred to as “The Axis” in World War II. World War II was instead a war of aggression launched by a single belligerent, Germany, supported by its allies. Europe had, in some ways, stumbled into World War I. While nationalist rivalries and international tensions certainly led to the war in some ways, as they had in World War I, the primary cause of WWII was unquestionably Adolf Hitler’s personal obsession with creating a vastly expanded German empire. The war resulted in approximately 55 – 60 million deaths, of which 25 – 27 million were Soviets and 6 million were the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. World War II was also the setting for the Holocaust, the first and only incidence of industrialized mass murder in world history. The promise of technology was realized in its most perverse form as the energy of advanced industrialism was unleashed in weapons of mass slaughter. It was the culmination of the vision of total war the world had first encountered in World War I, but it was generalized to vast stretches of the planet, not just parts of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. World War II was the defining disaster of the twentieth century for millions of people across the globe.
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