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Adolf Hitler had followed a path to power similar to Mussolini’s. At the end of World War I, Hitler had been a jobless soldier drifting around Germany. In 1919, he joined a struggling group called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known as the Nazi
Party. Despite its name, this party had no ties to socialism. -
Mein Kampf was a book written by Hitler where he set forth the basic beliefs of Nazism that became the plan of action for the Nazi Party.
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Benito Mussolini was establishing a totalitarian regime in italy, where unemployment and inflation produced bitter strikes, some communist-led. Alarmed by these threats, the middle and upper classes demanded stronger leadership. Mussolini took advantage of this situation. A powerful speaker, Mussolini knew how to appeal to Italy’s wounded national pride.
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Stalin focused on creating a model communist state. He made both industrial and agricultural growth the prime economic goals of the soviet union.Stalin removed all privately owned lands and formed collectives, large government owned farms each worked on by hundreds of families.
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Japanese militarists launched a surprise attack and seized control of the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. Within several months, Japanese troops controlled the entire province, a large region, that was rich in natural resources.
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Many men who were out of work joined Hitler’s private army, the storm troopers.The German people were desperate and turned to Hitler as their last hope.
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Hitler quickly dismantled Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic. In its place he established the Third Reich, or Third German Empire. According to Hitler, the Third Reich would be a “Thousand-Year Reich”—it would last for a thousand years.
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In 1935, Hitler began a military buildup in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
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Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, a German region bordering France and Belgium that was demilitarized as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. The League did nothing to stop Hitler
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Mussolini began building his new Roman Empire. His first target was Ethiopia, one of Africa’s few remaining independent countries. By the fall of 1935, tens of thousands of Italian soldiers stood ready to advance on Ethiopia.
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In 1936, a group of Spanish army officers led by General Francisco Franco, rebelled against the Spanish republic. Revolts broke out all
over Spain, and the Spanish Civil War began. The war aroused passions not only in Spain but throughout the world. -
On March 12, 1938, German troops marched into Austria unopposed. A day later, Germany announced that its Anschluss, or “union,” with Austria was complete. The United States and the rest of the world did nothing.
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Hitler invited French premier Édouard Daladier and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to meet with him in Munich. When they arrived, the führer declared that the annexation of the Sudetenland would be his “last territorial demand.” In their eagerness to avoid war, Daladier and Chamberlain chose to believe him. On September 30, 1938, they signed the Munich Agreement, which turned the Sudetenland over to Germany without a single shot being fired.
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The war forged a close relationship between the German and Italian dictators, who signed a formal alliance known as the Rome-Berlin Axis.
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The blitzkrieg had given way to what the Germans called the sitzkrieg (sitting war), and what some newspapers referred to as the
phony war. -
As tensions rose over Poland, Stalin surprised everyone by signing a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Once bitter enemies, on August 23, 1939 fascist Germany and communist Russia now committed never to attack each other.
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The blitzkrieg, or lightning war. Blitzkrieg made use of advances in military technology—such as fast tanks and more powerful aircraft—to take the enemy by surprise and then quickly crush all opposition with overwhelming force.
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On September 3, two days following the terror in Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
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On April 9, 1940, Hitler launched a surprise invasion of Denmark and Norway in order “to protect freedom and independence.
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Hitler turned against the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, which were overrun by the end of May. The phony war had ended.
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The German offensive trapped almost 400,000 British and French soldiers as they fled to the beaches of Dunkirk on the French side of the English Channel. A few days later, Italy entered the war on the side of Germany and invaded France from the south as the
Germans closed in on Paris from the north. -
In the summer of 1940, the Germans began to assemble an invasion fleet along the French coast. Because its naval power could not compete with that of Britain, Germany also launched an air war at the same time.
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A Japanese dive-bomber swooped low over Pearl Harbor, the largest U.S. naval base in the Pacific. The bomber was followed by more than 180 Japanese warplanes launched from six aircraft carriers.
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Act that prevented the removal of Japanese Americans from the US.
