Download WWII

Intro to WWII
1920 - 1939
Introduction:
• Most devastating war in human history
• 55 million dead
• 1 trillion dollars
• Began in 1939 as strictly a European
Conflict
• Widened to include most of the world
How It Began
• Lots of factors
• WWI leftovers
• Germany defeated in and had to pay cost of war. In
huge economic depression
• Italy victorious but wanted more territory
• Japan victorious but wanted China
• Outside factors…
What Were These Outside
Factors?
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Germany reduced size
Organized League of Nations
French and Britain unsure
U.S. isolationist
Kellogg-Briand Pact 1928
• Countries agreed to condemn wars and
settle quarrels peacefully – No enforcement
• Pacifism
German Depression
• The German Mark v. the U.S. Dollar
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1914: $1 = 4 Marks
1921: $1 = 75 Marks
02/1923: $1 = 48,000 Marks
10/1923: $1 = 440,000,000 Marks (440 million)
11/1923: $1 = 4,200,000,000,000 Marks (4.2
trillion)
Rise of Hitler
Weimar Republic – Reparations ($33 billion),
Rhineland, and weak military
Nazi Party organized, 1920s – workers’ party
• Nazi party largest in Germany, 1932
• Hitler voted as chancellor, 1933 – The
Reichstag burns down and Hitler blames the Communists
• New parliament created
• 450, 000 members
• Larger than German army
Hitler Gets Busy
• Gestapo Created -- April, 1933
• Jewish Boycott – April, 1933
• Nuremburg Laws – (yellow star) Strip Jews of their
citizenship and property. Jewish Books Banned & Burned –
May, 1933
• 27,000 People in Camps – July, 1933
• 60,000 People in Camps – 1938
• Illegal to Leave Germany – October, 1941
Spanish Civil War 1937
• Monarchy to Republic – Democracy vs.
Fascism
• Germany enters war to test out its war
machine and blitzkrieg tactics – Guernica
• Franco becomes the new fascist leader
• West sits back and watches - Appeasement
Appeasement
• Austria – March, 1938 – West does nothing
• Germany enters Rhineland – West does little
• Sudetenland in Czech.(80% Germans)– Sept.,
1938 – self-determination? Munich Conference
• All of Czechoslovakia – March, 1939 – West
prepares for war
• Poland – Sept., 1939 – official start of war
• By Summer of 1940, Germany Controlled Most of
Europe
• World shocked as France falls to Germans
Italy and Mussolini
• Fascism – Political philosophy that
advocates the glorification of the state, a
single party system with a strong leader and
an aggressive form of nationalism
Post WWI Italy
• They wanted more land, high war debts and
high unemployment
• Threat of Communism
• Democracy
Uprisings
• Peasants and workers want more land and
money
• Blackshirts make Fascism the only party by
1924
Corporate State
• Bring workers and owners together and put
an end to all parties.
• Unemployed men become the military
• Rebuild A Glorious Rome.
Italy attacks Ethiopia
• Use of Gas
• The League of Nations place sanctions on
Italy, allowed them to have oil, coal, and
iron. Haile Selassie I
• Appeasement
Those Dumb Enough To Ally
• Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939
• Stalin fears Hitler, so he
tries to ally with GB
and France. Stalin
wants land from
Finland to Bulgaria.
West says no way.
• Mussolini and Italy, 1939
• Off and on betrayed
until Italian defeat in
1943
Alliance That Changes War
• Germany “allies” with Japan
• Japan was “China Hungry”
• Japanese angry over U.S. support of China