The Japanese increasingly distrusted the West following the Wall Street Crash and held designs on subjugating China and Manchuria in a manner that echoed Nazi objectives in the east of Europe. Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936. Hitler and Göring, flanked by Erhard Milch and Victor Lutze, admire the new German Air Force, April 1936.ĭuring this time the friendship between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was strengthened, with Mussolini also keen to protect the European right while gaining the first place from which to benefit from German expansionism. Thus, he chose to intervene in the Spanish Civil War in order to bolster the right-wing presence in Europe, whilst trialling the effectiveness of his new air force and the Blitzkrieg tactics it could help deliver. Stalin was identified by Hitler as a key future adversary and he was wary of Germany being caught territorially between the Soviet Union in the east and a Bolshevik Spain, together with a leftist French government, in the west. The rise of extremism and the forging of alliancesĮurope emerged from World War One a very changed place, with swathes of political ground being taken up by players on the extreme right and left. Featuring renowned historian of the Third Reich Frank McDonough, and Nicholas O'Shaughnessy, a professor of communications at QMUL. So one of the most important questions from our past is just how Adolf Hitler was able to come to power. The ensuing Great Depression in turn helped to create conditions, such as widespread unemployment, that facilitated the National Socialist Party’s fatal rise to prominence.Īdolf Hitler's unbridled ambition would plunge the World into a war bloodier and more destructive than any in history. Hyper-inflation hit Germany hard in 1923-4 and facilitated the early development of Hitler’s career.Īlthough recovery was experienced, the fragility of the Weimar Republic was exposed by the global crash that hit in 1929. Economic downturnsĮconomic downturn can always be relied upon to create conditions of civil, political and international unrest.
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Nationalistic Germans were therefore increasingly open to ideas posited by anyone who offered the chance of rectifying the Versailles humiliation. At the insistence of the French, the terms of the Versailles Treaty were punitive in the extreme and left Germany destitute and its people feeling victimised. The devastating experience of the First World War left the victorious nations and their people desperate to avoid a repeat.
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Some of the high-profile agitators at this time were left-wing Jews, which fuelled the conspiracy theory of a Jewish Bolshevik disloyalty that later gained so much traction as Hitler laid the psychological groundwork in preparing Germany for another war. German combatants had felt betrayed by the signing of the armistice at Compiègne on 11 November 1918 amidst domestic political unrest that was driven by a civilian context of war fatigue and hunger. The railway carriage in which the 1918 armistice was signed was symbolically used again in 1940 when the French succumbed to German occupation.