World War II

The League set the pattern that would repeat all through the 1930s: strong words, no action. Every dictator who tested it learned the same lesson, and each test was bigger than the last.

Fascism ran on nationalism and militarism together, and Mussolini proved that a violent movement could take over a modern European country without winning an election first. Hitler copied him a year later with the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, which failed and sent him to prison.

The occupation wrecked the German economy and convinced many Germans that their government could not protect them. It is the direct cause of the hyperinflation that came next.

Money that had held a family's savings became worthless in months. Middle class Germans who lost everything in 1923 were among the first to listen to parties promising to tear the whole system down.

The coup failed, but the trial made Hitler famous across Germany and his prison sentence gave him time to write Mein Kampf. He also learned his lesson and decided to take power legally instead.

Without the Depression there is probably no Nazi government. The party had been shrinking before 1929. Mass unemployment turned a fringe movement into the largest party in the Reichstag, the German parliament, within three years.

France spent enormous sums preparing for the last war rather than the next one. The line worked exactly as designed and was still useless, because the Germans drove around its northern end through the Ardennes forest.

Stalin's government caused a famine that killed millions of its own citizens. It is a reminder that the Soviet Union, soon to be an Allied power, was already a state that killed on an enormous scale.

Within about six months of taking office the Nazis had banned every other political party, taken over the trade unions and put opponents in camps. A democracy was dismantled without a civil war.

The Gestapo could arrest people without a warrant and send them to camps without a trial. Once ordinary Germans understood that, most opposition went quiet, which is exactly what it was built to achieve.

Once antisemitism is written into law it stops being something a government does and becomes something a country is. Everything that came after was built on this legal foundation.

The League condemned Italy and imposed sanctions that deliberately left out oil. Ethiopia fell anyway. It was the clearest proof yet that collective security did not work.

Spain became the practice ground. Germany and Italy tested aircraft, tactics and terror bombing there, while Britain and France stayed out. Guernica showed the world what bombing a city would look like.

Two aggressive powers that had been rivals only a year earlier decided to work together instead. The word Axis, used for the enemy side for the rest of the war, comes from this agreement.

The pact linked Germany and Japan, at opposite ends of the world, against the Soviet Union. It is the first thread connecting the war that was coming in Europe with the war already starting in Asia.

Many historians count this, not 1939, as the real beginning of the Second World War. China fought Japan for eight years and tied down the bulk of the Japanese army for the entire conflict.

The scale of the killing shocked even governments that had ignored the invasion. It also hardened American opinion against Japan years before Pearl Harbor.

Germany annexes an entire country and the response was protest notes. Austria also brought Germany soldiers, factories and gold reserves, so appeasement did not just fail to stop Hitler, it made him stronger.

This is where persecution turned into violence in the open, watched by ordinary Germans and reported worldwide. Very few countries responded by taking in more refugees.

The two most bitter enemies in Europe agreed not to fight each other, and secretly agreed to divide Poland. It removed Hitler's last reason to hesitate, and the invasion of Poland came eight days later.

Britain imported most of its food and nearly all of its oil. If the submarines had won, Britain would have been starved out and there would have been no base from which to invade Europe in 1944.

For eight months almost nothing happened, and Britain and France used the time badly. When Germany finally moved in the spring of 1940, the Allies were no better prepared than they had been in September.

The killing of disabled people came first, and it is where the methods later used for genocide in the death camps were developed and staffed. The Holocaust did not begin from nothing.

The ghettos were the step between persecution and murder. They concentrated Jewish families in sealed districts where disease and starvation killed many, and where the rest could be found easily when the deportations began.

Churchill took over on the day Germany invaded the west. His refusal to negotiate in the summer of 1940, when much of his own cabinet wanted to explore terms, kept Britain in the war.

Losing an army would probably have forced Britain to negotiate. Saving it, without its equipment, kept Britain in the war and made everything after 1940 possible.

Auschwitz began as a camp for Polish prisoners and grew into the largest killing center of the Holocaust. More people were murdered there than in any other single place in the war.

France fell in six weeks, which nobody had expected. Britain was left alone in Europe, the Vichy government's collaboration with Germany split the French, and the French fleet and colonies became a problem the Allies had to worry about for the next two years.

Eight months of bombing did not break British morale or knock out the war industries, and the home front held. The Blitz proved that bombing alone could not win a war, a lesson the Allies then largely ignored themselves.

The pact formally tied Germany, Italy and Japan together. It is the reason Hitler declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, which turned two separate wars into one.

North Africa was where British and later American armies fought Germany while Europe was closed to them. It also protected the Suez Canal and the oil beyond it.

The United States was still officially neutral, and isolationism was still the loudest argument in Congress, but Lend-Lease meant American factories were sending armaments to Britain and later the Soviet Union. Neutrality had become a technicality.

Roughly a million and a half people were shot in pits behind the front line, before the death camps existed. The Holocaust was already well underway by the time the gas chambers were built.

The Soviet armies were beaten but they held the Germans up for two months. That delay is one reason the attack on Moscow began in October, with winter closing in.

It was one of the largest encirclements in military history and a crushing Soviet defeat. It also cost Germany weeks it could not spare before turning back toward Moscow.

The city was not stormed, it was sealed off and starved on purpose. Most of those who died in Leningrad were civilians, which is what makes it one of the clearest examples of how the war in the east was fought.

The German army came within sight of Moscow in December 1941 and was then thrown back. It was the first time in the war that a German offensive had been defeated, and it ended any hope of finishing the Soviet Union in a single summer campaign.

Germany declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor, which it did not have to do. That decision brought the largest industrial power in the world into the European war.

The defeat cost the United States an army and its main base in Asia. MacArthur's promise to return shaped American strategy in the Pacific for the next three years.

Millions of women did work they had been told they could not do, and did it well. The argument that women could not do industrial or technical jobs was much harder to make after 1945.

Total war needed civilians to accept rationing, long hours and casualty lists. Propaganda is how governments on every side managed that, which is why it is worth learning to read critically.

About one hundred and twenty thousand people, most of them American citizens, were removed from their homes because of their ancestry. No similar order was made against German or Italian Americans.

These camps existed for one purpose, which was killing. Unlike the concentration camps, almost nobody who arrived at Belzec, Sobibor or Treblinka was meant to leave, and very few did.

Thousands of prisoners died on a march they were forced to make without food or water. When news reached the United States it hardened American attitudes toward Japan for the rest of the war and beyond.

The raid did almost no damage, but it proved Japan could be reached. Japanese commanders then extended their defensive line to Midway to prevent it happening again, which set up their worst defeat.

They were hidden for two years before being discovered. Anne died at Bergen-Belsen in 1945, and the diary her father published became the most widely read account of the Holocaust.

Six months of fighting on land, at sea and in the air. It was the first time Japan was forced to give up ground it had taken, and after Guadalcanal the Japanese were on the defensive in the Pacific.

The battle became a contest of attrition and will that neither leader would back down from. It cost Germany an entire army and it is the point at which the German advance in the east stopped for good.

The first clear British victory over a German army in the war. Churchill said it was not the end but the end of the beginning, and North Africa was effectively decided from here.

More Jewish people were murdered in 1942 and 1943 than in any other period. The killing was at its worst while the Allies were winning, which is part of why the question of what they knew and when still matters.

Poorly armed fighters held out against the German army for nearly a month. It is the best known example of Jewish armed resistance and it answers the question of whether people fought back.

A deception operation using a dead body and false documents pulled German troops away from Sicily. It shows how much of the war was won by intelligence and deception rather than by fighting.

Their record, and the refusal of Black veterans to accept at home what they had not accepted at the front, became the central argument for ending segregation in the American forces, which President Harry Truman ordered in 1948.

Germany attacked, failed, and never mounted a major offensive in the east again. From Kursk onward the initiative belonged permanently to the Soviet Union.

The invasion brought down Benito Mussolini within weeks and opened a second front in Europe. It also tied down German divisions that were badly needed elsewhere.

Rather than take every island, the Americans captured the ones they needed for airfields and left the rest cut off. It saved lives and time, and it is how the war reached bombing range of Japan.

Italy changed sides, and Germany immediately occupied the country and disarmed the Italian army. What was meant to be a soft underbelly became twenty more months of hard fighting.