By the 1930s, the extreme nature of the Versailles Treaty’s terms came to be viewed as a pounishmwent document by both the German people, and the former Allies

• The former Allies were willing to turn a blind eye to the revisionist actions of Adolf Hitler and his government

• Hitler referred to the signing of the 1918 armistice as the “November crime” and blamed it on those he viewed as Germany’s internal enemies: Jews, communists, and liberals of all sorts

These revisionist powers, so called because they revised, or overthrew, the terms of the post–Great War peace, confronted nations that were committed to the international system and to the avoidance of another world war.

• To expand their global influence, the revisionist nations remilitarized and conquered territories they deemed central to their needs and to the spread of their imperial control.

• The Allies acquiesced to the revisionist powers’ early aggressive actions

  • • by the late 1930s and early 1940s the Allies decided to engage the Axis powers in a total war.

The economic crisis created by the Great Depression can be viewed in two ways when trying to understand the causes of WWII

1.) Rise of Totalitarian regimes -- the failures of liberal democracies to handle the economic crisis would give rise to more extreme revisionist governments

2.) Failure to Act by the British and French -- with their economies in turmoil from the Great Depression, responding to the aggression of Japan, Italy, and the Germans was palatable for a variety of reasons

• The actions did not directly challenge their authority globally

• many sympathized with the critique of the Treaty of Versailles

• they faced their own fascist challenges domestically

• the most aggressive behavior was being taken by the Japanese, and viewed the action of Hitler as righting a wrong from the Treaty of Versailles.

Driven in part by a desire to revise the peace settlements that followed the Great War and affected by the economic distress of the worldwide depression, Japan, Italy, and Germany engaged in a campaign of territorial expansion that ultimately broke apart the structure of international cooperation that had kept the world from violence in the 1920s

Italy

• Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in 1935 and 1936, when added to the previously annexed Libya, created an overseas empire

• Italy also intervened in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) on the side of General Francisco Franco (1892–1975), whose militarists overthrew the republican government

• Italy annexed Albania in 1939.

  • • Mussolini viewed Albania as a bridgehead for expansion into the Balkans.

• The invasion and conquest of Ethiopia in particular infuriated other nations; but, as with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, the League of Nations offered little effective opposition

Japan

• 1931 invasion of Manchuria

• July 1937 -- Japanese troops invaded China

• 1940-1941 -- Japanese occupied French Indochina

Germany

• After withdrawing Germany from the League of Nations in 1933, his government carried out an ambitious plan to strengthen the German armed forces.

  • • Hitler reinstated universal military service in 1935, and in the following year his troops entered the previously demilitarized Rhineland that bordered France.

    • Germany joined with Italy in the Spanish Civil War, where Hitler’s troops, especially the air force, honed their skills.

• Germany’s forced Anschluss (“union”) with Austria took place in March 1938

  • • Hitler justified this annexation as an attempt to reintegrate all Germans into a single homeland

    • using the same rationale, the Nazis attempted to gain control of the Sudetenland, the western portion of Czechoslovakia.

      • • region was inhabited largely by ethnic Germans, whom Hitler conveniently regarded as persecuted minorities

European politicians formulated the policy that came to be known as appeasement

• In conceding demands to Hitler, or “appeasing” him, the British and French governments extracted a promise that Hitler would cease further efforts to expand German territorial claims

• Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) arrived home from Munich to announce that the meeting had achieved “peace for our time.”

• Unprepared for war and distressed by the depression, nations sympathetic to Britain and France also embraced peace as an admirable goal in the face of aggression by the revisionist nations

During the course of the 1930s, the militarist position dominated, and for the most part civilians lost control of the government and the military

• Totalitarianism -- a system of government in which one party tries to rule with complete control over every aspect of the private and public lives of its citizens

• State (government) has complete control over:

  • • religion

    • economy

      • • Stalin’s totalitarian communist government there was no ownership of private property

        • totalitarian fascist there is private property and free enterprise with often severe restrictions

    • education

    • family

    • media

• other common features:

  • • militaristic nationalism

    • a rejection of democracy

    • a belief in natural social hierarchy

    • limitation of individual rights

    • violence

    • propaganda and intimidation to promote their ideas and to justify their control of every aspect of life

During World War I and the 1920's

• Both Japan and China fought on the side of the Allies

  • • China sought the return of former German holdings in Shantung province

    • 1915 -- Japan responded with the Twenty-one Demands

      • • pressured China into widespread concessions on access to raw materials (coal and iron resources)

        • Chinese resisted the most extreme Japanese demands that would have turned China into a Japanese ward

    • 1920s -- League of Nations sought to maintain Chinese sovereignty and limit Japanese military growth (while guaranteeing Japanese security)

WWII

September 18, 1931 Mukden (or Manchurian) Incident -- A Kwantung Army charge that Chinese soldiers had tried to bomb a South Manchurian Railway train (which arrived at its destination safely) resulted in a speedy and unauthorized capture of Mukden (now Shen-yang), followed by the occupation of all Manchuria

October 1932 League of Nations committee recommended Japanese troops be withdrawn, Chinese sovereignty restored, and autonomy granted to Manchuria

1933 Japan withdraws from the League of Nations

1934 Japan installs a puppet government with the last Manchu emperor, P'u-i declared regent and later enthroned as emperor of Manchukuo (Manchuria); all key positions were held by Japanese

July 7, 1937 Japanese troops invaded China and took Beijing, Nanking, Han-k'ou (Hankow), and Canton. Japanese faced vigorous Chinese resistance; Nanking was brutally pillaged by Japanese troops

September 1940 Tripartite Pact -- Germany and Italy recognized Japan as the leader of a new order in Asia

1940-1941 French Indochina -- Japanese occupied the Tonkin area of northern Vietnam and in the following year the rest of Indochina

July 1941 Japan announced a joint protectorate with Vichy France over all of French Indochina

August 1, 1941 United States responded by freezing Japanese assets and embargoing oil; Japanese now faced the choices of either withdrawing from Indochina, and possibly China, or seizing the sources of oil production in the Dutch East Indies

October 1941 New Prime Minister, General Tōjō Hideki takes power and Japan decides to go to war with the United States

December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Perl Harbor

[December 8 in Japan]

January 1942 Japanese troops occupied Manila

February 1942 Japanese troops occupied Singapore

March 1942 Japanese troops occupied the Dutch East Indies and Rangoon (Burma)

Japanese lessons for the American coup

Appeasement Timeline / Lebensraum

1929 -- German militarism began before the rise of the Nazi regime. Walter Kreiser published an exposé of the training of a special air unit, which was training in Germany and the Soviet Union in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Kreiser continued to expose violations under the Nazi regime and was sent to a concentration camp and died in 1938.

October 14, 1933 Germany withdraws from the League of Nations, disarmament pact

February 26, 1935 Hitler ordered Hermann Goering to establish the Luftwaffe, German airforce, in defiance of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles

March, 1935 Hitler publicly announced that the German Army was to be expanded. Conscription was introduced.

March 7, 1936 Rhineland--Hitler sent German troops to re-occupy the Rhineland In contravention of the terms of the Versailles Treaty

October 1936 Axis alliance concluded between Germany and Italy

November 1936 Anti-Comintern pact concluded between Germany and Japan

March 13, 1938 Germany annexes Austria (Anschluss)

September 22-24, 1938 Chamberlain meets with Hitler in Godesberg, Germany. Hitler claims Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia would be final German demand for territory.

September 29, 1938 Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and France sign the Munich Agreement

March 14-15, 1939 Germany breaks the Munich Agreement and occupies the rest of Czech lands.

March 16, 1939 Hitler went to Czech lands and from Prague Castle proclaimed the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

March 22, 1939 Mevel (Lithuania) was the last territorial acquisition before war broke out

August 23, 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact, dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence

September 1, 1939 Germany invades Poland

September 3, 1939 Honoring their support of Poland, Great Britain and France declare war on Germany