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World War II
Factors That Led To The World War II

Treaty of Versailles

an agreement between Germany and the Allied Powers (Great

Britain, France, and Russia) to end World War I

was a punishment to the Germans as they lost the war

Germans did:

Pay reparations to the Allied forces and forced them to accept

the responsibility of the war

lost their territories and were later distributed to the Allies

Enforce military restrictions

Economic Depression

Late 1920

countries’ economies were in a state of turmoil

Businesses were closed and many were unemployed

“Political Instability” and worldwide chaos ← result

US pulled out their foreign assets in German banks which greatly

affected Germany

Germans greatly suffered from unemployment and hunger

Rise of Fascism

Fascism ← a political belief that focuses on the extreme nationalism

and a dictatorship of one leader with only one party

dictators established strong fascists governments due to the

economic chaos left behind by World War I

These new forms of governments were determined to expand their

territories by looking for new lands to conquer.

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 Germany’s Militarism

Nazi Party rose into power

Hitler

offered hope to those desperate Germans as someone who can

restore their economy and national pride

started expanding his military secretly and became an ally of

Italy

disregarded the League of Nations and Treaty of Versailles

took over Austria and Czechoslovakia

gave German’s sense of pride and confidence

Failure of Appeasement

British and French

1930s: started to acknowledge te lapses of the Treaty of

Versailles for Germany

accepted the fact that Hitler’s actions of expanding its territories

were reasonable and justifiable.

prompted Britain to adopt Policy of Appeasement

approved the annexation of the Germans to Czechoslovakia but

Germans did not agree to occupy it as a whole

March 1939: whole of Czechoslovakia was occupied by

Germans and broke its promise

Appeasement ← agreeing to the demands of another nation in order

to avoid conflict

September 1, 1939: Hitler occupied Poland

This action broke World War II to happen in Europe as Britain and

France waged war against German

Failure of The League of Nations

1919: League of Nations was created as an international

organization with the goal of keeping world peace

It was good but became a failure at some point

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 has no capacity of preventing military aggression and invasion such
as Mussolini’s annexation of Ethiopia and Japan’s annexation of
Manchuria in China

Its failure to address the said problem led to the outbreak of World
War II

Japan’s Militarism

Japanese were affected by the worldwide economic depression and

lost trust in their leaders

asked help to their army in looking for solutions to their economic

problems

Emperor Hirohito ← became the symbolic leader

Hideki Tojo ← Japanese supported military leaders

Japanese industrialized quickly

Japanese needed more raw materials than it could supply locally to

sustain their production of goods

This impelled them to invade Manchuria in China, a region rich in

minerals and resources

Chinese asked for help from the league of nations since Japan
continues to occupy China and Korea

Japan started to conquer other areas of South East Asia

United States is concerned about their territories in Asia like the

Philippines

Japanese sensed that the United States military was a threat to their
expansion so Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December
1941

The Holocaust

The Holocaust

Holocaust ← the murder and persecution of estimated 6M Jews

supported by the German

Holocaust ← ‘sacrificing by fire’ in Greek

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 January 1933: Nazi rose into power in Germany. They believed and
introduced a new social order that the “Aryans”, the Germans were
of “superior race” and that other races, particularly the Jews, “were
inferior.”

Roma(Gypsies), disabled and some Slavic people ← also targeted

by the German authorities because of “Racial Inferiority”

Anti-Semitic (prejudice against Jewish people) of Adolf Hitler were

even translated to anti-Semitic policies

Nuremberg laws ← implemented by the Nazis in September 1935.

← denied Jews from German citizenship and

prohibited the marriage of Jews to German citizenship

Kristallnacht

“Night Of the Broken Glass”

marked the start of a more violent phase of anti-Jewish activity

Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues in all parts of Germany

were raided by the Nazis that killed an estimated 100 Jews.

Around 3000 Jewish males were held in concentration camps

led to tougher steps for the Jews

Jews banned from taking public transportation and entering public

buildings, including schools

Jews were also prohibited from running and owning businesses and
even encouraged to live outside Germany

End of 1939: A growing number of Jews find refuge on other

countries like France, Britain, and United States

However, these nations closed their borders to accept more Jewish

immigrants after admitting thousands of Jewish refugees

Hitler designed cities from their newly conquered territories in

Eastern Europe, like Poland, for the Jews to live

ghettos (concentration camps of the Nazis for jews) ← where Jews

were concentrated and isolated and are living in poor inhumane
conditions where Nazis sealed off with tight security hoping that
Jews will die of hunger or from disease

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 The Final Solution

“Genocide” ← the physical annihilation of the Jewish people

the action was backed up by Hitler’s ideas that there was the need
to eliminate inferior races, like the Jews, in order to protect the
Aryan race.

Reinhard Heydrich ← head of the Security Service (SS), the elite

security force of Hitler

Einsatzgruppen ← special group established by Reinhard Heydrich

and they carried out the “Final Solution” plan. They started
mobilizing across Germany and Eastern Europe to hunt down Jews
of all ages and sexes and placed them in concentration camps.
Some were shot to death while others were taken as slaves

The Final Stage

death camps with gas chambers were created to kill thousands of

Jews every day

The largest death camp was built in Auschwitz, Poland where Jews
were transported

1/3 of the Jews were sent to labor camp, wherein they were asked
to work to death or staved to death

2/3 of the arrivals experienced the gas chamber death

Even other Jewish inmates have undergone brutal and excruciating

medical experimentations by German doctors

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