World History

Course Code: HIS 205

Mohammad Atique Rahman
 IR between 1919-1939
Rise of Hitler, Failure of League of Nation and
Road to the Second World War
Few Concepts

• Utopianism: the belief in or pursuit of a state in which everything is perfect, typically regarded as
unrealistic or idealistic. Utopian refers to a society where everything is as good as it can possibly
be for everyone in the society.
• The opposite of utopia is dystopia, which is a society marked by fear, oppression, and poverty
with little to no hope for improvement
• The goals of the utopian society are:
a. freedom with limits
b. Peace and mutual respect
c. Spreading education
d. being civil
e. respecting rules and obedience
Realism
• Realism sometimes called naturalism is an art of explaining the subject matter i.e. events, facts,
issues, matters truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic descriptions, or exotic, and
supernatural elements.
• Political realism explain relations between men and state where the actors use power to
maximize their interests. The international system is thus combination of different countries
exercising their powers against each others to maximize their interests.
• Realism asks for “end justifies the means”.
Policy of Appeasement

 Appeasement is the policy of making concessions to the dictatorial powers in order to avoid

conflict, governed Anglo-French foreign policy during the 1930s. It became indelibly associated with
Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
Causes of WWII
• Failure of the League of Nations:
• We’re sovereign nations, but we’re going to try to combine our power to try to keep the peace.’
• League of Nation formed 1919 to advocate for collective security, disarmament and peace. It had 58 members:
• USA never joined L.N. The League was supposed to present the world and encompass all countries, but many
countries never even joined the organization, of which the U.S. was the most prevalent one. Some members only
remained members for a short while, before ending their membership. Many historians believe that if America
had joined the League, there would have been a lot more support in preventing conflicts. Other major powers
such as Germany and the Soviet Union were not allowed to join.
• The international relations of member countries conflicted with the League’s requirements for collective security
but there was no such international force to force collective security.
• The League didn’t have its own armed forces and depended on members to act, but none of the member
countries were ready for another war and didn’t want to provide military support.
• Appeasement was a great problem: the Leagues two largest members, Britain and France, were very reluctant to
resort in sanctions and military actions.
• Disarmament was highly advocated by the League, which meant that it deprived countries that were supposed
to act with military force on its behalf when necessary from means to do so.
• When countries started to attack others in order to try and expand, the League didn’t have any power to stop
them.
Rise of Hitler: 1st phase: using hatred and rhetoric

• Most Germans did not expect their country to lose World War I. And many felt shocked and betrayed to learn that its
leadership had surrendered. In the aftermath, German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm renounced the throne and fled to the
Netherlands. As revolutionaries fought for control of the German capital of Berlin, a new government formed in a smaller city
to the south called Weimar. Almost overnight, Germany had transformed into a democratic republic, which would be known
as the Weimar Republic.
• The collapse of the monarchy was very important because it created these power vacuums and this grab for power. And
these disgruntled youth, hardened youth, came back into German society and Austrian society, and were very disillusioned,
and had known— their primary, formative years were in the carnage of the First World War, the Great War, the war to end all
wars.
• And so they come out of this experience and really bring that to the streets of Germany, to the political culture of Germany—
so that kind of combative spirit. A lot of the politicking that's occurring in Germany is in beer halls and in street fights. For a
liberal society to function and a democracy to function, there has to be compromise. There has to be civility. And it's not part
of that, the birth of democracy in Germany.
• Adolf Hitler was among those youth who brought a combative spirit back to the new German democratic experiment. Hitler
was an Austrian citizen who had volunteered to fight for the German army. He was in a hospital, recovering from a mustard
gas attack that had left him partially blinded, when he learned of Germany's defeat. And he moved to Munich shortly
thereafter.
• Hitler was like hundreds of thousands of other Germans— some of them in the army, some of them not— in 1919—
disturbed by their nation's defeat, deeply unsettled by the political revolutions that occurred at roughly the same time, and
looking for an answer. He found it in a political organization that already existed called the German Workers' Party. And he
rapidly became a dominant figure in the movement because he had a gift for public speaking.
• In early 1920, the party changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or the Nazi Party for short.
2nd phase: identify scapegoats
• It was a movement that offered him an explanation for Germany's defeat— namely, that the nation had been sold
out. That it was not his fault as a former soldier that Germany had lost, but rather seditious forces at home had
undercut the war effort. And that explained why Germany had lost. That became the core of his message. And then
attached to that was a particular statement that among those seditious forces were the Jews.
• Traitors have betrayed us. That's why we lost the war. You need a scapegoat for that. The Jews were a scapegoat.
• So that was the beginning— that Hitler blamed this ignominious defeat on his political opponents. And then the
peak of this early period of crisis— from 1918 to 1923, Weimar was plagued with crisis— was the hyperinflation.
• In the great inflation of 1923, you need billions of marks to be able to get a loaf of bread. It didn't pay to work,
because your money was losing value every hour of every day. And the entire middle class was wiped out.
• It's not a coincidence that Hitler attempts to seize power in November 1923, the peak of the hyperinflation. And he
sees this as an opportunity— that Weimar has become so chaotic, the downward spiral has gone so far, that that's
when he undertakes the Beer Hall Putsch.
• Hitler and about 2,000 supporters attempted to stage a coup in which they took control of Munich. It ended in a
confrontation which resulted in the death of 16 Nazis and four German policemen. And Hitler was arrested and
charged with treason two days later.
• The Putsch failed. He then was sentenced to jail. But he was treated in jail like a bit of a celebrity, and not treated
with harshness, and not put away for a very long time. In jail, he wrote Mein Kampf— my battle, my struggle—
which was his blueprint. He told us what he was going to do. And then he did it.
3rd Phase: capturing state power
• Now, people knew what Hitler stood for, but they weren't quite sure what his priorities were. We now know, in
retrospect, looking back, that Hitler was obsessed with two things above all— removing the Jews from Germany
— and that became increasingly a murderous program, and he was obsessed with winning what he called living
space for Germany in the east.
• But up until 1932, that's not what he talked about all the time. Indeed, in the last three years, between 1930
and 1933, when Hitler's vote was rising the fastest, the Nazis downplayed their antisemitic rhetoric. And their
rhetoric was, what's wrong with this country is the system. The system is broken. The system doesn't know how
to fix what's wrong with this country.
• In 1932, Hitler ran against the current president, World War I general Paul von Hindenburg. The Nazis won the
largest share of seats in the Reichstag, at 37%, but did not get the majority needed for Hitler to become
president. In a second round of voting, Hindenburg was able to gain a narrow majority of votes and retain the
office.
• A third of the electorate gravitated toward Hitler. But it was only a third. And he wouldn't have come to power if
it had not been for this powerful elite around the president who said, you've got to pick somebody. Let's pick
him. And he thus became the person that the president chose to make chancellor.
• They believed that they could control Hitler in this way. They called him the drummer, and he was going to head
the parade. And the existing elites were going to manipulate him and pass the legislation that they needed. And
Germany would be saved— at least saved from communism, from a Marxist dictatorship. And it's one of the
great mistakes in all of history.
Aggressive Foreign Policy
• Adolf Hitler came to power with the goal of establishing a new racial order in Europe dominated by the
German “master race.” This goal drove Nazi foreign policy, which aimed to: throw off the restrictions
imposed by the Treaty of Versailles; incorporate territories with ethnic German populations into the Reich;
acquire a vast new empire in Eastern Europe; form alliances; and, during the war, persuade other states to
participate in the “final solution.
• The Nazi belief that the Germans must control Lebensraum (living space) in the “East” drove Nazi Germany’s
foreign policy. Hitler recognized that acquiring Lebensraum would require war, and he began preparing for it
as soon as he came to power.
• German foreign policy sought the cooperation of European states in achieving the Nazi goal of murdering the
Jews in Europe.
 Policy of Appeasement and German Aggression
• March 1938 German annexed Austria.
• Next move to ask to hand Sudetenland, a region bordering Germany with an ethnic German majority. On
September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, French Premier Edouard Daladier, Italian fascist
dictator Benito Mussolini, and Hitler signed the Munich agreement, which ceded the Sudetenland to Germany. In
March 1939, Germany occupied and dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia, establishing a German
“protectorate” over the Czech lands and permitting the formation of Slovakia as a sovereign state with a pro-
German regime.
• Hitler then began planning to attack Poland, recognizing that this could lead to war with France and Great
Britain. In May 1939, Hitler and Mussolini signed the “Pact of Steel,” a formal military alliance. Then on August
24, Ribbentrop and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a non-aggression pact between Germany
and the Soviet Union. In a secret protocol, the two states agreed to divide Poland between them.
The beginning of WWII
• With no need to fear Soviet intervention, Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and
France, Poland's allies, declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939.
• Germany’s defeat of Poland in 1939 and its conquest of Western European countries in spring 1940 enabled
it to attract new allies with promises of territorial and economic gains. Italy entered the war on Germany’s
side in June 1940, and in September Germany, Italy and Japan formed the Tripartite Pact. By the end of 1940,
Hungary, Romania and Slovakia joined the Axis powers, followed by Bulgaria and Croatia in 1941.
Facts of WWII

One of the two major

powers fighting the WW2
was the “Allies”, made up of
countries like Britain, France
Russia, China, and the USA.
The other power was the
“Axis” group made up of
Germany, Italy, and Japan.
Facts of WWII
• Approximately 1.5 million children lost their lives in the Holocaust of which 1.2 million
were Jewish and the rest Gypsies.
• German suffered the highest number of casualties, exceeding 21 million.
• The Nazis used “concentration camps” to hold millions of Jewish people where they
would work and starve until they where “exterminated” in gas showers using a pesticide
called Zyklon-B
• The Nazis killed approximately 12 million people, of which 6 million were Jews.
• Hitler designed the Nazi flag. Red stood for the social idea of Nazism, white for
nationalism, and the black swastika for the struggle of the Aryan man.
The aftermath After the end of the war, a conference was held in
Potsdam, Germany, to set up peace treaties . The countries that fought
with Hitler lost territory and had to pay reparations to the Allies .
Germany and its capital Berlin were divided into four parts. The zones
were to be controlled by Great Britain, the United States, France and the
Soviet Union. The three western Allies and the Soviet Union disagreed
on many things and as time went on Germany was divided into two
separate countries : East Germany , which had a Communist government
and West Germany, which was a democratic state . Berlin was also
divided into East and West Berlin. Austria was also occupied by the four
Allies from 1945 to 1955.
Soviet Expansion:

• Berlin Blockade
• Iron Curtain
• Beginning of Cold War
• Formation of the United
Nations
• International Monetary System