- Making history the second world war nation creation full#
- Making history the second world war nation creation series#
To a German people saddled with a weak and ineffective democratic government, a hyperinflated currency, and an enfeebled military, this “stab in the back” mythology proved an enormously seductive explanation that essentially absolved them of the blame for the war and their loss in it. German armies had not been defeated in the field, he held rather, they had been betrayed by an assortment of corrupt politicians, Bolsheviks, and Jewish interests who sabotaged the war effort for their own gain. Hitler offered the German people an alternative explanation for their humiliating defeat in the Great War. Many Germans viewed the lopsided terms of the treaty as unnecessarily punitive and profoundly shameful. The Treaty of Versailles also required Germany to disarm its military, restricting it to a skeleton force intended only to operate on the defensive.
Making history the second world war nation creation full#
The peace agreement forced Germany to accept full responsibility for the Great War, and levied a massive system of reparation payments to help restore areas in Belgium and France devastated during the fighting. Much of his appeal to the German citizenry had to do with his promises to restore German honor, believed by many Germans to have been mortgaged via the Treaty of Versailles. Without Hitler, a megalomaniacal leader bent on establishing a 1,000-year German empire through military conquest, it becomes extremely difficult to imagine the outbreak of such a lengthy and devastating war.Īt the same time, Hitler’s rise to power did not occur in a vacuum. Virtually all historians of the Second World War agree that Hitler’s rise to power was the proximate cause of the cataclysmic war that gripped the globe between 19. Those conditions formed the background against which Adolf Hitler could ascend to the position of German Chancellor in the 1930s. The unbalanced Treaty of Versailles (which forced a crippling peace on Germany to end the First World War) and the global depression that enveloped the world during the 1930s (which led to particularly desperate conditions in many European nations as well as the United States) usually emerge as two of the most crucial.
Making history the second world war nation creation series#
In the case of the Second World War, historians generally point to a series of conditions that helped contribute to its outbreak. Those factors created the backdrop against which Lincoln’s election and the shelling of Fort Sumter led to full-blown armed conflict in the spring of 1861 those conditions contributed to a state of affairs in which a triggering event could exert such enormous influence and touch off a four-year war. In the case of the Civil War, for example, historians often point to the growing sectional polarization that divided the nation in the 1840s and 1850s, the national debate over the future of slavery, and the divergent economic paths that distinguished North and South during the antebellum period. In their attempts to explore cause and effect, however, historians often probe more deeply beyond the “triggers” to locate trends, developments, and circumstances that contributed equally, if not more, to events. Such dramatic incidents are often the ones we think of as “causing” an event, since the connection between the trigger and the outcome appears both direct and obvious. A proximate cause is an incident that appears to directly trigger an event, as the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 and the shelling of Fort Sumter led to the outbreak of the Civil War. To help analyze the effects of those different inputs, historians often classify an event’s causes into different categories. A proximate cause is an incident that appears to directly trigger an event.