How to Understand What Caused World War II

It’s one of the ironies of history that before the outbreak of World War II, what later became known as World War I was described by contemporaries as “The War to End All Wars”—a conflict so horrific that the idea of it happening again was inconceivable. So what were the historical developments that led to the most destructive war in human history? Here’s a brief outline.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. World War I didn’t really settle anything—at least for Germany. For Germany, the end of World War I was a chaotic, anticlimactic affair. After years of combat, the German armies simply collapsed from equal parts fatique and demoralization. Because German territory had remained relatively untouched by the savagery of war, many of its citizens wondered who had “sold out” German interests, creating a vast reservoir of resentment that was later tapped by Adolf Hitler.
2. The post-war German economy was in shambles. It has long been believed that the allied powers’ demands for huge war reparations from Germany after World War I created the economic chaos of the Weimar regime in the 1920’s (when inflation was so severe that a piece of bread cost a wheelbarrow full of paper money). Whether or not this is true, the fact is that the German economy—once the powerhouse of Europe—was in a desperate state, and ripe for the rise of authoritarianism.
3. Hitler wasn’t stopped when he could have been. After he seized power in 1933, Hitler made it perfectly clear what he had in mind for Germany and the rest of Europe. Still, England and France reacted tepidly when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland (a clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles) and, later in the 1930’s, annexed the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Many historians believe that if the democratic powers had confronted Hitler in early 1936, rather than late 1939, he would have been defeated.
4. Everyone knew what was coming. All through the 1930’s, it was clear to anyone who followed European affairs that a major conflict loomed between Hitlerian Germany and the rest of the continent (Winston Churchill was especially prescient in this regard). However, the worldwide depression—combined with the fact that the allied powers had fought a long, exhausting war only two decades before—caused most leaders to wearily “hope for the best.”
5. The invasion of Poland was the last straw. It’s possible that—based on the response to his annexation of the Sudetenland—Hitler genuinely believed that England and France would look the other way when he invaded Poland in September of 1939. This time, however, the allied powers stood firm, and war broke out. And Hitler's forces quickly invaded and occupied France.