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Unit 8
10–15% of examTwo world wars, a revolution in Russia and the Great Depression made the first half of the 20th century the most destructive period in Europe's history. You'll see how a Balkan crisis became World War I, why the peace that followed failed, how fascist and communist dictatorships grew out of the chaos, and how Nazi Germany's aggression led to World War II and the Holocaust.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
By 1914 Europe was split into two armed alliance systems, charged with nationalism and imperial rivalry, yet still confident that science and technology meant progress. The decades that followed tested that confidence with total war, economic collapse, and a three-way struggle between democracy, communism and fascism.
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The assassination of Austria-Hungary's Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 set off alliance commitments and war plans that pulled the Great Powers into war. Machine guns, barbed wire and poison gas locked the Western Front into a deadly trench stalemate, and the fighting spread to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. War weariness fed mutinies and revolution, and by 1918 the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires had fallen or were collapsing, while the United States emerged as a world power.
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War losses, food shortages and an unpopular tsar led to the February Revolution of 1917, which forced Nicholas II to abdicate and left a weak Provisional Government sharing power with the Petrograd Soviet. In October 1917 Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power, then won a brutal civil war against opponents who had foreign help, and in 1921 Lenin allowed some private trade under the New Economic Policy (NEP) to revive the economy.
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At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson's idealistic Fourteen Points clashed with French and British demands to punish Germany. The Treaty of Versailles blamed Germany for the war and charged it heavy reparations; new states like Poland and Czechoslovakia were created; the League of Nations began without the U.S., Germany or the Soviet Union; and Britain and France took over former German and Ottoman lands as mandates.
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War debts, tariffs, overproduction and heavy dependence on American loans left Europe's economies fragile in the 1920s. When the U.S. stock market crashed in 1929 and American money stopped flowing, the Great Depression spread across Europe, and new approaches like Keynes's case for government spending, Scandinavian cooperative social programs and France's Popular Front did not stop extremist parties from gaining ground.
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Fascism glorified the nation and war, built a cult around one leader and rejected democracy. Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922 and Hitler in Germany in 1933 by exploiting bitterness over the war, economic fear and weak new democracies, and Franco won Spain's civil war (1936–1939) with German and Italian help while Britain and France stayed out. In the Soviet Union, Stalin forced rapid industrialization through Five-Year Plans and collective farms, at the cost of a devastating famine in Ukraine, purges of supposed enemies and the gulag labor camps.
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Britain and France, desperate to avoid another war, followed a policy of appeasement while Italy invaded Ethiopia (1935) and Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland (1936), annexed Austria (1938) and took the Sudetenland under the Munich Agreement (1938), then seized the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939. With the U.S. isolationist and the West distrusting the Soviet Union, Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939, clearing the way for Germany's invasion of Poland.
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Germany's Blitzkrieg ("lightning war") of fast-moving tanks and planes conquered Poland in 1939 and France in 1940, and in 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union while Japan attacked across Asia and the Pacific. The Allies turned the tide thanks to the Soviet Union's huge military effort and losses, the factories and science of the United States and Britain, Churchill's leadership and resistance movements in occupied countries. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 opened the nuclear age.
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Driven by racism and anti-Semitism, the Nazis stripped Jews of their rights through laws like the Nuremberg Laws (1935) and violence like Kristallnacht (1938). During the war, with help from allied governments and local collaborators, they murdered about six million Jews in mass shootings and death camps such as Auschwitz. They also killed millions of other people, including Roma, people with disabilities, Polish civilians and Soviet prisoners of war, and sent thousands of gay men to concentration camps.
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Before 1914 most Europeans still trusted science and technology to solve problems, but World War I left a "lost generation" disillusioned and cynical. New physics from Einstein, Heisenberg and Bohr made the universe seem less certain while also making nuclear power and weapons possible, and the world wars pulled women into factories, offices and politics.
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This wrap-up topic asks you to build an argument about what changed and what stayed the same between 1914 and 1945, such as how total war expanded governments' power over everyday life. Strong answers use specific evidence and show complexity, for example by weighing more than one cause or perspective.
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