In 1938, Hitler threatened to unleash a European war unless the Sudetenland, a border area of Czechoslovakia containing an ethnic German majority, was surrendered to Germany. The leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany held a conference in Munich, Germany, on September 29–30, 1938, in which they agreed to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler. Czechoslovakia agreed under significant pressure from Britain and France.
On March 15, 1939, Hitler violated the Munich Agreement and moved against the Czechoslovak state. The Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia were proclaimed a part of Germany and were occupied by German forces. Slovakia became an independent state, closely allied with Germany. Hungary, which had annexed territory in southern Slovakia after the Munich conference, seized part of the Ukraine. Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.
On March 23, 1939, German troops suddenly occupied Memel, Lithuania. Hitler then demanded the annexation of the Free City of Danzig in Poland to Germany and access for Germany through the so-called Polish Corridor to East Prussia.
Convinced that Hitler would not negotiate, Britain and France guaranteed to protect Polish territory against German aggression. With Hitler determined to attack Poland, Europe was on the brink of war in late summer 1939. On September 1, 1939, Hitler and the Nazi army invaded Poland. Left with little other choice, on September 3, Great Britain, France, and Poland declared war on Germany. World War II had begun.
At the Lausanne Conference of 1932, Germany, Britain, and France agreed to the formal suspension of reparations payments from the defeated countries after World War I. Thus, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the financial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, the post-World War I peace agreement, had already been revised. Hitler was determined to overturn the remaining military and territorial provisions of the treaty to create a German empire in Europe.
Germany had already been secretly rebuilding its army before the Nazi takeover of power. The Nazis continued this rearmament [expansion of military] and rapidly expanded arms production. Military conscription was reintroduced on March 16, 1935, in open violation of the Treaty of Versailles. At the same time, Hitler announced the expansion of the German army to more than 500,000 men.
In the 1925 Treaty of Locarno, Germany had recognized both the permanence of its borders with France and Belgium and the demilitarization of the Rhineland. On March 7, 1936, however, Hitler ignored this agreement and ordered the German armed forces into the demilitarized Rhineland. Hitler’s action brought condemnation from Britain and France, but neither nation intervened.
After a prolonged period of intense propaganda inside Austria, German troops entered the country on March 12, 1938, receiving the enthusiastic support of most of the population. Austria was incorporated into Germany on the following day. In April, this German annexation was retroactively approved in a vote that was manipulated to indicate that about 99 percent of the Austrian people wanted the union (known as the “Anschluss”) with Germany. Aggressive Nazi campaigning and propaganda was used to convince the German and Austrian people that strength and empire would result from their unity. Still vulnerable and scared of the Depression and feeling embarrassed following WWI, many Germans and Austrians were convinced by the Nazis’ promises for national greatness. Neither Jews nor Roma (Gypsies) were permitted to vote.
Nazism was a totalitarian movement led by Adolf Hitler. Hitler was the head of the Nazi Party in Germany. Nazism had mass appeal, hostility toward outsiders, and rule by dictatorship. The charismatic dictator Hitler was the sole source of inspiration for people and the nation. The goal of the Nazi party was to destroy all enemies of the Aryan [white, European] people and help the Nazis take back from other European countries what they thought were their historic homelands.
Hitler added to German hopes by declaring his faith in the mission of the German race. In Hitler’s book Mein Kampf (written from 1925 to 1927, My Struggle), he outlined both his goals and his theories of race and propaganda:
The easiest and hence most widespread explanation of the present misfortune is that it was brought about by the consequences of the lost War [WWI] and that therefore the War is the cause of the present evil [depression]. . . . It takes a truly Jewish effrontery [disrespect] to attribute the blame for the collapse solely to the military defeat. . . . The foremost connoisseurs [experts] . . . in the use of falsehood and slander have always been the Jews. . . .
Jewish Germans had been relatively unharmed by the German depression of the 1920s and 1930s, a fact that made it easier for Hitler and the Nazis to blame them as the source of Germany’s economic woes.
The growth of communist power in the Soviet Union (now Russia) aroused fear in Germany and around the world. Many people in Europe and the U.S. thought communism was a threat to their way of life. Hitler exploited those fears by saying he would defend Europe against communism. This won him the support of many conservative people who misunderstood how totalitarian his movement was. Hitler had a deep understanding of how people think and what makes them angry and afraid. He stressed the fact that all propaganda must be able to reach even the least intelligent people and that its truthfulness is much less important than its success.
Hitler played upon historic anti-Semitism in Europe and identified the Jews with both Russian Communism and evil. The Jews were to be discriminated against not according to their religion but according to their “race.” Nazism declared the Jews to be forever fundamentally different from and harmful to Germans.
The Nazis rejected democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and all movements of international cooperation and peace. Instead, Nazism stressed instinct, the subordination of the individual to the state, and blind obedience to leaders appointed from above. It also emphasized the inequality of men and races and the right of the strong to rule the weak. It sought to suppress other political or religious views.
:give me 15 different topics from this
1. Hitler's threat to unleash a European war in 1938
2. The Munich Agreement and the surrender of Sudetenland
3. German occupation and annexation of Czechoslovakia
4. Hitler's violation of the Munich Agreement in 1939
5. German occupation of Memel, Lithuania in 1939
6. Hitler's demand for annexation of the Free City of Danzig in Poland
7. Britain and France's guarantee to protect Polish territory against German aggression
8. The invasion of Poland and the start of World War II
9. The Lausanne Conference of 1932 and the suspension of reparations payments
10. Hitler's determination to overturn the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles
11. Germany's secret rebuilding of its army before the Nazi takeover
12. Violation of the Treaty of Locarno through the remilitarization of the Rhineland
13. German annexation of Austria in 1938 (Anschluss)
14. Aggressive Nazi propaganda and campaigning in Austria
15. The ideology and goals of Nazism under Adolf Hitler