| 1929 | U.S. stock market crashes; global depression begins; Soviet leadership initiates “liquidation of the kulaks”; Stalin's first five-year plan officially begins |
| 1931 | Japan invades Manchuria; Spanish republicans overthrow monarchy |
| 1933 | Hitler comes to power in Germany |
| 1935 | German government enacts Nuremberg Laws; Italy invades Ethiopia |
| 1936 | Purges and show trials begin in USSR; Hitler remilitarizes Rhineland; Spanish Civil War begins |
| 1937 | Japan attacks China |
| 1938 | Germany annexes Austria; European leaders meet in Munich to negotiate with Hitler; Kristallnacht in Germany |
| 1939 | Germany invades Czechoslovakia; Spanish Civil War ends; Nazi-Soviet Pact; Germany invades Poland; Britain and France declare war on Germany; World War II begins |
| 1940 | France falls to German army |
| 1940–1941 | British air force fends off German attacks in the battle of Britain |
| 1941 | Germany invades Soviet Union; Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; United States enters war |
| 1941–1945 | The Holocaust |
| 1942–1943 | Siege of Stalingrad |
| 1944 | Allied forces land at Normandy, France |
| 1945 | Berlin falls; United States drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; World War II ends |