Understanding Western Society
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Introduction for Chapter 27

27

DICTATORSHIPS AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR

1919–1945

>How did totalitarian regimes attempt to remake European politics, culture, and society, and what impact did they have on World War II? Chapter 27 examines totalitarianism and World War II. In the age of anxiety, Communist and Fascist states undertook determined assaults on democratic government and individual rights across Europe. On the eve of the Second World War, popularly elected governments survived only in Great Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Switzerland. The human costs of totalitarianism were appalling. Millions died as Stalin forced communism on the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Attempts to build a “racially pure” New Order in Europe by Hitler’s Nazi Germany led to the deaths of tens of millions more in World War II and the Holocaust, a scale of destruction far beyond that of World War I.

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Life at Auschwitz. This rough painting by an anonymous inmate of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp is preserved on the ceiling of a camp barracks. Prisoners labor on a drainage canal, while two carry a dead worker off the field. (De Agostini/Getty Images)

> CHAPTER CHRONOLOGY

1921 1936
– New Economic Policy (NEP) in U.S.S.R. – Start of great purges under Stalin; Spanish Civil War begins
1922 1937
– Mussolini gains power in Italy – Japanese army invades China
1924 1938
– Mussolini seizes dictatorial powers – Kristallnacht marks beginning of more aggressive anti-Jewish policy in Germany
1924–1929 1939
– Buildup of Nazi Party in Germany – Germany occupies Czech lands and invades western Poland; Britain and France declare war on Germany, starting World War II; Soviet Union occupies eastern Poland
1927 1940
– Stalin comes to power in U.S.S.R. – Germany defeats and occupies France; Battle of Britain begins
1928 1941
– Stalin’s first five-year plan – Germany invades U.S.S.R.; Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; United States enters war
1929 1941–1945
– Lateran Agreement; start of collectivization in Soviet Union – The Holocaust
1929–1939 1942–1943
– Great Depression – Battle of Stalingrad
1931 1944
– Japan invades Manchuria – Allied invasion at Normandy
1932–1933 1945
– Famine in Ukraine – Soviet and U.S. forces enter Germany; United States drops atomic bombs on Japan; World War II ends
1933 1935
– Hitler appointed chancellor in Germany; Reichstag passes the Enabling Act, granting Hitler absolute dictatorial power – Nuremberg Laws deprive Jews of all rights of citizenship