The period of anxiety and depression that followed the Great War led many to question whether democracy and capitalism could meet the challenges of modern society. In this context, radical political parties gained new prominence in every European nation. In Italy, Benito Mussolini and the Fascists seized power in the early 1920s, providing a model and an ideology for the right-wing dictatorships of the 1930s. In the Soviet Union after 1928, Joseph Stalin led his nation through a brutal and repressive “second revolution” that used the tools of totalitarianism to establish Stalin’s absolute power and to force the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. In 1933, Germany’s new chancellor and Nazi Party leader, Adolf Hitler, began plans to create a German Nazi empire based on the ideology of Aryan supremacy. Hampered by their own worries, other nations, including Great Britain, seemed powerless to stop Germany’s remilitarization or to check Hitler’s aggressive expansion. The invasion of Poland in 1939 by Germany and the Soviet Union demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that negotiation with Hitler was futile, and France and Great Britain declared war, marking the start of World War II. Even as the Germans carried out their plans for the conquest and domination of Europe, they pursued another of Hitler’s key objectives, the extermination of all European Jews. ■