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The Great Depression and World War II

1929–1945

The years of anxiety and political maneuvering in Europe that followed World War I were made much worse when a massive economic depression spread around the world following the American stock market crash of October 1929. An increasingly interconnected global economy now collapsed. Free-market capitalism appeared to have run its course. People everywhere looked to new leaders for relief, some democratically elected, many not. In Europe on the eve of the Second World War, liberal democratic governments were surviving only in Great Britain, France, the Low Countries, the Scandinavian nations, and neutral Switzerland. Worldwide, in countries such as Brazil, Japan, the Soviet Union, and others, as well as in Europe, dictatorships seemed the wave of the future.

The mid-twentieth-century era of dictatorship is a highly disturbing chapter in the history of civilization. The key development was not only the resurgence of authoritarian rule but also the rise of a particularly ruthless brand of totalitarianism that reached its fullest realization in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Japan in the 1930s. Stalin, Hitler, and Japan’s military leaders intervened radically in society and ruled with unprecedented severity. Hitler’s desire for eastward territorial expansion was partially racially motivated (against the Slavs and Jews, whom he considered inferior). His sudden attack on Poland in 1939 started World War II. Hitler’s successes encouraged the Japanese to expand their stalemated Chinese campaign into a vast Pacific war by attacking Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and advancing into Southeast Asia. By war’s end, millions had died on the battlefields and in the bombed-out cities. Millions more died in the Holocaust, in Stalin’s Soviet Union from purges and forced imposition of communism, and during Japan’s quest to create an “Asia for Asians.”