13. Crisis, Dictatorship, and the Second World War

13.1 The Interwar Crisis and Fragile Democracy

The years from 1918 to 1939 were shaped by the unresolved consequences of the First World War rather than by simple peace. The interwar period saw the collapse or reorganization of empires, the creation of new states, political violence, economic instability, and conflict over national borders and political systems.

Consequences of the First World War

The German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires disappeared or were radically reorganized. New states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia contained large ethnic minorities and competing national claims. The Treaty of Versailles required Germany to accept responsibility for the war, surrender territory, reduce its armed forces, and pay reparations. Many Germans regarded these terms as a national humiliation.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 added an ideological dimension. The Bolsheviks created a communist government that aimed to replace capitalism with a classless society. Communist parties formed across Europe, while conservatives, business leaders, landowners, and many middle-class citizens feared revolution and the abolition of private property.

Why democracy was vulnerable

Parliamentary governments expanded after 1918, but many faced:

• fragmented politics and unstable coalitions;

• political violence from communists, fascists, monarchists, and nationalist militias;

• inflation, unemployment, debt, and reparations;

• political elites who accepted elections but not civil liberties or minority rights; and

• fear of revolution, which encouraged some conservatives to support authoritarian leaders.

Democracy therefore competed with authoritarian alternatives in conditions of insecurity. The key issue was not simply whether elections existed, but whether institutions and political leaders were committed to pluralism, lawful opposition, and peaceful transfers of power.

Takeaway: The interwar crisis resulted from the interaction of war legacies, economic hardship, ideological conflict, and weak democratic commitment.

13.2 Fascism, Communism, and Authoritarian Rule

Authoritarian movements gained support by promising order, national revival, social unity, and protection from communism. Their appeals were especially powerful when parliamentary governments appeared divided or unable to address economic and political emergencies.

Fascist ideas and methods

Fascism rejected liberal democracy, Marxist class conflict, and individual rights when they conflicted with the supposed interests of the nation. Fascist movements generally promoted:

• unity of the national community;

• obedience to a charismatic leader;

• political violence and militarism;

• hostility to socialism and communism;

• subordination of individuals to the state or nation;

• propaganda and mass mobilization; and

• discipline, sacrifice, and territorial expansion.

Fascism first achieved power in Italy. Benito Mussolini became prime minister in 1922 after the March on Rome and gradually dismantled parliamentary government through censorship, intimidation, imprisonment, and secret-police surveillance. The regime also pursued imperial ambitions, including the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–1936.

Communism and Stalinism

Communism argued that capitalism divided society into competing economic classes and that collective ownership should replace the capitalist system. Under Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks created a one-party state after revolution and civil war. Joseph Stalin later consolidated power in the Soviet Union and pursued rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization through state planning. These policies brought economic transformation but also famine, forced labor, mass arrests, deportations, and political terror.

Communist and fascist systems were opposing ideologies, but both developed authoritarian structures that limited pluralism and individual political freedoms. Communist governments emphasized class struggle and international revolution; fascist governments emphasized national unity, hierarchy, and racial or ethnic identity.

Takeaway: Fascism and communism offered different visions of society, but authoritarian rule in both systems relied on political control, propaganda, and repression.

13.3 The Great Depression and the Breakdown of Confidence

The financial crisis of 1929 spread through international trade, banking, credit, and investment networks. European economies were especially vulnerable because many governments and businesses depended on American loans and because the First World War had left heavy debts and disrupted trade.

Social and political effects

The Great Depression produced:

• mass unemployment;

• business failures and bank collapses;

• falling agricultural prices;

• reduced international trade;

• homelessness and poverty; and

• growing distrust of established political parties.

Countries responded differently. Some democracies adopted welfare programs, public-works projects, or financial reforms. Others imposed austerity or turned toward authoritarian rule. Economic crisis did not automatically create dictatorship, but it gave extremist movements an opportunity to present themselves as alternatives to governments that seemed ineffective.

Germany's particular vulnerability

The Nazi Party had been a fringe movement during much of the 1920s. After 1929, it gained electoral support by blaming the Weimar government, the Treaty of Versailles, communists, and Jews for Germany's suffering. The Depression was therefore an important condition in Hitler's rise, but not the only cause. Nazi success also depended on propaganda, political violence, electoral strategy, conservative cooperation, and the willingness of President Paul von Hindenburg and other elites to undermine parliamentary government.

Takeaway: Economic crisis weakened confidence in democracy, but political choices and institutional failures determined how that crisis translated into authoritarian power.

13.4 The Nazi Seizure of Power

Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, through a constitutional process. The Nazi Party had not won an absolute majority, and conservative politicians initially believed they could control Hitler within a coalition government. Instead, the Nazis used emergency powers, legal changes, intimidation, and repression to destroy parliamentary democracy.

Steps toward dictatorship

1. Reichstag Fire Decree, February 1933: Civil liberties were suspended, allowing the government to arrest political opponents and restrict the press and public assembly.

2. Enabling Act, March 1933: The government received authority to make laws without the Reichstag, removing effective parliamentary checks.

3. Coordination, or Gleichschaltung: State governments, cultural institutions, trade unions, and professional organizations were brought under Nazi control.

4. Suppression of opposition: Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, liberals, and other opponents were arrested or forced into exile.

5. One-party state: By July 1933, political parties other than the Nazi Party had been abolished or dissolved.

6. Leader dictatorship: After President Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler combined the offices of president and chancellor and became the Führer.

The sequence shows that democratic destruction can occur through a mixture of legal mechanisms and coercion. Formal procedures did not protect democracy when emergency authority, political violence, elite cooperation, and popular acquiescence worked together against it.

Takeaway: The Nazi seizure of power was a rapid process in which constitutional authority was converted into one-party dictatorship.

13.5 Antisemitism, Racial Law, and the Holocaust

Nazi racial policy treated Jews as a supposedly biological and political enemy. Antisemitism had deep roots in European history, including religious discrimination, economic restrictions, expulsions, pogroms, and modern racial theories. The Nazis did not invent antisemitism, but they made it a central principle of state ideology.

Escalation of persecution

Nazi propaganda falsely blamed Jews for Germany's defeat in the First World War, economic problems, liberalism, communism, and cultural change. The regime presented Jews not as a diverse religious and cultural community but as a dangerous racial group.

Persecution developed in stages:

• In 1933, Jewish people were removed from parts of the civil service and subjected to boycotts and professional exclusion.

• In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and people classified as German under Nazi racial law.

• In 1938, property seizures, forced emigration, and violence intensified.

• On November 9–10, 1938, Kristallnacht, or the November Pogrom, brought coordinated attacks on synagogues, businesses, homes, and Jewish people. German authorities arrested approximately 30,000 Jewish men and sent many to concentration camps.

The Holocaust did not begin as one fully formed event in 1933. It escalated through propaganda, discriminatory law, social exclusion, economic theft, forced emigration, ghettoization, deportation, mass shooting, and extermination. War and occupation enabled Nazi Germany to place millions more Jews under its control and to radicalize persecution into systematic genocide.

Takeaway: Nazi racial policy transformed prejudice into state persecution and, under wartime conditions, into genocide.

13.6 Expansion, Collective Security, and Appeasement

Nazi foreign policy combined revision of the postwar settlement, rearmament, racial ideology, and territorial expansion. Hitler sought to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, unite people he considered ethnic Germans, and create a German empire in eastern Europe, including territory described as Lebensraum, or “living space.”

Expansion and failed resistance

Germany withdrew from disarmament restrictions, reintroduced conscription, remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, annexed Austria in March 1938, and demanded the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.

The League of Nations represented an attempt at Collective security, in which states would respond jointly to aggression. Its limited response to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War weakened confidence in international enforcement. The Spanish Civil War, fought from 1936 to 1939, also became an international ideological conflict and a testing ground for weapons, aircraft, propaganda, and military tactics.

Appeasement attempted to preserve peace by making concessions to an aggressive state. British and French leaders feared another mass war, faced opposition to rearmament, and believed that some German grievances might be addressed through negotiation. At the Munich Agreement in September 1938, Germany was permitted to annex the Sudetenland without Czechoslovakia participating in the decision. Germany occupied the remaining Czech lands in March 1939, showing that Hitler's aims extended beyond uniting German-speaking populations.

Takeaway: Aggressive expansion succeeded partly because international institutions were weak and leading states repeatedly prioritized short-term peace over resisting aggression.

13.7 The Invasion of Poland and War of Annihilation

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact, a nonaggression agreement with a secret protocol dividing parts of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. The pact removed the immediate danger of a two-front war for Hitler and cleared the way for an attack on Poland.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3. The Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland on September 17, following the agreement. The European war had begun.

From European war to racial war

The Second World War was not only a conflict between armies. It was also a war against civilian populations, political opponents, ethnic groups, and alleged racial enemies. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was planned as a war of conquest and annihilation. German forces and collaborators murdered Jewish communities, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, political opponents, and many other civilians.

The Holocaust developed within this wider context of racial war and occupation. Nazi authorities established ghettos, deported Jewish populations, carried out mass shootings, and created killing centers. The genocide depended on state institutions, police and military forces, railways, administrators, collaborators, and the participation or acquiescence of people across occupied Europe.

Takeaway: The invasion of Poland began the European war, while Nazi occupation policies transformed the conflict into a wider war against civilian and racial populations.

13.8 Interpreting Political and Historical Evidence

Political documents, laws, speeches, posters, photographs, administrative records, and personal testimonies can reveal how people experienced, justified, resisted, or suffered during the interwar crisis and the Second World War. They are most useful when examined in relation to their purpose, audience, context, and omissions.

Questions for evaluating evidence

When examining a historical document, ask:

1. Who created it, and for what audience?

2. What political assumptions or prejudices does it express?

3. What does it reveal about power, fear, or responsibility?

4. What information does it omit?

5. How does it compare with evidence from other documents?

A Nazi propaganda poster, for example, can reveal how the regime represented Jews or communists and how it attempted to shape public opinion. It cannot be treated as reliable evidence that those representations were true. Similarly, an emergency decree can show how political authority was claimed and used, but its legal language should be compared with evidence of arrests, censorship, and repression.

Connecting evidence to the broader argument

Effective interpretation links individual evidence to larger developments:

• postwar treaties and political reactions help explain resentment;

• constitutional documents and emergency decrees show how democracy could be weakened;

• racial laws demonstrate the conversion of ideology into state policy;

• diplomatic records illuminate the limits of appeasement and collective security; and

• testimonies from victims, refugees, soldiers, and resistance members reveal the human consequences of dictatorship, occupation, and genocide.

Takeaway: Historical evidence becomes more meaningful when its creator, purpose, perspective, omissions, and relationship to other evidence are examined together.