10.5 The Interwar Years and Totalitarianism

Notes

Economic crisis and anger after World War I helped dictators rise to power.

• The Great Depression began with the U.S. stock market crash of October 1929 and spread worldwide, causing mass unemployment.
• Totalitarianism: a government that controls every part of public and private life, using propaganda, secret police, censorship and terror, often around a single leader.
• Fascism stressed extreme nationalism, loyalty to the state and a single leader, and opposed communism. Benito Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922.
• In the USSR, Joseph Stalin used Five-Year Plans to industrialize and forced collectivization of farms. A famine in 1932 to 1933, including the Holodomor in Ukraine, killed millions. His Great Purge killed or imprisoned many supposed enemies.
• In Germany, the Weimar Republic suffered hyperinflation (1923) and the Depression. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party blamed Jews and the Versailles treaty. Hitler became chancellor in January 1933 and quickly made himself dictator.
• In Japan, military leaders gained power and invaded Manchuria (1931), seeking resources.