Notes
World War I (1914–1918)
- Long-term causes: militarism, alliances (the Triple Entente and Triple Alliance), imperialism, and nationalism. The spark: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914).
- Trench warfare on the Western Front with machine guns, poison gas and tanks made it a war of attrition. Total war mobilized economies, used propaganda, and brought women into factories.
- The Russian Revolution (1917): the tsar fell, then Lenin's Bolsheviks took power ("peace, land and bread") and left the war.
- The Treaty of Versailles (1919): the war guilt clause, reparations, territory losses, and military limits for Germany. Wilson's League of Nations formed but was weak (the U.S. didn't join). New nations formed from old empires.
Between the wars
- The Great Depression (1929) spread unemployment.
- Totalitarian regimes: Stalin's Soviet Union (Five-Year Plans, collectivization, the Ukrainian famine, purges), Mussolini's fascist Italy, and Hitler's Nazi Germany (anti-Semitism, the Nuremberg Laws, expansion).
- Appeasement: Britain and France let Hitler remilitarize the Rhineland and take the Sudetenland (Munich, 1938).
World War II (1939–1945)
- Germany invaded Poland (1939) after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Blitzkrieg, the fall of France (1940), the Battle of Britain, the invasion of the USSR (1941), and the Allied invasion at Normandy (D-Day, 1944).
- The Holocaust: the Nazis murdered about 6 million Jews, plus Roma, disabled people and others.
- The war ended in 1945; Germany was divided. The United Nations formed.
Interwar and wartime culture
Disillusionment after WWI showed up in art and philosophy (existentialism, modernism). Mass media and propaganda grew.
Practice
A Serbian nationalist killed him in Sarajevo.
Neither side could break through.
Russians were exhausted by war and hunger.
The war guilt clause angered Germans.
Millions died, especially in Ukraine.
Britain and France let Hitler take the Sudetenland.
Britain and France declared war in September 1939.
It was carried out through camps and mass shootings.
Free response
Write your answer first, then open the scoring guide.
Free-response question
Answer (a), (b) and (c).
(a) Describe ONE long-term cause of World War I.
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The alliance system, which turned a conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia into a war among all the great powers.
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(b) Explain ONE way the Treaty of Versailles contributed to World War II.
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Its war guilt clause, reparations and territory losses humiliated Germany and created resentment that Hitler used to gain support.
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(c) Explain ONE way totalitarian governments controlled their populations in the 1930s.
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They used secret police, propaganda, censorship and purges to eliminate opposition, as in Stalin's Great Terror.
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