By June, Hitler was posing for photographs in front of the Eiffel Tower. Poland had fallen in three weeks France lasted only a few weeks more. Mirroring the German’s Schlieffen Plan of 1914 in the previous war, Germany attacked through the Netherlands and Belgium to avoid the prepared French defenses along the French-German border. But in May 1940, Hitler launched his attack into Western Europe. Belligerents called it the Sitzkrieg (sitting war). Throughout the winter of 1939-40, however, fighting was mostly confined to smaller fronts in Norway. It was called blitzkrieg, or lightening war.Īfter the fall of Poland, France and its British allies braced for an inevitable German attack.
German doctrine emphasized the use of tanks, planes, and motorized infantry (infantry that used trucks for transportation instead of marching) to concentrate forces, smash front lines, and wreak havoc behind the enemy’s defenses. The German army, anxious to avoid the rigid, grinding war of attrition that took so many millions in the stalemate of WWI, built their new modern army for speed and maneuverability. Britain and France declared war two days later and mobilized their armies. Britain and France hoped that the Poles could hold out for three to four months, enough time for the Allies to intervene. The European war began when the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1 st, 1939. Hitler signed a secret agreement-the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact-with the Soviet Union that coordinated the splitting of Poland between the two powers and promised non-aggression thereafter. In March 1939, Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia and began to make demands on Poland. It was thought that Hitler could be appeased, but it became clear that his ambitions would continue pushing German expansion. Britain and France, alarmed but still anxious to avoid war, the major powers agreed-without Czechoslovakia’s input-that Germany could annex the region in return for a promise to stop all future German aggression. In 1938 Germany annexed Austria and set its sights on the Sudetenland, a large, ethnically German area of Czechoslovakia. Huge rallies like this one in Nuremberg displayed the sheer number of armed and ready troop and instilled a fierce loyalty to (or fearful silence about) Hitler and the National Socialist Party in Germany. Once in power, Hitler worked toward the twin goals of unification and expansion. The untermenschen (“lesser” humans) would have to go.
In his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, Hitler advocated for the unification of Europe’s German peoples under one nation and that nation’s need for lebensraum, or living space, particularly in Eastern Europe, to supply Germans with the land and resources needed for future prosperity. Britain and France stood by warily and began to rebuild their militaries, anxious in the face of a renewed Germany but still unwilling to draw Europe into another bloody war.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Hitler and Mussolini-the fascist Italian leader who had risen to power in the 1920s-intervened for the Spanish fascists, toppling the communist Spanish Republican Party. He reoccupied regions lost during the war and re-militarized the Rhineland, along the border with France. Hitler repudiated the punitive damages and strict military limitations of the Treaty of Versailles. Championing German racial supremacy, fascist government, and military expansionism, Adolph Hitler rose to power and, after aborted attempts to take power in Germany, became Chancellor in 1933 and the Nazis conquered German institutions. Germany’s Weimer Republic collapsed with the economy and out of the ashes emerged Adolph Hitler’s National Socialists-the Nazis. Across the globe in Europe, the continent’s major powers were still struggling with the after-effects of the First World War when the global economic crisis spiraled much of the continent into chaos.
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