The Second World War did not begin on September 1st, 1939, when German forces crossed the Polish border at dawn. It did not even begin in 1933 when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. To understand how the deadliest conflict in human history started, it is necessary to return to November 1918, to a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne in northern France, where German representatives signed the armistice that ended the First World War. The two conflicts are inseparable.
The peace that followed the Great War was not a real peace at all. As the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch reportedly said when he first read its terms, it was not a peace, but an armistice for twenty years. He was accurate to within a matter of months. The First World War had been a disaster of almost incomprehensible scale.
Four years of industrialized slaughter had consumed roughly seventeen million lives, military and civilian. Empires that had stood for centuries collapsed within months. The Austro-Hungarian Empire simply ceased to exist, replaced by a patchwork of small and often quarrelsome successor states. The Ottoman Empire broke apart and withered into what became modern Turkey.
The Russian Empire was swept away by revolution and replaced by the Soviet Union. Even the victors had been bled nearly white. Britain lost close to a million men killed. France, which had suffered the brunt of the fighting on the Western Front, lost over one and a half million of its sons.
These were not statistics. These were the husbands, brothers, fathers, and children of entire generations, and the nations that survived carried the weight of those losses into every decision they made in the years that followed. Germany had suffered, too. Nearly two million German soldiers died in the fighting.
By the autumn of 1918, the situation was becoming untenable. The Hindenburg Line had been broken by the Allies in the Hundred Days Offensive. American troops were arriving in France at a rate that Germany could not match. The naval blockade had been strangling Germany’s economy since 1914, and by 1918, ordinary German civilians were genuinely starving.
Revolution was underway. In late October, sailors mutinied at the German naval bases of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. Workers councils seized power in Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, and other major cities. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated on November 9th and fled to the Netherlands.
A social democratic politician named Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a German republic from a window of the Reichstag building, reportedly without any prior planning, simply to prevent a communist republic from being proclaimed first. Here is the crucial detail that would poison German politics for the next fifteen years and prove one of the most destructive lies in the history of modern politics. When the armistice was signed, the German army had not been defeated on German soil. German troops still occupied large swathes of France and Belgium.
No Allied army was marching through the Brandenburg Gate. From the perspective of millions of ordinary German soldiers and civilians, many of whom had been told right up until the last weeks that Germany was fighting honorably and not losing, the surrender made no sense. The conclusion that suggested itself to those unwilling to accept the reality of military defeat was that Germany had been betrayed from within, stabbed in the back by traitors at home, by socialists, by pacifists, by Jews, by anyone other than the generals who had actually demanded the armistice. This was a lie.
Eric Ludendorff, who had effectively commanded the German war effort for two years, had personally told the Kaiser that the military situation was hopeless. He then had the breathtaking audacity to place the blame on the civilian government for following his own advice. The stab-in-the-back myth, known in German as the Dolchstoßlegende, was born almost immediately, and it became the cornerstone of Adolf Hitler’s political appeal. The new German Republic, known as the Weimar Republic, came into existence under the worst possible circumstances imaginable for a democratic experiment.
It was born in defeat, in revolution, and in economic crisis. Its founders were men of genuine principle, but they were immediately burdened with the consequences of a war they had not started and a defeat they had not caused. In the minds of German nationalists, they would forever be the November criminals, the traitors who had sold out the fatherland. The peace conference that assembled in Paris in early 1919 was unlike anything the world had seen before.
Representatives from thirty-two nations gathered to settle the most destructive war in history, remake the maps of three continents, and build an international order that would prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again. The dominant figures were the so-called Big Four: President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France, and Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy. Each man came to Paris with a different vision, and the compromises between them would ultimately satisfy nobody and store up grievances that would prove lethal. Wilson arrived in Paris to a reception that was nothing short of extraordinary.
Crowds lined the streets. People wept with joy. He was hailed as the savior of civilization. His vision was idealistic and genuinely inspiring.
He called for the self-determination of peoples, open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, arms reductions, and a League of Nations that would resolve disputes through law rather than war. But Wilson’s idealism ran immediately into the hard walls of political reality. Clemenceau, known as the Tiger, was seventy-eight years old and had lived through two German invasions of France. He wanted Germany broken, permanently weakened, and made to pay for the devastation it had inflicted.
Lloyd George was privately more sympathetic to Germany and more realistic about the long-term consequences of a punitive peace, but he was a prisoner of British public opinion, inflamed by years of wartime propaganda and promises to make Germany pay until the pips squeaked. Orlando of Italy walked out of the conference in protest when Wilson insisted that the principle of self-determination must override the secret Treaty of London, which had promised Italy territory in Dalmatia in exchange for entering the war. The Italian sense of having been cheated, of having sacrificed six hundred thousand dead to be denied the fruits of victory at the peace table, created the political conditions for fascism. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28th, 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, was received in Germany with shock, fury, and humiliation.
The date was chosen deliberately. It was exactly five years to the day after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The German peace delegation, which had expected to negotiate a treaty based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points, had instead been presented with a document and told to sign or face renewed war. The terms were severe on almost every front.
Germany lost approximately thirteen percent of its pre-war territory and ten percent of its population. Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France. The Rhineland was to be occupied by Allied troops for fifteen years and permanently demilitarized thereafter. The Saar region with its valuable coal fields was placed under League of Nations administration.
Poland, which had been partitioned out of existence in the 1790s, was reconstituted as a sovereign state, and to give Poland access to the sea, a strip of territory called the Polish Corridor was created, separating the German province of East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The German army was limited to one hundred thousand long-service volunteers. There was to be no German air force, no submarines, and no tanks. The general staff was dissolved.
Germany was to be permanently a military second-rate power. But the provision that proved most politically explosive of all, the clause that would haunt European politics for the next twenty years, was Article 231, the so-called war guilt clause. This single paragraph required Germany to accept sole responsibility for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied governments and their nationals had been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies. Germany alone was declared guilty.
The catastrophe that had consumed four years and seventeen million lives was laid entirely at Germany’s door. The reaction in Germany was one of unified outrage that crossed every political line. The reparations bill took two years to calculate. When the final figure was announced in May 1921, it stood at 132 billion gold marks.
The most famous critique came from John Maynard Keynes, a young Cambridge economist who had resigned from the British delegation in protest. His book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, argued that the reparations demands were not just economically unrealistic, but morally indefensible and would produce exactly the political backlash that rational statesmen should fear. The book became an international bestseller and shaped educated opinion in Britain and the United States for the entire interwar period, feeding a growing conviction that Germany had been treated unjustly and that some revision of the treaty was both fair and necessary. This guilt about the peace settlement would have enormous consequences in the 1930s, when revision was no longer a matter of diplomatic negotiation, but of responding to Hitler’s demands at gunpoint.
The Weimar Republic staggered into existence carrying all these burdens. The early years were punctuated by crisis after crisis. A communist uprising in Berlin was suppressed using right-wing paramilitary units called the Freikorps, whose leaders murdered the socialist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Right-wing coups and a series of political assassinations followed.
But the greatest immediate threat to the republic’s survival came not from bullets, but from the printing press. The German government’s response to its fiscal problems was to print money. The French occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923 triggered an economic crisis that turned severe inflation into hyperinflation of genuinely catastrophic proportions. By November 1923, the exchange rate had reached 4.
2 trillion marks to one US dollar. Workers were paid twice a day and given time off to spend their wages before they lost their value entirely. People burned banknotes in their stoves because the paper had more value as fuel than as currency. The savings of the German middle class, built over lifetimes of thrift, were wiped out completely.
People who had played by the rules had been utterly ruined, and they were desperately looking for someone to blame. It was in this toxic atmosphere of defeat, humiliation, economic chaos, and political violence that Adolf Hitler made his first serious bid for national attention. Born in 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town, Hitler had led an undistinguished early life. He was rejected twice by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, a failure that left a deep wound.
He spent several years drifting in Vienna, absorbing the turbulent political culture of a city where radical German nationalism and virulent antisemitism were mainstream political forces. When the First World War broke out, he enlisted in the Bavarian army with genuine enthusiasm. The war gave his directionless life a structure and purpose it had never had. He was wounded twice and was awarded the Iron Cross first class for an act of individual bravery.
When the armistice came, he was in a military hospital, temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack. He later claimed that the news of Germany’s surrender was so overwhelming that his sight temporarily returned. After the war, Hitler was used by the Bavarian army as an informer, monitoring the radical political groups proliferating in Munich’s turbulent atmosphere. In September 1919, he was sent to observe a meeting of a tiny group called the German Workers Party.
He ended up in an argument with another attendee and discovered something that appears to have genuinely surprised him. He had a remarkable talent for political oratory. He joined the party, became its most important speaker, and within months was effectively its leader. His political meetings attracted growing crowds through 1921 and 1922.
His rhetorical style was unlike anything German politics had seen before, a raw, visceral, emotionally overwhelming performance that hit the precise notes of grievance, pride, and burning resentment that resonated with his audiences. The Beer Hall Putsch of November 8th and 9th, 1923 was Hitler’s first attempt to seize power. Taking inspiration from Mussolini’s March on Rome the previous year, he attempted to launch a revolution from Munich. On the evening of November 8th, with the help of General Erich Ludendorff, he disrupted a meeting of Bavarian leaders at a large Munich beer hall, fired a pistol into the ceiling, and announced that the national revolution had begun.
The plan collapsed almost immediately when the Bavarian government and military withdrew their support. On the morning of November 9th, a column of about two thousand Nazi demonstrators attempted to march through Munich and was met by police who opened fire. Sixteen Nazis and four policemen were killed. Hitler was arrested and put on trial for treason.
The trial was his first major national platform, and he used it brilliantly. Rather than defending himself, he turned the proceedings into an indictment of the republic. The sympathetic judges gave him only the minimum sentence, and he was released after serving nine months. During those nine months, dictating to his deputy Rudolf Hess, he produced the first volume of Mein Kampf, his combined autobiography and political manifesto.
It laid out with remarkable clarity the goals he intended to pursue: the destruction of Marxism, the acquisition of Lebensraum, or living space, for the German people in Eastern Europe, the racial restructuring of Europe through the persecution and elimination of the Jewish population, and the establishment of a German empire that would dominate the continent. Any person who read Mein Kampf carefully would have known exactly what Hitler intended to do if he ever came to power. The tragedy is that most people did not read it carefully. The mid-1920s were in retrospect the Weimar Republic’s best years.
Hyperinflation was brought under control by a currency reform. The Dawes Plan reorganized Germany’s reparations payments and opened the door to a flood of American investment. The Locarno Treaties appeared to normalize Germany’s position in Europe. Germany was admitted to the League of Nations in September 1926.
The cultural life of the republic during this period was genuinely extraordinary. Berlin became one of the cultural capitals of the world, a city of remarkable creative energy and social freedom. But beneath the gleaming surface of Weimar culture, the wounds of defeat and economic crisis had not healed. They had merely been covered over, and not very thick.
The Wall Street crash of October 1929 ripped that cover away. The collapse of the American stock market triggered the Great Depression, and its effects spread across the Atlantic with terrifying speed. American banks called in their loans to Germany. German banks collapsed.
German industry contracted violently. Unemployment climbed to over six million by the beginning of 1932. Germany’s national income fell by nearly a third between 1929 and 1932. In this catastrophe, the Nazi Party found its moment.
The correlation between the depression’s severity and Nazi electoral performance is almost perfectly precise. In the Reichstag elections of May 1928, before the depression had hit, the Nazis won only 2. 6% of the vote. They were a fringe party.
A year after the crash, in the September 1930 elections, they won 18. 3% and 107 seats, becoming the second largest party in the Reichstag. By July 1932, they won 37. 4% and became by far the largest party in Parliament.
In four years, they had gone from marginal to dominant, carried there by the anger, fear, and despair of millions of Germans. Hitler was offering emotional release and a clear narrative of blame. The depression had happened because of the Jews, the Marxists, and the November criminals who had betrayed Germany. This was not true, but it was emotionally satisfying in a way that the moderate parties’ complicated explanations could not match.
He was offering spectacle and belonging, a total community with its own symbols, rituals, and mass events. And he was offering specific promises: tear up Versailles, rearm Germany, smash the communists. For many members of the German middle class and business community, Hitler represented the lesser evil compared to the communists. The path from electoral dominance to actual power ran through the backrooms of the German establishment, through the intrigues of conservative politicians who convinced themselves that they could use the Nazi movement without being used by it.
Paul von Hindenburg, the eighty-four-year-old field marshal who had been elected president, detested Hitler and had refused twice to appoint him chancellor, reportedly calling him a Bohemian corporal. But a group of conservative advisers convinced the old man that bringing Hitler into government on conservative terms was the only way forward. On January 30th, 1933, Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. The conservatives believed they had domesticated a dangerous but useful force.
They were catastrophically wrong. Within weeks, the conservatives learned what they had done. The Reichstag fire of February 27th, 1933 gave Hitler the pretext he needed to move against his opponents. The Reichstag Fire Decree of the following day suspended virtually all civil liberties and authorized the arrest of political opponents without charge.
Thousands of communists, social democrats, and trade union leaders were arrested. The Enabling Act of March 23rd, 1933 gave Hitler the power to rule by decree for four years without consulting the Reichstag. German democracy ended not with a bang but with a parliamentary vote. The months that followed saw the systematic dismantling of every institution that might have served as a check on Nazi power.
Political parties were banned or dissolved themselves under pressure. By July 14th, the Nazi Party was formally declared the only legal political party in Germany. The process known as Gleichschaltung, the coordination of all German institutions, proceeded at blinding speed. The universities were purged of Jewish professors and political dissidents, driving out much of the finest academic talent in the world, including Albert Einstein.
How did the outside world respond? In Britain, the dominant response was a combination of anxiety and a determination not to overreact. There was a widespread feeling that Germany had legitimate grievances rooted in the injustice of Versailles. In France, the response was a mixture of deep anxiety and political paralysis.
The United States under Franklin Roosevelt was constrained by powerful isolationist currents in public opinion. The Soviet Union under Stalin was focused primarily on the internal transformation and terror of the Five-Year Plans. Japan’s descent into militarist imperialism provided an early demonstration of how the international community would respond to aggression. In September 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army staged an incident at Mukden and used it to justify the occupation of Manchuria.
The League of Nations condemned Japan. Japan resigned from the League, kept Manchuria, and renamed it Manchukuo. Nothing happened. The lesson was unmistakable and was not lost on Hitler or Mussolini.
Mussolini had been the original template for European fascism. His imperial ambitions centered on the conquest of Ethiopia. In October 1935, Italian forces invaded with a modern army of approximately three hundred thousand men equipped with artillery, aircraft, and chemical weapons. The Ethiopians fought back with extraordinary courage, but their rifles were no match for Italian tanks and mustard gas.
The League imposed economic sanctions, but deliberately excluded oil, and without the ability to cut off Italy’s fuel supply, the sanctions were largely ineffective. The League of Nations had failed its second major test after Manchuria. Its authority was effectively destroyed. The Ethiopian crisis was also pivotal in the alignment of the fascist powers.
In October 1936, Hitler and Mussolini announced the Rome-Berlin Axis. The same month, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. German rearmament had been proceeding secretly for years. In March 1935, Hitler openly announced the existence of the Luftwaffe and the reintroduction of compulsory military service.
These were direct violations of the Treaty of Versailles. Britain, France, and Italy met at Stresa and issued a joint condemnation. And then in June 1935, Britain unilaterally signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, formally accepting German naval rearmament. The French, who had not been consulted, were furious.
The Stresa Front had lasted exactly two months. It sent an unmistakable signal to Hitler that Britain would accommodate German violations rather than resist them. The remilitarization of the Rhineland on March 7th, 1936 was the most dangerous gamble of Hitler’s entire pre-war career. Under the Treaty of Versailles, the Rhineland was permanently demilitarized.
Approximately twenty-two thousand German troops entered the zone and occupied it. Hitler had given his commanders secret orders: if French forces moved to resist, they were to retreat immediately. The generals were terrified. But the French did not march.
The French government was in the middle of a political crisis, and Britain made absolutely clear that it would not support military action. Hitler had gambled everything on a bluff and won. His contempt for the Western democracies deepened into something like certainty. The Spanish Civil War added another dimension.
In July 1936, General Francisco Franco launched a military revolt against the elected Spanish Republic. Germany and Italy intervened on Franco’s side, recognizing the war as an opportunity to test new weapons and tactics. The German Condor Legion learned the techniques of tactical air support and strategic bombing that it would employ so devastatingly in the years ahead. The most notorious episode was the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26th, 1937, when Condor Legion aircraft attacked the town on a busy market day, killing several hundred civilians.
The British journalist George Steer filed a detailed eyewitness report that shocked the world. Pablo Picasso responded with a massive painting that became one of the defining images of the 20th century. Britain and France adopted a policy of non-intervention, which was a theater of bad faith and mutual deception. The Spanish Civil War ended in April 1939 with Franco’s victory.
It had demonstrated again and again the pattern that was becoming the decade’s defining feature: the fascist powers would act, take risks, and back them with force, while the democracies hesitated, deliberated, and ultimately accommodated. Austria was the first item on Hitler’s territorial agenda. On February 12th, 1938, Hitler summoned Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg to his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden and subjected him to a lengthy humiliation, demanding that Austrian Nazis be brought into the government. Schuschnigg, in a last desperate gamble, announced a plebiscite on Austrian independence to be held on March 13th.
Hitler could not allow this. He demanded that the plebiscite be cancelled and that Schuschnigg resign. Abandoned by Britain and France, Schuschnigg resigned. On the morning of March 12th, German forces crossed the Austrian border.
They met no resistance. On March 13th, the Anschluss was formally proclaimed, and Austria ceased to exist as an independent state. The western powers protested and did nothing. The strategic consequences for central Europe were immediate and severe.
Czechoslovakia was now surrounded on three sides by Germany. Czechoslovakia in 1938 was in many ways the brightest example of what the post-Versailles order had been trying to create. A genuine democracy with a modern industrial state, important arms industries, a well-trained army, and extensive fortifications. It had mutual assistance treaties with France and the Soviet Union.
On paper, it was a defensible country with powerful allies. In practice, it was about to be sacrificed on the altar of appeasement. The Sudetenland, the mountainous border region, contained approximately three million German-speaking people. Their political leader, Konrad Henlein, was receiving instructions and funding from Berlin.
His strategy was to make demands designed to be refused, escalate, and provide the pretext for German intervention. Through the summer of 1938, Hitler made a series of violently threatening speeches. By September, Europe seemed to be sliding toward war. The three flights that Neville Chamberlain made to Germany in September 1938, the first time the sixty-nine-year-old prime minister had ever flown, became the defining acts of his premiership.
On September 15th, he flew to Berchtesgaden, where Hitler told him bluntly that he demanded the Sudetenland and was prepared to risk a world war to get it. Chamberlain worked with the French to produce a proposal demanding that all areas with more than 50% German population be ceded to Germany. When Chamberlain flew back to Germany on September 22nd, meeting Hitler at Bad Godesberg, he found that the stakes had been raised. Hitler now demanded immediate military occupation by October 1st.
For a few days, war seemed genuinely imminent. The British Navy was mobilized. Air raid trenches were dug in London’s parks. And then at the last moment, Mussolini intervened to propose a four-power conference.
The Munich Conference of September 29th–30th, 1938 was the low point of European democracy in the entire interwar period. Four leaders sat around a table and decided the fate of a country that had no representative in the room. Czechoslovakia was told what had been decided. The terms gave Germany the Sudetenland, its fortifications, its industrial plants, and the mountain passes that formed Czechoslovakia’s natural defensive line.
Chamberlain returned to London holding that document, and told the cheering crowd that he believed it was peace for our time. Hitler himself expressed contempt for the ease of it. He had wanted a military campaign. Munich did not satisfy Hitler.
It taught him that the democracies would retreat further under pressure. Within six months, Munich was exposed as the illusion it had always been. On March 15th, 1939, German forces entered what remained of Czechoslovakia and occupied it without resistance. This was fundamentally different from everything that had gone before.
The annexation of Austria could be justified by the principle of self-determination. But the Czech lands had no German-speaking population to speak of. This was raw conquest. It shattered the central premise of Chamberlain’s policy, that Hitler was a nationalist leader seeking to incorporate German populations into Germany, not a conqueror seeking to dominate Europe.
The reversal of British policy came with remarkable speed. On March 31st, 1939, Britain gave Poland a unilateral guarantee, and France followed with a similar commitment. After years of refusing to make binding commitments to Eastern European states, the democracies had now committed themselves to defending a country they had no practical ability to help directly, and had done so without securing the Soviet alliance that would have made the guarantee militarily meaningful. The only power that could actually place troops on Germany’s eastern flank was the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union had not been consulted.
The Anglo-French negotiations with the Soviet Union for a collective security arrangement were a dismal failure. The Soviets wanted a comprehensive arrangement that would allow Soviet forces to enter the Baltic states and Poland automatically. Poland refused categorically to allow Soviet troops on Polish soil. The negotiations dragged desultorily through the summer.
Stalin, watching them stall, reached his own conclusions. The most immediate and certain means available was a deal with Germany itself. In the summer of 1939, secret contacts were established between Berlin and Moscow. Ribbentrop flew to Moscow on August 23rd and signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty.
The public terms committed both countries to neutrality if either was attacked. The secret protocol divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence with chilling precision. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Poland fell to the Soviet sphere. Western Poland fell to Germany.
It was a partition of Eastern Europe between two totalitarian powers. The news of the pact fell on European capitals like a thunderbolt. It meant that Germany could attack Poland without fear of Soviet intervention. It meant that war had become a near certainty.
On the night of August 31st, SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms staged a faked attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border. At 4:45 in the morning on September 1st, 1939, German forces crossed the Polish border on multiple fronts. The Wehrmacht’s armored and motorized divisions, applying in full measure the operational concepts of deep, fast combined arms warfare that would be called Blitzkrieg, drove into Polish territory from the north, west, and south. The Luftwaffe bombed Polish airfields, communications networks, and cities.
The old battleship Schleswig-Holstein, anchored in Danzig Harbor, opened fire on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte, beginning a battle that the outnumbered defenders would sustain with extraordinary courage for seven days. The Second World War had begun. Britain delivered its ultimatum to Germany at 9 in the morning on September 3rd, demanding that Germany withdraw its forces from Poland. No reply came.
At 11:15 in the morning, in a BBC radio broadcast, Neville Chamberlain told the British people that this country is at war with Germany. His voice was tired, sad, and strained. France declared war a few hours later. Poland was conquered quickly.
Soviet forces invaded from the east on September 17th in accordance with the secret protocol. Warsaw surrendered on September 27th. In five weeks, a nation of thirty-five million people had been overrun by two great powers acting in coordination. What really started the Second World War?
There was no single cause. The war was the product of a chain of causes stretching back at least to 1919. The Treaty of Versailles created the conditions of humiliation, economic devastation, and resentment. The Great Depression provided the crisis that turned political possibility into electoral reality.
The failures of the Weimar Republic created the institutional vacuum that Hitler exploited. The mistakes of conservative German politicians allowed him into the machinery of the state. The policy of appeasement, however understandable in its origins, ultimately enabled Hitler by teaching him that the democracies would not resist. The failure to build an effective alliance against Germany, including the failure to bring the Soviet Union in, was a strategic error of the first magnitude.
But in the end, the war happened because one man willed it. Adolf Hitler did not stumble into the Second World War. He had been planning for it since the early 1920s and had spent the years of his power systematically building toward it. He was a specific individual who made specific choices at specific moments.
The responsibility for the Second World War rests above all on Adolf Hitler and the movement he led. Understanding how he was able to make those choices requires understanding everything that preceded him. The story of 1918 to 1939 is ultimately a story of how free societies can fail, how economic desperation can open the door to demagogy, and how the international community’s failure to act on shared principles can produce consequences infinitely worse than the costs of action would have been.