Significant events leading up to the outburst of World War II in 1939?

I could tell you, but then I’d deprive you of the satisfaction of reading the textbook your school issued you.
I respect the educational process too much to ruin that for you.

@Captain_Fantasy DONT WORRY I ALREADY KNOW THEM but I dont really understand them. It wont hurt to user your brain:)
Significant events (in chronological order) that occurred before Germany’s invasion of Poland
in September 1939:
1. Japan invades Manchuria.
2. Germany annexes Austria.
3. Germany occupies Czechoslovakia.

1. The great being sneezed out a race of giants
2. A plane of existence opened up high atop a windswept mountain
3. All the mosquitoes died, thus leaving hordes of birds to go hungry and die
4. Frogs of all nations massed on the western highlands, calling for longer lunch breaks
5. Napkin production dropped off sharply, leaving a wake of messy faces
6. A small group of teens discovered the efficacy of red lipstick and pumps in getting a date.
7. Demons from the abyss resorted to making silly faces and refused point blank to possess anyone who wasn’t named Steve.
8. A stratego game was opened andWWII sprang into being with battle lines drawn!

Looks like you already have your answer.

@tokijitza I was going to say something else, but I see that @Captain_Fantasy is crafting, so I’ll step back and allow him to have at you.
PS, I saw your other homework question on another thread. Please take a hint.

“If World War Two had been an online Real Time Strategy game, the chat room
traffic would have gone something like this:”

Hitler[AoE] has joined the game.
Eisenhower has joined the game.
paTTon has joined the game.
Churchill has joined the game.
benny-tow has joined the game.
T0J0 has joined the game.
Roosevelt has joined the game.
Stalin has joined the game.
deGaulle has joined the game.
Roosevelt: hey sup
T0J0: y0
Stalin: hi
Churchill: hi
Hitler[AoE]: cool, i start with panzer tanks!
paTTon: lol more like panzy tanks
T0JO: lol
…(continued)...

@tokijitza If you think about the Anschluss, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and start to wonder what happened subsequently to make the Polish invasion different, you will be on your way to a partial understanding of the proximal events that led to the outbreak (not “outburst”) of WWII. But to understand the deeper mechanisms, you need to go back to WWI, and the post-war repercussions of Versailles. There are plenty of good books out there which can provide you an overview.

The Treaty of Versailles was neither lenient enough to appease Germany, nor harsh enough to prevent it from becoming the dominant continental power again. The treaty placed the blame, or “war guilt” on Germany and Austria-Hungary, and punished them for their “responsibility” rather than working out an agreement that would assure peace in the long-term future. The treaty resulted in harsh monetary reparations, territorial dismemberment, mass ethnic resettlements and indirectly hampered the German economy by causing rapid hyperinflation – see inflation in the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Republic printed trillions to help pay off its debts and borrowed heavily from the United States (only to default later) to pay war reparations to Britain and France, who still carried war debt from World War I.

The treaty created bitter resentment towards the victors of World War I, who had promised the people of Germany that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points would be a guideline for peace; many Germans felt that the German government had agreed to an armistice based on this understanding, while others felt that the German Revolution had been orchestrated by the “November criminals” who later assumed office in the new Weimar Republic. Wilson was not able to get the Allies to agree to adopt them, nor could he persuade the U.S. Congress to join the League of Nations.

Contributing to this, following the Armistice of 1918, Allied forces, including those of the American Army, occupied the Rhineland as far east as the river with some small bridgeheads on the east bank at places like Cologne. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 the occupation was continued. The treaty specified three occupation Zones, which were due to be evacuated by Allied troops five, ten and finally 15 years after the formal ratification of the treaty, which took place in 1920, thus the occupation was intended to last until 1935. In fact, the last Allied troops left Germany five years prior to that date in 1930 in a good-will reaction to the Weimar Republic’s policy of reconciliation in the era of Gustav Stresemann and the Locarno Pact. The German colonies were taken during the war, and Italy took the southern half of Tyrol after an armistice had been agreed upon. The war in the east ended with the collapse of Russian Empire, and German troops occupied (with varying degree of control) large parts of Eastern and Central Europe. After the destructive and indecisive battle of Jutland (1916)and the mutiny of its sailors in 1917, The Kaiserliche Marine spent most of the war in port, only to be turned over to the allies and scuttled at surrender by its own officers. The lack of an obvious military defeat was one of the pillars that held together the Dolchstosslegende and gave the Nazis another tool at their disposal.

An opposite view of the treaty held by some is that it did not go far enough in permanently neutering the capability of Germany to be a great power by dividing Germany into smaller, less powerful states. In effect, this would have undone Bismarck’s work and would have accomplished what the French delegation at the Paris Peace Conference wanted. However, this could have had any number of unforeseeable consequences, especially amidst the rise of communism. Regardless, the Treaty of Versailles is generally agreed to be a very poor treaty which helped the rise of the Nazi Party.

Oh lookie! @Cruiser handed it to you on a silver platter!

Will @Cruiser get credit for the grade?

Well, I tried to be helpful. Maybe it’s bedtime.

@tokijitza : “It wont hurt to user your brain:)” @Cruiser usered his. Why don’t you user yours, since you think it is so cute an idea?

And since we’ve already done the work, it is not outburst, but outbreak.

@gailcalled Scroll up. I tried.

@dpworkin: I know. But I thought it bore repeating. And @Cruiser is such a soft touch.

“Oh, no. We couldn’t find /users/tokijitza/.”

I guess that’s that.

Well I, for one, refuser to user my brain-ur.
I’d rather ask a cruiser or twoser.
For an effort so lame, I think it’s a shame.
In the end the student’s the loser.

And the crowd goes wild!!!! “Hhhhhhhhhhh!
Thanks. I’m here all week! Tip your waiter! Good night Ashland!

::::sustained applause::::

@hiphopflipflapwhateveryour nameis. That was hilarious thanks for that lol.

@Trillian Nice rhyme!
@tokijitza
Here’s something they won’t teach you in school. The Nazi party and Hitler were actually funded and created by big money interests in the US. Notable among the players involved from the US is one Prescott Bush. (although wikipedia offers this denial: Rumors about the alleged Nazi ‘ties’ of the late Prescott Bush… have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated. Despite some early financial dealings between Prescott Bush and a Nazi industrialist named Fritz Thyssen (who was arrested by the Nazi regime in 1938 and imprisoned during the war), Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathizer.)
Not only that, but Communist russia was funded by big money interests in the US. One of the Rockefeller Bros. often hand delivered large sums of money to the new politburo during the beginning of the Lenin era.
But don’t offer these facts on your test. The teacher will have you shot.

@davidbetterman There is no more @tokijitza. We are all just blowing in the wind. And Prescott Bush may not have been a Nazi, but he expressed his admiration for Hitler on camera. They can’t blot it out. All the Bushes seem to forget that history records things.

Actually, Prescott was a Nazi. I just pasted the wiki article to show how easy it is to change the facts.
All of Prescott’s kids and grandkids are Nazis, too. That includes George Sr. and G Dubya.

Too bad about @tokijitza.

1. Germany loses WW1, Treaty of Versailles
2. Great Depression caused by the USA, makes the German people hate the recently formed Weimar Republic, despite its best efforts to alleviate the effects of the GD, even more. They want the Kaiserreich back.
3. Hitler exploits 1. and 2. to get popular support and get to power.
4. You know the rest.

@Trillian I love your first post…. sarcastic & silly to the 9th degree!!!

Above all, the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933 which paved the way for him to implement the perverse ideology he had documented in his book ‘Mein Kampf’ about 10 years earlier. It’s the major event. Ervin Staub, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, is famous for his works on the psychology of mass violence and genocide and he wrote a book called “The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence”, see

http://www.amazon.com/Roots-Evil-Origins-Genocide-Violence/dp/0521422140/

Staub studied many conflicts and wars including WWII, Vietnam and more recently the genocide in Rwanda. I quote:

“The groundwork gets laid during severe social upheavals, like economic crises and political chaos, in places that have a history of divisions between a dominant group and a less powerful one. The turmoil causes members of a majority group to find appealing the ideologies that scapegoat a weaker group, blaming them for the problem and envisioning a better future that ‘they’ are preventing. The hatred spreads all the more readily when the majority group has itself been victimized in the past and still feels wounded or wronged.”

Hitler’s NSDAP (Nazi party) got 43.9% on March 5, 1933, the last election in Germany before WWII which also means that the majority voted for other parties. Apart from open antisemitism the Nazi party portrayed the German population as victims of the Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919.

What Hitler really had in mind including all the brutality that would follow had been documented in his book ‘Mein Kampf’, however few people had really read it. It took quite some time before ‘Mein Kampf’ became a bestseller. Simply counting the numbers of printed copies can also be misleading. From 1936 on every married couple received a free copy at the civil registry office. Not many of them actually read anything, let alone the whole thing.

In his book ‘The Second World War’ Winston Churchill felt that after Hitler’s ascension to power no other book deserved more intensive scrutiny than ‘Mein Kampf’, and called the book the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.

Over time more and more people realized that Hitler meant every word he wrote, but this took time. Even many Jews didn’t realize at first that the ghettos were just created to become a giant waiting rooms for the trains to the extermination camps. The true dimensions of Hitler’s plan took quite a while for people to realize. I haven’t read ‘Mein Kampf’ and I won’t. It’s too disgusting and it’s promoting one of the most perverse ideologies ever invented. There are summaries available on the web. It tells us about Nazi brutality. Understanding what happened in the regular army is a different matter. Most of this brutality and sometimes war crimes is about unleashing the beast hidden inside human beings. Wars, especially longer ones change people fundamentally. This horrible phenomenon isn’t restricted to WWII.

Study what the allied powers did to Germany post-armistice to force them to sign the Versailles Treaty. Continuing a blockade and starving the German population. Marshall Foch had it exactly right “This is not a peace treaty but a 20 year armistice”. He was correct almost to the month. If Hitler hadn’t come into power, a half dozen others like him were waiting in the wings. If Germany hadn’t started it, Stalin would have.

now this dialogue is what this community has over all others! Kudos to all who participated.