Between the Wars and WWII Reading Analysis

Discussion Questions:

  1. Describe the regime that Mussolini established. What was the purpose of the corporative state and what was it actually like?
  2. How did Hitler become chancellor? Of what significance were the months from June, 1932 to January, 1933? The elections of March 1933? How would you rate him as a politician?
  3. Was the Nazi revolution really a revolution? Explain the outstanding political, economic and social changes introduced in Germany under the Third Reich.
  4. Munich is considered one of the great failures of all time. Was it really a failure? How did the French, the British and the Russians view the policy of appeasement? How was this policy abandoned?
  5. In what sense did Hitler dominate the European continent by the summer of 1940?
  6. Analyze the alternatives open to the Allies in meting out conditions for peace. Assess the terms given to Germany, Italy and Japan. Compare and contrast the peace settlements of World Wars I and II?

Vocabulary- Identify and Define the following items/events/people:

Europe Between the Wars, 1919-1939
League of Nations
Little Entente
Dawes Plan
Treaty of Locarno
Kellogg-Briand pact
Great Depression
John Maynard Keynes
Popular Front
Benito Mussolini
Fascio di Combattimento
Weimar Republic
Adolph Hitler / Mein Kampf
NSDAP/Nazis
Lebensraum
the Enabling Act
Nuremberg laws
Kristallnacht
New Economic Policy/"war communism"
Joseph Stalin
five-year plan
Stakhanov cult
kulaks
collective farms
General Francisco Franco / Spanish Civil War
Oswald Spengler
Marie Stopes' Married Love
Dadaism and Surrealism
Bauhaus School and Walter Gropius
Kurt Weill'sThe Threepenny Opera
"degenerate art"
Socialist Realism
Arnold Schoenberg and atonal music
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
Carl Jung
Werner Heisenberg
Ernest Rutherford
World War II
Lebensraum
Rhineland
Rome-Berlin Axis
appeasement
Neville Chamberlain
Sudentenland
Munich Conference
"peace in our time"
1939 non-aggression pact
Blitzkrieg
Maginot Line / Dunkirk
Winston Churchill
Battle of Britain
Pearl Harbor
Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
Grand Alliance
El Alamein
Stalingrad
Battle of Midway
Normandy / the Holocaust
Final Solution
Einsatzgruppen
Auschwitz
Wannsee Conference
Great Patriotic War
Albert Speer
Luftwaffe
Dresden
Allied Strategic Bombing Survey
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Yalta
Potsdam