1918- After World War I Ended in 1918, Germany Was Blamed for the War. Germanyhad to Give

World War II

1918- After World War I ended in 1918, Germany was blamed for the war. Germanyhad to give up land and was banned from having armed forces. The Germany economy went into a depression, many were jobless and hopeless.

1933- On January 30,the German people voted for a leader named Adolf Hitler to become Chancellor of Germany. His Nazi Party, or the Third Reich, took power and Hitler is essentially the dictator of Germany.Hitler promised to make his country great again and quickly began to arm Germany again and to seize land from other countries.

1938- Hitler had always seen Austria as being part of Germany. He, himself, had been born in the Austrian town of Brannau, but for all his life Hitler considered himself German. Many Austrians had the same belief so that Hitler felt empowered to bully Chancellor Schuschnigg of Austria into submission. In February 1938, Hitler gave the Austrian chancellor a list of ten demands. The chief demand was that a man called Seyss-Inquart should be made Minister of the Interior. Seyss-Inquart was an Austrian Nazi and such a position would give him control of the Austrian police. Such a demand was clearly unacceptable to Schuschnigg.The chancellor tried a different ploy. He made it known that he would order a plebiscite (a vote on one question) about whether the people of Austria wanted a free Austria or not. Hitler could not be sure that he would get the result he wanted from this proposed plebiscite. Hitler demanded that the plebiscite should not take place and that Schuschnigg should resign. If neither of these took place, he told the chancellor that he would order his military to invade Austria.

Schuschnigg could not take this risk and he resigned. The only member of his cabinet not to resign was Seyss-Inquart. As the sole member of the Austrian government, he invited German troops into Austria in March 1938. On March 15th 1938, Hitler entered Vienna in triumph. Austria became part of the German Greater Reich; Schuschnigg was arrested and imprisoned and almost immediately the Austrian Jews lost their rights.

In September 1938, following the German annexation of the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia, a portion of the area was given to Hungary in order to build relations between the two nations.

1939- Hitler had promised British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain and the German people that the Sudetenland would be his "last territorial demand" in Europe. But, Hitler now wanted to grab the remainder of Czechoslovakia due to its strategic importance. At Hitler's instruction, nationalist Slovaks living in the eastern portion of Czechoslovakia began agitating for a completely independent state, which would take another huge chunk out of Czechoslovakia. On March 10, 1939, President Hácha responded to the Slovak demand for independence by ousting the leaders of the Slovak government and declaring martial law inside the province of Slovakia. Hácha's unexpected and defiant action took the Nazis by surprise, upsetting their carefully laid plans. Hitler reacted to this turn of events just as he had when Schuschnigg took a defiant stance in Austria – he ordered his generals to prepare for an immediate invasion. President Hácha, sent a message to Hitler asking for a face-to-face meeting to resolve the ongoing crisis. Hitler, of course, met with him as soon as possible. After the first meeting, Hácha was ushered back into Hitler's presence. At 3:55 a.m., Wednesday, March 15th, the Czech president was forced to sign the document stating he had "confidently placed the fate of the Czech people and country in the hands of the Führer of the German Reich." Two hours later, the German Army rolled into the first non-Germanic territory to be taken by the Nazis.

After securing the neutrality of the Soviet Union (through the August 1939 German-Soviet Pact of nonaggression), Germany started World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany on September 3. Within a month, Poland was defeated by a combination of German and Soviet forces and was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

In 1939 the Zichenau Region was annexed by Germany and incorporated into East Prussia. Despite Nazi propaganda presenting all of the regions annexed as possessing significant German populations that wanted reunification with Germany, the Reich's statistics of late 1939 show that only 31,000 out of 994,092 people in this territory were ethnic Germans.

1940 - The relative lull in fighting which followed the defeat of Poland ended on April 9, 1940, when German forces invadedNorway and Denmark. On May 10, 1940, Germany began its assault on Western Europe by invading The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, which had taken neutral positions in the war, as well as France. On June 22, France signed atruce with Germany, which provided for the German occupation of the northern half of the country and permitted the establishment of a collaborationist regime in the south with its seat in the city of Vichy.

With German encouragement, the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) in June and formally annexed them in August 1940. Italy, a member of the Axis Powers, joined the war on June 10. From July 10 to October 31, the Nazis waged, and lost, an air war over England, known as the Battle of Britain.

As early as 1937, Romania had come under the control of a fascist government that bore great resemblance to that of Germany’s, including similar anti-Jewish laws. Romania’s king, Carol II, dissolved the government a year later because of a failing economy and installed Romania’s Orthodox Patriarch as prime minister. But the Patriarch’s death and a peasant uprising provoked renewed agitation by the fascist Iron Guard paramilitary organization, which sought to impose order. In June 1940, the Soviet Union co-opted two Romanian provinces, and the king searched for an ally to help protect it and appease the far right within its own borders. So on July 5, 1940, Romania allied itself with Nazi Germany-only to be invaded by its “ally” on October 7, 2940 as part of Hitler’s strategy to create one huge eastern front against the Soviet Union

1941- After securing the Balkan region by invading Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece on April 6, 1941, the Germans and their allies invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in direct violation of the German-Soviet Pact. In June and July 1941, the Germans also occupied the Baltic States; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and East Prussia. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin then became a major wartime Allied leader, in opposition to Nazi Germany and its Axis allies. During the summer and autumn of 1941, German troops advanced deep into the Soviet Union, but stiffening Red Army resistance prevented the Germans from capturing the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow. On December 6, 1941, Soviet troops launched a significant counteroffensive that drove German forces permanently from the outskirts of Moscow. One day later, on December 7, 1941, Japan (one of the Axis powers) bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The United States immediately declared war on Japan. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States as the military conflict widened.

1942-1943- In May 1942, the British Royal Air Force carried out a raid on the German city of Cologne with a thousand bombers, for the first time bringing war to Germany. For the next three years, Allied air forces systematically bombed industrial plants and cities all over the Reich, reducing much of urban Germany to rubble by 1945.

On the eastern front, during the summer of 1942, the Germans and their Axis allies renewed their offensive in the Soviet Union, aiming to capture Stalingrad on the Volga River, as well as the city of Baku and the Caucasian oil fields. The German offensive stalled on both fronts in the late summer of 1942. In November, Soviet troops launched a counteroffensive at Stalingrad and on February 2, 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Soviets. The Germans mounted one more offensive at Kursk in July 1943, the biggest tank battle in history, but Soviet troops blunted the attack and assumed a military predominance that they would not again relinquish during the course of the war.

In July 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily and in September went ashore on the Italian mainland. After the Italian Fascist Party's Grand Council deposed Italian premier Benito Mussolini (an ally of Hitler), the Italian military took over and negotiated a surrender to Anglo-American forces on September 8. German troops stationed in Italy seized control of the northern half of the peninsula, and continued to resist. Mussolini, who had been arrested by Italian military authorities, was rescued by German SS commandos in September and established (under German supervision) a neo-Fascist puppet regime in northern Italy. German troops continued to hold northern Italy until surrendering on May 2, 1945.

1944- On March 19th, in response to Hungary's attempt to get out of the war and withdraw its armed forces from the eastern front, Germany invades Hungary and installs a pro-Nazi puppet government.

On June 6, 1944 (D-Day), as part of a massive military operation, over 150,000 Allied soldiers landed in France, which was liberated by the end of August. On September 11, 1944, the first US troops crossed into Germany, one month after Soviet troops crossed the eastern border. In mid-December the Germans launched an unsuccessful counterattack in Belgium and northern France, known as the Battle of the Bulge. Allied air forces attacked Nazi industrial plants, such as the one at the Auschwitz camp.

1945- The Soviets began an offensive on January 12, 1945, liberating western Poland and forcing Hungary (controlled by Nazis) to surrender. In mid-February 1945, the Allies bombed the German city of Dresden, killing approximately 35,000 civilians. American troops crossed the Rhine River on March 7, 1945. A final Soviet offensive on April 16, 1945, enabled Soviet forces to encircle the German capital, Berlin. As Soviet troops fought their way towards the Reich Chancellery, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Western Allies at Reims and on May 9 to the Soviets in Berlin. In August, the war in the Pacific ended soon after the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 120,000 civilians. Japan formally surrendered on September 2.