The Road to 1939

The Treaty of Versailles (1919) stripped Germany of territory, limited its military, and demanded reparations. That humiliation gave later nationalist movements, especially the Nazis, a grievance to exploit, but resentment alone does not start a war. The Great Depression after 1929 wrecked economies worldwide, and desperate, impoverished populations in Germany, Italy, and Japan proved receptive to leaders promising national revival through conquest. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, annexed Austria in 1938, then took the Sudetenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia by 1939. Each move tested whether anyone would stop it.

Nobody did. The League of Nations condemned Japan's invasion of Manchuria but took no real action, showing that collective security had no teeth when a major power simply walked out of the League instead of complying. Britain and France, scarred by the last war and unsure the fight was worth it, chose appeasement instead: at Munich in 1938 they let Germany take the Sudetenland, believing they were buying peace by satisfying Hitler's stated demands. Hitler understood it differently, as proof the democracies would not fight and a green light for further expansion. Germany invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia months later and Poland in September 1939.

These failures connect directly to German rearmament. Hitler's regime poured resources into the military from 1933 onward, rebuilding the army Versailles had tried to cap and signaling intent that appeasement chose to ignore rather than confront. Unit 7 then follows this road straight into the war itself, where mobilization, ideology, and technology combine on a scale the 1930s only foreshadowed.