Diplomatic History of Europe 1500 - 2000 | Europe into Crisis (Lecture 29)

Lecture 29: The promise of the interwar period rapidly ebbed, however, as the Great Depression of 1929 and the shift toward Authoritarianism and Fascism in European politics moved the continent toward another plunge into disaster. This lecture covers the darker period from 1929 to 1939 and tracks the rise to power of Mussolini in Fascist Italy, Hitler in Nazi Germany, and the calculations of Stalin in the Soviet Union. We observe Hitler’s aggressive racist ideology of domination and his diplomatic revolution, overthrowing the Treaty of Versailles and exploiting the appeasement policies of the Western democracies before launching World War II in 1939 after signing the Nazi-Soviet Pact—an unexpected and strange alliance.

Essential Reading:
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, pp. 288–318.

Supplementary Reading:
Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of German Expansion, pp. 1–120.