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04:29Street battles erupted between extreme right-wing nationalists and communists trying to start a revolution
04:35then in 1923 the country was devastated by hyperinflation which reached hundreds of percent a month
04:46ordinary people's savings were wiped out this was fertile ground for a new breed of rabble-rousing right-wing politicians
05:00among them had been born in Austria. Hitler had fought bravely as a soldier in World War I and been awarded the Iron Cross
05:15on returning to Germany in the United States
05:18on returning to Germany he settled in Munich and his fiery oratory soon enabled him to seize control of the small National Socialist or Nazi Party
05:28in October 1923 in October 1923 in October 1923 Hitler and had attempted an armed coup against the Weimar government it failed and he was sentenced to nine months
05:43in prison in prison he wrote a book
05:48in which he blamed Germany's hills on the Jews and demanded that it rebuild its strength and seek new territories in the East
05:58on his release he set about building the Nazis into a proper disciplined political party
06:07from now on he would use the democratic system to achieve power
06:13but for the next five years Weimar Germany prospered support for extremist parties left and right dwindled
06:23then suddenly Hitler's opportunity arrived
06:28in October 1929 the US stock market crashed
06:38billions of dollars were lost
06:41and an economic depression swept across the world
06:45unemployment in Germany soared to over six million
06:50only extremist politicians seemed to offer a solution
06:54politicians like Hitler
07:02by 1931 his Nazis were a true mass movement
07:06and they had their own brown shirted thugs
07:10the SA storm troops who numbered almost three million
07:17in the 1932 elections the Nazis became the largest party in Germany's parliament the Reichstag
07:23but Hitler refused to join a coalition leaving parliament paralyzed
07:30to break the passed to break the on-pass president Hindenburg made him chancellor in January 1933 head of the government
07:42within a month the Reichstag burned down
07:48and demanded emergency powers.
07:51He then used them to ban all other political parties.
07:56In August 1934, President Hindenburg died.
08:01Hitler declared himself president.
08:04He was now absolute leader, the FĂŒhrer of Germany.
08:08At first, there was little sign of what was to come.
08:22For the next three years,
08:24the FĂŒhrer concentrated on rebuilding Germany's economy.
08:28He spent millions on public works,
08:31including the 5,000-mile autobahn system,
08:34to soak up the unemployed.
08:39But in secret, Hitler was also spending lavishly
08:42on a huge rearmament program.
08:46Under the Versailles Treaty,
08:49the German army had been limited to 100,000 men.
08:53The country was forbidden to have an air force,
08:55tanks or submarines.
08:59This small army was trebled in size.
09:03Then, in 1935, Hitler came out into the open.
09:08He unveiled a brand-new air force, the Luftwaffe.
09:13It had 2,500 planes, far more than Britain or France.
09:21Unemployment plunged,
09:22and the Nazis became enormously popular.
09:25Now emboldened,
09:29the FĂŒhrer made his first expansionist move.
09:33In 1935, he reoccupied the Saarland district
09:36on the French border,
09:38after it voted to return from League of Nations
09:40to German rule.
09:45A year later, he sent German troops into the Rhineland,
09:48part of Germany which had been demilitarized at Versailles.
09:52At the time,
09:57many felt that Hitler was only claiming back
09:59what was rightfully German's.
10:01Neither Britain nor France objected.
10:03When Berlin hosted the 1936 Olympic Games,
10:12the Nazis were seen by many as firm but fair.
10:16A government which was restoring the nation's pride,
10:20and which didn't threaten anyone.
10:21Of course, there were signs.
10:27The 1935 Nuremberg Laws
10:29forbade Jews to marry true Aryan Germans
10:32and deprive them of their citizenship.
10:36But when the first threats came to world peace,
10:40they didn't come from Hitler at all,
10:42but from somewhere else entirely.
10:57Japan, at the start of the 20th century,
10:59was already a military power.
11:03It had defeated Russia in a war in 1905,
11:06and it had fought alongside the Allies in World War I.
11:13After the war, Japan was an acknowledged world power,
11:17and it signed up to the League of Nations.
11:23But politically, it was a mess of contradictions.
11:26And the country faced major economic problems.
11:44Its population was exploding.
11:47And it had no natural resources
11:49to fuel its rapidly expanding industries.
11:53Its leaders needed solutions.
11:56And they saw them in Chinese Manchuria.
12:02Manchuria was a land of rich grain fields,
12:06with plenty of coal and minerals.
12:09It was a perfect target.
12:12Japanese troops were already stationed there.
12:16Other possible targets were the colonies
12:18ruled by the European powers.
12:21Burma, Malaya, and Hong Kong,
12:23controlled by Britain.
12:24Indo-China, ruled by France,
12:27and the Dutch East Indies.
12:31But at this stage, Japan had to be cautious.
12:34They didn't want to rouse the other great power in the Pacific.
12:39The United States.
12:41For all its anti-imperialist slogans,
12:45the U.S. actually ran an unofficial empire in the Pacific.
12:49The Philippines, Guam, and several islands
12:52were under its direct rule.
12:57It undoubtedly had the strength to take on Japan,
13:00but since the end of World War I,
13:02it had had other distractions.
13:12This was America's jazz age.
13:20Throughout the 1920s,
13:21a nation concentrated on exploiting its vast resources.
13:24There was an economic boom that seemed without end.
13:29Fortunes were made both in industry and the stock markets.
13:35America seemed lost to the increasing pursuit of pleasure.
13:39With distractions like these,
13:45Japan's growing pains in the Pacific seemed very far away.
13:52America had slashed its army after World War I
13:55and agreed a naval reduction treaty with Britain, France, and Japan.
14:01This, in effect, handed naval superiority in the Pacific
14:06to the Pacific to the Japanese.
14:10And then came the Great Depression.
14:21As the economic devastation spread,
14:24a quarter of the population lost their jobs.
14:28Tens of thousands were made homeless,
14:30living in shanty towns.
14:33Whereas before,
14:34it had been distracted by pleasure,
14:37now America was distracted by pain.
14:40It was time for Japan to make her move.
14:51In 1931,
14:52without even informing their own elected government,
14:55the Japanese forces in Manchuria
14:57seized the capital Mukde
14:59and then overran the rest of the territory.
15:04A puppet state,
15:06Manchu quo,
15:07was proclaimed under a puppet rule.
15:10Henry Puyi,
15:12the last emperor of China,
15:13who had been deposed in 1911,
15:16was dragged out of retirement.
15:17at its headquarters in Geneva,
15:24the League of Nations now faced its first great test.
15:28Japan was universally condemned.
15:32But her response was blunt.
15:35Japan, however,
15:37find it impossible to accept
15:40that it was adopted by the assembly.
15:45The Japanese then just walked out
15:48and the League suddenly realized
15:50there was nothing it could do about Manchuria.
15:58Japan was declared an international pariah,
16:01but it didn't care.
16:03Its leaders had turned their eyes
16:05to further conquests in China.
16:10These were easy pickings.
16:12China was in a state of chaos.
16:15The government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek
16:17was locked in conflict
16:18with the Chinese Communist Party
16:20under Mao Zedong.
16:24There was civil war.
16:25In 1936,
16:33as a precursor to invasion,
16:36the Japanese signed a pact with Hitler.
16:38The aim was to guard against any attack
16:41by Soviet Russia
16:42were it to move on China.
16:47Then in July 1937,
16:50the Japanese provoked an incident
16:52with Chinese troops
16:53and invaded.
16:55At first,
17:06the Chinese were taken by surprise.
17:11But they soon fought back fiercely.
17:14The Communists even joining
17:15the Kuomintang in a united front.
17:20The Japanese responded
17:22with amphibious landings.
17:24By the end of 1937,
17:26they had overrun
17:27much of northern China
17:28and the coast.
17:37The Japanese fought this war
17:39with exceptional brutality,
17:41bombing cities indiscriminately.
17:45Westerners living in the commercial centre,
17:47the port of Shanghai,
17:48were now evacuated.
17:51The city was then besieged
17:52for three months.
17:53It suffered widespread damage,
18:14with Japanese forces
18:16showing no pity or concern
18:18for the native population.
18:19But it was after the capture
18:24of Nanking,
18:25then the Chinese capital,
18:27on December the 17th, 1937,
18:30that the Japanese forces
18:31really ran along.
18:34Over 300,000 civilians
18:35are estimated
18:36to have been massacred
18:37during a six-week orgy of rape
18:40and indiscriminate killing.
18:42The Japanese even attacked
18:49British and U.S. warships,
18:51which had been sent
18:51to protect their shipping and trade.
18:55The worst incident
18:56came on December the 12th, 1937.
18:59The American gunboat Panay
19:01was sunk by Japanese bombers.
19:04Fifty crewmen died.
19:05Despite this,
19:09the Western powers
19:09refused to intervene.
19:13So the League of Nations
19:15could do nothing.
19:19In the United States,
19:21President Roosevelt
19:21wanted to impose
19:22a naval blockade of Japan.
19:25It has become clear
19:27that acts and policies
19:29of nations
19:30in other parts of the world
19:32have far-reaching effects
19:35on us.
19:38But the British
19:38would have none of it,
19:40fearing that it might
19:41provoke a war.
19:42So all Roosevelt could offer
19:44was a $25 million loan
19:46to Chiang Kai-shek
19:48to buy arms.
19:51Even though the Communists
19:53were now fighting
19:54alongside the Kuomintang,
19:55the Soviet Union
19:56did little to help either.
19:58Its only involvement
19:59was a series of clashes
20:01along its own border
20:02with Manchuria.
20:06But China itself
20:08received nothing.
20:09Instead,
20:10it had to fight on alone.
20:16During 1938,
20:18the Japanese overran Canton
20:20and pushed the Chinese forces
20:22deeper into the west
20:24of the country.
20:25All the rhetoric
20:26of the League of Nations,
20:28all those promises
20:29to stop international aggression
20:31had come to nothing.
20:33And by now,
20:34the Western powers
20:35were facing aggression
20:36much closer to Hull.
20:37today, it is easy to laugh
20:46at Benito Mussolini,
21:00the fascist dictator of Italy.
21:02All that posturing seems faintly ridiculous now, but it didn't seem that way in 1922.
21:13Back then, Italy had seemed to be on the edge of anarchy.
21:17The country was riven by strikes and land seizes.
21:22The democratic government, just as in Germany, seemed powerless in the face of such unrest.
21:28So, Benito Mussolini, a war veteran and a journalist, decided to take a stand.
21:34He organized a right-wing nationalist party, the Fascists.
21:41With a country paralyzed by a general strike in August 1922, Mussolini ordered his followers to march on Rome.
21:51Fearing a civil war, Italy's king, Victor Emmanuel, asked him to form a government.
21:59If he realized the necessary and sufficient premises for a collaboration of the four great Western powers...
22:07Mussolini swiftly stamped out any political opposition and assumed dictatorial powers.
22:14He must crystallize a position of power in justice.
22:19By 1928, his position seemed secure.
22:23Parliament was appointed rather than elected, and all power was firmly in the hands of the Fascist Grand Council.
22:30Like Hitler, Mussolini's first acts made him immensely popular.
22:40Massive programs of public works provided employment and transformed Italy's infrastructure.
22:47Corruption was rooted out, and the Mafia more or less eliminated.
22:53Italy's armed forces were built up, including an advanced modern air force.
23:03In the Mediterranean, Mussolini launched a powerful navy, bigger than the combined might of the British and French Mediterranean fleets.
23:12When the Great Depression came, Italy seemed to weather it better than most.
23:20Mussolini became a source of worldwide inspiration.
23:29Political leaders, not least Adolf Hitler in Germany, saw the Fascist system as a role model.
23:35Strong and purposeful, in contrast to the weakness of the democracies in Britain and France.
23:42But Mussolini wanted more than adulation.
23:46He wanted to recreate the Roman Empire.
23:50And he already had a target in mind for his first imperial land ground.
23:55His target was Abyssinia, today's Ethiopia.
24:06Italy already had colonies on its borders in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.
24:12In December 1934, Italian forces provoked a clash with Abyssinian troops at an oasis in the Ogaden region, well inside Abyssinian territory.
24:31Mussolini then sent reinforcements to Eritrea and Italian Somaliland, demanding that Abyssinia pay reparations.
24:38The emperor of Abyssinia, Haile Selassie, appealed in person to the League of Nations.
24:51He called on it to live up to its ideals.
24:54Here was a small nation under threat from another member of the League.
24:58This was the supreme test.
25:01But the League did nothing.
25:03Britain's foreign minister, Anthony Eden, at least tried to broker a peace deal, but Mussolini would have none of it.
25:14In early October 1935, the Italian army invaded from Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.
25:20The primitive Abyssinian forces stood little chance against a modern army equipped with artillery and tanks.
25:32The Italian air force had total command of the air and harried the Abyssinians.
25:51On occasions dropping gas bombs, even though gas had been outlawed at Versailles as a crime against humanity.
25:59After six months, Abyssinia was completely overrun.
26:05The emperor Haile Selassie fled into exile in Britain.
26:14From its headquarters in Switzerland, the League of Nations wrung its hands.
26:19It did impose economic sanctions, but they had little effect.
26:23Mussolini's aggression had revealed two things.
26:30The League of Nations, that great hope for peace, was impotent.
26:35And both Europe's supposed major powers, the democracies Britain and France, no longer had the stomach for a fight.
26:42Both Britain and France had been shattered by World War I, and their economies had never really recovered.
27:00Both had witnessed waves of strikes and unrest.
27:03Both had suffered mass unemployment, even before the Great Depression.
27:14Both also faced the cost of controlling empires, now swollen by taking on Germany's former colonies,
27:20and the Middle Eastern territories once run by the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
27:28And above all, both had been traumatized by the horrific casualties of World War I.
27:35A succession of British leaders, Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, and above all, Stanley Baldwin,
27:41all resolved to keep Britain out of future conflicts.
27:45Despite horrific casualties on the Western Front, Britain had ended World War I with a large and very effective conscript army.
27:55This was immediately run down to a small professional force designed to police its sprawling empire.
28:03And when the Great Depression struck, any ideas of modernizing the army were abandoned.
28:11It meant that Britain went into the run-up to war, economically and militarily weak.
28:22French losses during World War I had been even worse than the British.
28:25Ever mistrustful of the Germans, a large conscript army was maintained.
28:34But throughout the 1920s, France's birth rate had declined.
28:38It became clear that there would be a manpower shortage by the mid to late 1930s.
28:44France realized it could never compete with Germany on the size of its army alone.
28:49The solution was to adopt an entirely defensive mentality.
29:05The Maginot Line, a series of fortifications, was begun in 1930 along the frontier with Germany and ran as far as the Belgian border.
29:14There, it theoretically linked up with fortifications planned by the Belgians.
29:25This new French military approach meant that France was only capable of waging a defensive war.
29:32It just did not have the ability to launch an attack on Italy, even if the British had had the troops to help.
29:38And of course, both countries knew that their navies in the Mediterranean were outnumbered by Mussolini's new fleet.
29:53So when Italy conquered Abyssinia, it made sense for both powers to do nothing.
29:58It just seemed too remote, too much someone else's problem.
30:03By now, they both had to deal with all the traumas of the Great Depression.
30:14That seemed so much more pressing.
30:16And above all, they were now faced with a military threat far closer to hold.
30:25A resurgent and rearming Germany.
30:32And Germany's power, and that of Italy, too, was soon about to be demonstrated.
30:37In supporting the rise of another dictator.
30:40In Spain.
30:54In 1936, civil war erupted in Spain.
30:57It was exceptionally vicious.
31:00Setting family against family.
31:02Communist against fascist.
31:04Believers against atheists.
31:11In 1931, a left-wing government had come to power determined to get rid of the centuries-old Spanish monarchy.
31:20The king was forced into exile, and a republic was declared.
31:28In February 1936, the parties of the left combined in a popular front to take on the forces of the right in a general election.
31:37The popular front won narrowly.
31:43Even though its reform programme was modest, a wave of strikes and land seizes led the right to fear that a communist takeover was inevitable.
31:58Within the Spanish army, long a bastion of conservative and Catholic thinking, senior officers began to consider the possibility of a coup.
32:09Among them was General Francisco Franco.
32:13A former chief of staff who had been effectively exiled to command Spain's forces in the Canary Islands.
32:18On July 17th, 1936, the units of the army fighting guerrillas in Spain's colony in Morocco mutinied.
32:34The next day, Franco flew to join them, proclaiming a new nationalist movement which would save Spain from communism.
32:41Mainland garrisons now joined this revolt.
32:46The popular front responded by calling for volunteers to defend the republic.
32:52Battle lines had been drawn.
32:54At first, Franco faced problems.
32:55He and his army were in North Africa, and he had to get across the Straits of Gibraltar back to Spain.
33:09So he turned to the one person he thought might help.
33:13Adolf Hitler.
33:14Within a month, transport aircraft from Hitler's new Luftwaffe had begun an airlift, taking Franco's battle-hardened veterans over to southern Spain.
33:28At this stage, the republic still seemed to have the advantage.
33:43The pro-Franco military uprisings in Madrid and Barcelona were quickly crushed, leaving it in control of most of the east of the country.
33:51Franco's nationalists were confined largely to the north-west and part of the south.
34:06But the nationalist situation was transformed when Hitler and Mussolini started to pour in troops and weapons.
34:14The German dictator seized the opportunity to test his new equipment and expanding armed forces.
34:26The first panzer tanks were sent along with some 12,000 troops.
34:33And the Luftwaffe deployed its Condor legion with its ultra-modern new bombers and fighters.
34:44Mussolini sent a so-called volunteer corps of 50,000 men and more than 700 aircraft.
34:59In vain did the republicans appeal to Britain, France and the Soviet Union for help.
35:04But London and Paris were scared of setting off a European rule.
35:11They declared a policy of non-intervention.
35:18Cynically, both Germany and Italy signed up to this.
35:22But when it became obvious that they were still sending arms to the nationalists,
35:27Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, announced that he would help the republic.
35:31Stalin's worry was the rise of fascism in Germany.
35:39Hitler had made it abundantly clear that he believed communism to be Nazism's ultimate enemy.
35:49Stalin saw the Spanish Convict as a way of keeping Germany and Italy occupied
35:55while building up the Soviet Union's military strength.
35:57About 700 military advisers were sent, along with tanks and fighter aircraft.
36:07It was something, but no match for the support Franco had received.
36:15In fact, the largest source of outside help for the republic didn't come from a country at all,
36:19but from volunteers, the international brigades.
36:24About 30,000 left-wing Americans, British, French and Germans signed up to fight in Spain.
36:30With their new fascist support, the nationalists were able to open two fronts.
36:40One advancing towards Barcelona from the north, the other led by Franco pushing up towards Madrid from the south.
36:47By the end of 1936, Madrid was enveloped on three sides and virtually under siege.
36:56The fighting was intense and often accompanied by appalling atrocities against civilians.
37:05The republicans hunted down and murdered Roman Catholic priests.
37:12The nationalists slaughtered anyone accused of being communist.
37:16German and Italian air power was used indiscriminately against civilian targets.
37:24Madrid was heavily bombed, but the worst incident came in April 1937, when the Basque town of Guernica was virtually obliterated with 6,000 civilian deaths.
37:40The area controlled by the republic was steadily ground down.
37:49Its forces fought with great gallantry, but under-trained and under-equipped amateurs were no match for the professional soldiers led by Franco,
37:59or for the combined modern weaponry of Italy and Germany.
38:02As the war dragged on, the fighting around Madrid became a symbol of the left's determination not to be crushed by a fascist dictatorship.
38:18But behind the scenes, the republican alliance was falling apart.
38:22The communists and socialists wanted to concentrate on winning a military victory.
38:26But the more idealistic anarchists and syndicalists saw the war as an opportunity for a mass revolution by the workers.
38:40These disagreements burst out into the open in May 1937.
38:45Fighting broke out in Barcelona between the anarchists and communists.
38:49It was a fatal weakening of the republican courts.
38:56By the end of 1938, the nationalists had penned their enemy into a small enclave around Barcelona,
39:03and another stretching eastward from Madrid to the coast.
39:14Madrid continued to hold out, but the international brigades were withdrawn.
39:19More and more nations began to recognise Franco's government
39:23as his forces closed in for the final assault on Madrid.
39:34At the end of March 1939, his defenders, exhausted after nearly three years of fighting,
39:40the capital finally surrendered.
39:42A month later, Franco formally declared hostilities at an end.
39:59The scars of Spain's civil war took years to heal, and in some ways, they never have.
40:04And internationally, Franco's victory over the republic proved a disaster.
40:14Hitler and Mussolini were confirmed in their belief that the democracies of Britain and France were impotent to resist any real pressure.
40:22While Stalin despaired of their willingness to confront fascism.
40:30Hitler, in particular, saw his way open to begin the aggressive policies outlined in Mein Kampf.
40:38Even before the Spanish Civil War ended, his armies were on the march.
40:45From the moment he became Chancellor of Germany on January 30th, 1933, Hitler had begun to put his long-term ambitions into action.
41:01On February the 3rd, he told his top commanders that his ultimate aim was to conquer territory in the East and ruthlessly Germanise it.
41:16They were instructed to prepare for a massive expansion.
41:19Although Germany had been forbidden tanks, a secret treaty with the Soviet Union in 1923 had allowed the development of tank designs and experimentation with new mobile armoured tactics.
41:38Energetic young German officers like Heinz Guderian read the theories of British thinkers like Basil Liddle Hart and Colonel John Fuller.
41:46They even watched exercises being carried out by the British during the 1920s on Salisbury Plague.
41:53It was from these that they came up with the idea of fast-moving units combining tanks, artillery and infantry that could thrust fast and deep into enemy territory.
42:09Hitler adopted their ideas with enthusiasm.
42:12The new army was to have three panzer divisions.
42:19Similarly, the new air force, the Luftwaffe, under former World War I fighter ace Hermann Göring, had had a framework to build on.
42:27Throughout the years in which its air force was officially banned, Germany had kept up its design skills by building civilian machines and gliding and flying clubs provided a reserve of potential air.
42:45Hitler revealed the existence of the Luftwaffe in March 1935.
42:55He then announced that the army was to be increased to 300,000 men and conscription was reintroduced.
43:04Britain and France protested feebly at this flagrant breach of the Versailles Treaty.
43:14But soon, they reluctantly and slowly began to rearm.
43:25Until this point, Hitler had been modest in his goals.
43:29He had only taken back what was his, the Rhineland and Sala.
43:34But now he had a grander target in mind.
43:38His homeland, Austria.
43:39In 1934, Austrian Nazis had attempted to seize power and unify the country with Germany.
43:50The Austrians, after all, spoke German, even if they had never been part of a German state.
43:57In February 1938, another Nazi plot was discovered.
44:02Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg protested to Hitler.
44:11Hitler responded by demanding that Austria stop mistreating the Austrian Nazis and unite with Germany.
44:18The youth is unwritten and they will continue to stay.
44:23Hitler!
44:27Schuschnigg promptly called a referendum so that the Austrians could vote on whether to remain independent.
44:36But on March the 12th, 1938, the eve of the referendum, Hitler, fearing that it might produce the wrong result, sent in his troops.
44:46Complete surprise and an enthusiastic welcome by Nazi sympathisers made it a bloodless invasion.
44:55Within hours, Hitler announced Austria's incorporation into the Third Reich.
45:01A sovereign nation had for the first time been subsumed into a greater Germany.
45:08Once again, the Western democracies failed to react.
45:12In the summer of 1938, he turned on his next prey, Czechoslovakia.
45:22A substantial German minority lived in the northwest of the country, an area known as the Sudetenland.
45:29These Sudeten Germans had been part of the old Austrian Empire, but had been cut off when Czechoslovakia was created in 1919.
45:39This was the time bomb that had started ticking at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
45:48Hitler encouraged Sudeten German demands for autonomy and then threatened the Czech government with force if it refused to agree.
45:59Undaunted, the Czech government ordered general mobilization and prepared to resist.
46:08The Czechoslovak army was large and well equipped with formidable fortifications on its frontier with Germany.
46:16Hitler backed off.
46:17But then at the beginning of September, concerned that war might be imminent, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain decided to act as a peacemaker.
46:29He flew to meet Hitler twice.
46:34The Nazi dictator assured him that if he could have the Sudetenland, he would make no further territorial demands in Europe.
46:42In Munich, on September 29th 1938, with Mussolini acting as mediator, France and Britain signed an agreement giving the Sudetenland to Germany in return for a formal declaration by Hitler that he had no more territorial ambitions.
47:06Chamberlain flew back to Britain waving the piece of paper, which he claimed guarantees peace in our time.
47:19And so, on October 1st, German troops occupied the Sudetenland and seized the Czech frontier fortifications.
47:30Hitler now began sizing up his next target, Poland.
47:44Again, the nominal cause was a German minority marooned as a result of the Versailles Treaty.
47:51Hitler demanded the return of the port of Danzig to German control,
47:57so that East Prussia could be linked up with the rest of Germany.
48:03The Poles refused, and Hitler hesitated.
48:07He was not quite ready for all-out war, and he had unfinished business with Czechoslovakia.
48:13In March 1939, the eastern part of the country, Slovakia, which was ethnically different to the Czech lands, appealed to Hitler for help in achieving greater independence.
48:27Hitler summoned the Czechoslovak Prime Minister, Emil Hacha, to Berlin, and browbeat him into putting his country under German protection.
48:41German troops now marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia, unopposed.
48:48Most of the country was annexed into the Reich. Slovakia was declared a protector.
48:56For the first time, Hitler had seized non-German-speaking territory.
49:01But again, there was only a feeble protest from Britain and France.
49:08At the end of March, he again repeated his demand that Poland give up Danzig.
49:13This time, France and Britain declared unequivocally that they would declare war if he attacked Poland.
49:20But by now, Hitler cared little whether they did or not.
49:27He was sure that they would be weak and indecisive opponents.
49:35In Russia, Stalin had also become increasingly concerned by Hitler's aggression.
49:41In April, Stalin proposed an alliance with Britain and France.
49:45But negotiations made little progress.
49:49And finally, Stalin despaired, deciding that there was another solution to the German threat.
49:59On August the 23rd, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, who everyone had believed were sworn enemies, announced a non-aggression pact.
50:08The agreement secretly specified that Poland would be split between the two countries and Stalin would have a free hand to take over Estonia, Lafayette and Lithuania.
50:25Now free from any Russian threat, Hitler ordered his armed forces to prepare for an immediate invasion.
50:31On the evening of August the 31st, the German Wehrmacht prepared for the assault.
50:40Its Fuhrer had made the decision, which would plunge the world into war.
50:44For the soldiers who advertised the role in many Russian characters, Hitler believed their role in German power.
50:47The day of all the soldiers were killed in one of the most, 1834 years and then sent them into war.
50:53Captioning by www.gis Bachelor's Natională»ans
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50:58www.gis Bachelor's Natională»ans
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51:07Transcription by CastingWords
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