The twentieth-century world, Year 9: dictatorship, the Second World War and the Holocaust

The Great Depression (set off by the Wall Street Crash)

HintThink what happened to jobs and banks across the world at the end of the 1920s.

The whyAfter the crash of 1929, American banks called in their loans and German businesses collapsed. By the winter of 1932–33 about six million Germans were out of work. People who had ignored Hitler in better times now listened to anyone promising jobs and strong leadership.

He blamed the Communists and had civil rights suspended

HintAn emergency order was signed the very next day, and the prisons began to fill with his rivals.

The whyAt Hitler's urging the president signed an emergency decree that allowed arrest without trial and the banning of newspapers and meetings. Thousands of Hitler's opponents were locked up shortly before an election. The decree was never withdrawn.

Enabling

HintThe name means 'making it possible'.

The whyWith Communist deputies arrested or in hiding and stormtroopers lining the hall, only the Social Democrats voted against. Parliament had voted its own power away.

He merged it with his own and became Führer

HintAfter this there was one man at the top, under a new title meaning 'leader'.

The whyAs head of state as well as head of government, Hitler now had no one above him who could dismiss him. The army swore an oath of loyalty to him personally, not to Germany. In eighteen months the chancellor of a coalition had become a dictator.

It saved the army, so Britain could fight on

HintCount what came home across the Channel, not what was left on the beaches.

The whyAbout 338,000 British and Allied soldiers were brought back, though most of their tanks, guns and lorries were left behind. Without those trained men Britain would have had little to defend itself with.

Stalingrad

HintIt carried the name of the Soviet leader of the time.

The whyGermany lost an entire army there and never fully recovered in the east. From then on Soviet forces pushed westwards, in the end all the way to Berlin. A battle counts as a turning point when the direction of the war is different after it.

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor

HintA surprise raid on a naval base in Hawaii.

The whyEarlier that year Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. With the USA now fighting too, a war that began in Europe stretched across the Pacific, Asia and North Africa. Together the Allies had far more factories and people than their enemies.

It opened a new front in western Europe, squeezing Germany from both sides

HintSoviet armies were already advancing on the opposite flank.

The whyAbout 156,000 troops landed on the first day. Paris was freed in August, and by May 1945 the armies coming from west and east had met in Germany. A 'turning point' is judged by what it made possible afterwards, not by how dramatic the day was.

To stop enemy bombers finding their targets

HintThink what a lit-up city looks like from the air.

The whyWardens patrolled the streets to check that no light showed. It is one example of how the war reached into ordinary life months before any bombs fell on British cities.

Imports were being sunk, so scarce supplies had to be shared fairly

HintBritain grew far less than it ate, and U-boats hunted the ships.

The whyEveryone had a ration book with coupons for the same basic amounts, whatever their income. Bacon, butter and sugar came first, and more foods followed. The rich could not simply buy more of what was rationed.

Gone back home

HintThink how a family feels when the danger it was warned about keeps failing to arrive.

The whyThe heavy bombing the government expected did not come for months, a quiet spell nicknamed the 'Phoney War'. The government printed posters urging parents to leave their children where they were. More children were sent away in 1940, when France fell and the Blitz began.

They show a small minority, not the typical Londoner

HintAsk where the other 96 were sleeping.

The whyMost people stayed in their own homes, under the stairs or in a garden shelter. The Tube pictures are genuine, but they were chosen because they made a striking image. A true photograph can still give a false idea of what was normal.

1935

HintTwo years after Hitler became Chancellor.

The whyThe laws also banned marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. They followed a boycott of Jewish shops in 1933 and dismissals from many jobs. Each step made the next seem less shocking, which is how persecution was able to grow.

Kristallnacht (the November Pogrom)

HintThe usual name refers to the shattered windows that covered the streets.

The whyBetween about 26,000 and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. It marked a change from laws and exclusion to open, organised violence, carried out in public view. Many historians prefer the name 'November Pogrom', because the older one can make it sound like broken glass and nothing more.

Genocide

HintA word invented in 1944 because no existing word was strong enough.

The whyThe lawyer Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who lost 49 members of his own family, created the term and campaigned for it to become a crime in international law. The United Nations agreed in 1948.

It shows that each victim was a person, not a statistic

HintA number can tell you how many, but never who.

The whySix million is too large a number to picture. One named child, with a family, a school and plans for the future, is not. Testimony also records what the perpetrators' paperwork leaves out: what it was like, and how people helped one another, resisted and remembered.