Conflict and Tension: The Inter-War Years, 1918–1939

How this unit works

This is your Paper 1 Section B wider world depth study (option 1B/B): 44 marks — 40 content marks plus 4 SPaG marks on Question 4 — in about 60 minutes. Q1 — source inference (4); Q2 — how useful are two sources (12); Q3 — write an account (8); Q4 — how far do you agree (16 + 4 SPaG). The question methods live in the Exam Skills section; this unit supplies the knowledge. Two features of this exam should shape your revision:

1. 16 of the 40 content marks are source marks — and AQA leans heavily on political cartoons for this option: British cartoons on the Big Three, the Rhineland, Munich and the Nazi–Soviet Pact are all staples. You need contextual knowledge that can be deployed against a source, not just recalled. The Source Workbench at the end is built for exactly this.
2. Question 4 always names a “main reason” or “main cause” — so for every major outcome (the Treaty's harshness, the League's failure, the outbreak of war) you need a ranked set of competing causes rather than a list. The Factor Hierarchies at the end supply them.

Contested ground: the four debates

Timeline: the events you must place

Learn the order before the detail — the sections explain each event.

Part one — peacemaking, 1918–1921

Part two — the League of Nations, 1920–1937

Part three — the road to war, 1934–1939

Key people and institutions

Key vocabulary

The specialist terms that earn the SPaG marks on Question 4 — defined here once and used throughout.

Chapter 1 — Peacemaking, 1918–1920

The First World War killed something in the region of nine to ten million soldiers and left the victors with a problem no previous peace conference had faced: how to settle a war fought by whole societies, in an atmosphere of grief and public expectation, between allies who wanted different things. Everything in Chapters 2 and 3 grows out of the settlement described here — which is why whether Versailles caused the Second World War is the most argued question in the whole option.

1.1 Three victors, three problems

The armistice (11 November 1918) stopped the fighting; it settled nothing. Germany withdrew from occupied territory, handed over artillery, aircraft, locomotives and its submarines, and accepted Allied occupation of the west bank of the Rhine — and, crucially, the naval blockade continued until the peace was signed, so Germany negotiated (insofar as it negotiated at all) under continuing food shortage. Germany had not been invaded and its army marched home in good order — one reason many Germans found it hard to accept they had been comprehensively defeated. The Paris Peace Conference opened on 18 January 1919 with thirty-two nations attending; Germany, its allies, and Bolshevik Russia were excluded, with the fear of Bolshevism spreading westwards hanging over every discussion. Real decisions were taken by three men who wanted incompatible things:

• Wilson arrived with a programme — the Fourteen Points (January 1918): open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, disarmament, self-determination for the peoples of the collapsed empires, an independent Poland with access to the sea, and — the point he cared about most — a general association of nations to guarantee future peace. He believed a punitive settlement would store up another war.
• Clemenceau wanted security. France had suffered around 1.4 million military deaths, the fighting had been on French soil, and this was the second German invasion in fifty years. He wanted Germany permanently weakened: territory removed, the army cut, the Rhineland detached or occupied, and reparations large enough both to rebuild France and to keep Germany poor.
• Lloyd George was caught between two positions. He had just won an election on an overwhelmingly punitive public mood (a colleague had promised to squeeze Germany “until the pips squeak”); privately he believed a ruined Germany could not buy British goods and a desperate one might go Bolshevik. He also wanted Britain's specific interests: the German colonies, and the removal of the German fleet as a naval rival.

1.2 What each leader wanted, and got

The specification asks for “the extent to which they achieved their aims” — a comparison question. Score each:

• Clemenceau got most of what he could realistically get, and less than he wanted. Secured: Alsace-Lorraine, a 100,000-man German army, the demilitarised Rhineland occupied for fifteen years, the Saar under League administration, a very large reparations bill. Refused: a separate Rhineland state and the dismemberment of Germany. Critically, the Anglo-American guarantee of French security he accepted in exchange evaporated when the United States rejected the Treaty. French opinion thought the result inadequate — Clemenceau was voted out in 1920.
• Lloyd George got most of his specific objectives. The German colonies became mandates, several British-administered; the German navy was destroyed as a rival — much of it scuttled by its own crews at Scapa Flow (21 June 1919); the merchant fleet was largely transferred; and he blocked the harshest French proposals. His difficulty was domestic: to a public expecting Germany crushed the Treaty looked lenient, while to critics like the economist Keynes it looked ruinous.
• Wilson secured his central institution and lost almost everything else. The League of Nations was created — its Covenant written into the Treaty itself as Part I. But self-determination was applied selectively (denied to the German-speakers of Austria and the Sudetenland), and then came the decisive defeat: the US Senate refused to ratify the Treaty in November 1919 and again in March 1920. America never joined the League Wilson had designed, and made a separate peace with Germany in 1921. Wilson himself suffered a stroke in 1919 while campaigning for the Treaty.

1.3 The terms of the Treaty of Versailles

The Diktat. Germany was given the terms and told to sign — no negotiations; written observations secured only minor alterations. Scheidemann's government resigned rather than accept; a new government signed under threat of invasion and continued blockade. The Treaty was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles — the room where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871 after France's defeat, a choice of location nobody missed. Learn the terms under four headings:

1.4 Reactions to the settlement

German objections came in three kinds — and a categorised analysis beats a list of complaints. Procedural: Germany had not been allowed to negotiate, and the final terms departed substantially from the Fourteen Points on which it believed it was making peace — the grievance carried by the word Diktat. Moral: Germans overwhelmingly rejected Article 231, arguing that responsibility for a war with such tangled origins could not be assigned to one side; they pointed to the selective application of self-determination (the principle created Poland and Czechoslovakia while German-speakers in Austria, the Sudetenland, Danzig and the Corridor were denied any say); and they noted Germany was disarmed while nobody else was. Practical: reparations were held to be unpayable — with the cutting edge that the territories removed included the resources Germany needed in order to pay. These objections were not confined to the extremes: every mainstream German party opposed the Treaty, so any government that cooperated with it could be attacked as treasonable — with lasting consequences for German democracy (covered in the Germany unit).

Allied reactions were also dissatisfied — in opposite directions. In France, opinion held the Treaty had failed to provide security; Foch predicted “an armistice for twenty years”, and the promised Anglo-American guarantee never materialised. In Britain, initial approval gave way to unease, sharpened by Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which argued reparations would wreck the European economy — and had considerable influence on later British reluctance to enforce the Treaty. In Italy, the settlement produced the “mutilated victory”: promised territory was largely withheld, Orlando walked out of the conference, and the grievance fed Mussolini's rise. And the United States Senate rejected the whole thing.

1.5 The wider settlement and the new Europe

Versailles dealt only with Germany. Four further treaties dismantled the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires: St Germain (Austria, 1919) — a small republic, union with Germany forbidden; Neuilly (Bulgaria, 1919); Trianon (Hungary, 1920) — the harshest in proportion, Hungary losing around two-thirds of its territory and population; and Sèvres (Turkey, 1920) — so severe it was overthrown by Turkish resistance under Mustafa Kemal and replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923): the one part of the settlement successfully revised by force before 1930, and a precedent worth noticing. Nine new or reconstituted states emerged — Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary, Finland and the Baltic states — with three structural problems: minorities (central Europe's populations were mixed, so roughly 30 million Europeans were left as national minorities — Czechoslovakia alone contained around 3 million Germans in the Sudetenland, each minority a potential grievance and, in the German cases, a potential pretext); economies (cut off from the imperial markets in which they had developed, mostly agricultural, vulnerable to the farm-price collapse); and security (small, weak, sandwiched between Germany and the Soviet Union — both of which had lost territory to them and neither of which accepted the settlement).

The settlement's strengths should not be omitted. It ended a war that had killed millions and restored a functioning international order within two years. It created the first permanent international organisation with universal ambitions. It gave genuine independence to peoples who had had none. It was, in its treatment of Germany, considerably milder than Brest-Litovsk — the settlement Germany had imposed on Russia in 1918 (see the First World War unit). And it was never enforced to its full severity: reparations were repeatedly reduced and the Rhineland occupation ended early.

Chapter 2 — The League of Nations and international peace

The League was the most ambitious institutional experiment in international relations to that point: an attempt to replace the balance of power with collective security — aggression against any state resisted by all states together. It handled a substantial number of disputes successfully, improved millions of lives through work with no pre-1919 equivalent, and then failed completely in the only test that mattered. Understanding both halves is what makes a balanced answer possible.

2.1 Design and its built-in limits

The League's structure is not a list to memorise but an explanation of what happened later — learn the machinery with its consequences attached. The Covenant (Part I of the Treaty of Versailles) set four aims: discourage aggression, encourage cooperation, promote disarmament, improve living and working conditions. The Assembly — every member, met once a year, unanimity required. The Council — the crisis-handling body: four permanent members (Britain, France, Italy and Japan) plus elected members, also unanimity — with a devastating implication: any accused aggressor sitting on the Council could veto action against itself. The Secretariat at Geneva was the civil service; the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague gave rulings it could not enforce. The League's powers ran in three escalating stages: moral condemnation → economic sanctions → military action (Article 16) — but the League had no armed forces of its own, so military action required members to volunteer troops, ships and money.

Membership was the largest structural problem. Forty-two states joined at the outset, rising to around sixty at the mid-1930s peak. But the United States never joined; Germany was excluded until 1926 and left in October 1933; Japan left in March 1933; Italy left in December 1937; the USSR joined only in 1934 and was expelled in December 1939. For most of its life the League lacked one, two or three of the world's most significant powers — and by 1937 three of its four original permanent Council members had walked out.

2.2 The work of the League's agencies

Any answer treating the League purely as a failure is unbalanced — and the agencies' record is genuinely impressive. The International Labour Organisation brought governments, employers and unions together to raise working standards: campaigns for a maximum working day, minimum-wage agreements in some sectors, and a ban on poisonous white lead in paint — it outlived the League itself, passing into the UN in 1946. The Health Organisation collected medical statistics, funded research and ran campaigns against leprosy, malaria and yellow fever (including large-scale mosquito-control work), plus international drug control. The Refugee Commission under Nansen returned around 425,000 prisoners of war home and created the Nansen passport — the first international travel document for stateless people. The Slavery Commission freed around 200,000 slaves in Sierra Leone and intervened over the death rate among African labourers building the Tanganyika railway, which fell from about 50% to 4%. The Mandates Commission supervised the former German and Ottoman territories, requiring annual reports — at least some external scrutiny of colonial rule.

2.3 The test cases of the 1920s

Two further episodes matter because of where they happened: the Ruhr occupation (1923) — France and Belgium seized Germany's industrial heartland over a reparations default, entirely outside the League, by a permanent Council member; and the Geneva Protocol (1924), designed to strengthen arbitration, abandoned when Britain refused to ratify it.

2.4 Diplomacy outside the League

The two most celebrated peace agreements of the 1920s were made without the League. The Locarno treaties (1925), negotiated by Stresemann and Briand, did something Versailles had not: they obtained Germany's voluntary acceptance of its western frontiers with France and Belgium and of the demilitarised Rhineland, with Britain and Italy as guarantors. The “Locarno honeymoon” led to Germany joining the League with a permanent Council seat in 1926, and Stresemann and Briand shared the Nobel Peace Prize. But read the treaties carefully: Germany accepted its western frontiers as permanent; its eastern frontiers with Poland and Czechoslovakia were covered only by arbitration agreements — Stresemann was explicit in private that eastern revision remained a German objective. Locarno, celebrated as the settlement of Europe, in fact signalled which frontiers were negotiable. The Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928) grew into a declaration by 65 states renouncing war as an instrument of policy — with no enforcement mechanism, no definition of aggression, and a self-defence reservation every aggressor of the 1930s duly claimed. Disarmament followed the same route: the Washington Naval Conference (1921–22) set capital-ship ratios and worked, because the participants wanted to avoid an expensive race; the World Disarmament Conference (Geneva, 1932–34) failed — France would not disarm without security guarantees, Germany demanded equality, and when equality was refused Hitler withdrew Germany from the conference and from the League in October 1933.

2.5 The Depression changes everything

The world economy of the 1920s depended on American money: American loans financed German reparations payments, which financed Allied war-debt repayments to America — a circuit that stopped when American lending stopped after the Wall Street Crash. The value of world trade fell by roughly two-thirds between 1929 and 1932, and unemployment reached tens of millions. The political consequences ran in four directions: governments turned inward — every state prioritised its own recovery, tariffs rose (the American Hawley–Smoot Tariff of 1930 provoked wide retaliation), and cooperation became politically much harder to sell; sanctions became unthinkable — sanctions require giving up trade voluntarily, and in a depression, when exports mean jobs, no government could do that, while any that tried would see its trade taken over by non-members, above all the United States; democracies weakened and dictatorships gained — in Germany the Depression destroyed Weimar's support and produced Hitler's rise (Germany unit); in Japan the collapse of silk exports discredited the civilian government and strengthened an army arguing that only territorial expansion could secure resources; in Italy Mussolini looked to imperial adventure as a distraction; and Britain and France were disarmed by circumstance — both cut defence spending, both faced domestic crises (Britain's 1931 financial crisis produced a National Government and the end of the gold standard), and both approached the 1930s knowing they could not afford a war.

2.6 Manchuria and Abyssinia

Manchuria, 1931–33. Manchuria was a Chinese province rich in coal and iron where Japan already held economic interests and a railway. In September 1931 an explosion on that railway near Mukden (18 September 1931) — almost certainly staged by Japanese officers — became the pretext for the Japanese army to occupy the whole province. China appealed to the League, whose response was investigation: the Lytton Commission, appointed December 1931, did not report until October 1932 — thirteen months after the invasion. Its findings were clear (Japan had acted unlawfully; Manchuria should return to Chinese sovereignty), but by then Japan had installed the puppet state of Manchukuo. When the Assembly adopted the report in February 1933, Japan simply left the League (March 1933). No sanctions were imposed; no member proposed military action; Japan went on to occupy Jehol and, in 1937, to invade China proper.

Abyssinia, 1935–36. Mussolini wanted an African empire, a distraction from economic difficulty, and revenge for Italy's defeat there in 1896. Using the Wal Wal incident (December 1934) as pretext, Italy invaded on 3 October 1935, using aircraft, tanks and poison gas against an army largely equipped with rifles and spears. Haile Selassie appealed to the League. This time the League acted — and the manner of its acting was worse than inaction. It declared Italy the aggressor and imposed sanctions in November 1935 — but the sanctions excluded oil, coal, iron and steel (the commodities that would actually have stopped the Italian war machine), and the Suez Canal, controlled by Britain, stayed open to Italian troopships: Britain and France feared pushing Mussolini towards Hitler and wanted to preserve the Stresa Front (see 3.2). Then in December 1935 the Hoare–Laval Pact leaked: the British and French Foreign Ministers had secretly agreed to offer Italy around two-thirds of Abyssinia. The outcry forced both to resign — but the damage was done. Italy annexed Abyssinia in May 1936; Haile Selassie addressed the Assembly in person in June; sanctions were lifted in July; Italy left the League in December 1937.

2.7 Why the League could not avert war in 1939

By 1939 the League was effectively defunct as a security organisation. After Abyssinia, no major dispute was submitted to it: the Rhineland, the Spanish Civil War, Anschluss, the Sudeten crisis, Prague and Poland were all handled outside Geneva — by bilateral negotiation, four-power conference, or not at all. Munich, the most important European negotiation of the decade, involved the League not at all. Germany, Japan and Italy had left; the League's last significant act was to expel the USSR in December 1939 for invading Finland — a gesture at a state that had ceased to care. Five cumulative reasons account for the failure:

1. Absent great powers. The USA never joined; Germany, Japan and Italy left; the USSR was a member only 1934–39. Collective security cannot function when the likeliest aggressors are outside and the strongest potential enforcer never joined.
2. Structural weakness. Unanimity, no army, and enforcement that always depended on Britain and France agreeing to act (2.1).
3. The Depression. It made sanctions unaffordable and aggression attractive, and weakened the democracies exactly as the dictatorships strengthened (2.5).
4. Great-power self-interest. In Vilna, Corfu, Manchuria and Abyssinia the pattern is identical: Britain and France put their own strategic or economic interests ahead of the Covenant — and other states noticed (2.3, 2.6).
5. The association with Versailles. Because the Covenant was part of the Treaty, the dissatisfied powers saw the League as an instrument for preserving a settlement they were determined to overturn — so the states whose cooperation was most needed had the least reason to give it (2.1).

Chapter 3 — The origins and outbreak of the Second World War

Between 1933 and 1939 Hitler dismantled the Treaty of Versailles piece by piece, and at every stage the powers that had imposed it decided that resistance would cost more than acceptance. Read the chapter as a sequence in which each step made the next one easier — militarily, because Germany grew stronger; psychologically, because each unopposed breach reduced the expectation that any breach would be opposed. The final section takes the question the whole unit builds towards: who was responsible?

3.1 Hitler's aims and the first moves

Hitler's foreign-policy aims were stated publicly and repeatedly — in Mein Kampf and in speeches — and they formed a connected set: destroy the Treaty of Versailles (the least controversial aim inside Germany, since all parties shared it); rearm, so German demands could not be refused; unite German-speakers — Austria, the Sudetenland, Danzig, the German minorities of Poland — presented as self-determination, which had the useful property of sounding like a principle the West had itself invented (see 1.5); Lebensraum — living space in the east, in Poland, Ukraine and Russia, seized for German settlement with the existing populations displaced or subjugated — an aim far beyond any treaty grievance, and the strongest evidence that his objectives could not have been satisfied by concession; and destroy communism — both ideological commitment and diplomatic asset, since it made him appear to some in Britain and France a useful barrier against the USSR.

The Dollfuss affair (July 1934) showed the limits of German power at the outset: Austrian Nazis attempted a coup in Vienna and murdered Chancellor Dollfuss — and Mussolini, who regarded Austria as a buffer, moved troops to the Brenner Pass and made clear he would resist. Hitler, whose army was still small, denied involvement and withdrew support; the coup collapsed. The lesson he drew was not to abandon Anschluss but to secure Italy first — which is exactly what he had achieved by 1938. The Saar plebiscite (January 1935) was, by contrast, a legitimate success: held under League supervision as the Treaty required, it returned over 90% for return to Germany. Hitler had breached nothing — the Treaty's own machinery had delivered him a propaganda triumph, and he used it to argue that the rest of the settlement could be revised as reasonably.

3.2 Rearmament in the open, and the Stresa Front

Secret rearmament had begun before Hitler and accelerated under him — officers trained abroad, aircraft designers on “civil” projects — and the Disarmament Conference was abandoned in October 1933. In March 1935 Hitler went public: he announced the Luftwaffe and the reintroduction of conscription, with the army to reach 550,000 men — more than five times the Versailles limit. These were open, unmistakable breaches. The response was the Stresa Front (April 1935): Britain, France and Italy condemned German rearmament and reaffirmed Locarno and Austrian independence — on paper formidable, the three powers that had defeated Germany, with Italy (as Dollfuss had shown) willing to act over Austria.

The Anglo-German Naval Agreement (June 1935) destroyed it within three months. Britain concluded a bilateral agreement permitting Germany a surface fleet up to 35% of British tonnage and submarines up to 45%. Britain's reasoning: Germany would rearm anyway, so a negotiated limit was better than none, and a naval deal would keep German ambitions away from the North Sea. But the Agreement did three things Britain had not intended: it legitimised German rearmament (Britain had formally accepted a German navy larger than Versailles allowed); it gave Germany submarines, which the Treaty had banned outright; and it was concluded without consulting France or Italy — two months after all three had jointly condemned exactly this behaviour. The Front never recovered: Italy invaded Abyssinia in October, Britain and France found themselves imposing sanctions on the partner they had just aligned with, and Mussolini concluded his future lay with Germany (see 2.6).

3.3 The Rhineland, March 1936

On 7 March 1936 German troops marched into the demilitarised Rhineland. The zone had been demilitarised twice over — imposed by Versailles and voluntarily accepted by Germany at Locarno, with Britain and Italy as guarantors (see 2.4) — so remilitarisation was not only a Treaty breach but the repudiation of an agreement Germany had freely signed, which is why it mattered more than the 1935 announcement. The force was small — around 30,000 troops, under orders to withdraw immediately if the French army moved; Hitler said afterwards that the following forty-eight hours were the most nerve-racking of his life. Nobody moved. France had a caretaker government facing an election, military planners who insisted any response required full mobilisation, and would not act without Britain. Britain was unwilling — the widely quoted view was that Germany was only “marching into their own back garden”. Both were distracted and divided by the Abyssinian crisis, at its height and setting them at odds with Italy — the other Locarno guarantor. And Hitler softened the act with offers of new non-aggression pacts and a proposal to return to the League, giving those seeking a reason for inaction something to point at. The strategic consequence was immediate: Germany began fortifying its western frontier — and once those defences existed, France could no longer credibly threaten to march east to help Poland or Czechoslovakia. The entire French alliance system in eastern Europe rested on the ability to attack Germany's undefended west, and that ability was now gone.

3.4 New friends: Spain, the Axis and the Anti-Comintern Pact

The Spanish Civil War (from July 1936, when Franco's nationalist rebellion attacked the elected Republican government) became the arena in which the new alignments formed. Germany and Italy supported Franco — Germany's Condor Legion provided air support and used the war to test tactics and machines, most notoriously in the bombing of Guernica (April 1937), which showed the world what aerial attack on a civilian target looked like. The USSR supported the Republic, with the volunteer International Brigades. Britain and France sponsored non-intervention, which was widely ignored and in practice worked against the Republic, denied the arms its enemies freely received. The diplomatic consequences exceeded the military ones: fighting on the same side brought Hitler and Mussolini together — the Rome–Berlin Axis (October 1936), an understanding rather than a formal alliance; the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan (November 1936), which Italy joined in 1937; and eventually the Pact of Steel (May 1939), a full military alliance between Germany and Italy. Britain and France now faced potential threats in three theatres simultaneously — western Europe, the Mediterranean and the Far East — with no reliable partner: Italy had changed sides, the United States remained isolationist, and the Soviet Union was distrusted and excluded.

3.5 Anschluss, March 1938

Union with Germany was explicitly forbidden by the peace settlement — one of the clearest instances of self-determination being denied, since a substantial body of Austrian opinion had favoured it from the start (see 1.5). The sequence in 1938 was rapid: in February, Chancellor Schuschnigg was summoned to Berchtesgaden and pressed, under threat of invasion, into appointing the Austrian Nazi Seyss-Inquart as Minister of the Interior — placing the police in Nazi hands. Realising where this led, Schuschnigg announced on 9 March a plebiscite on Austrian independence. Hitler could not risk a vote going the wrong way: he demanded its cancellation and Schuschnigg's resignation; Schuschnigg resigned on 11 March; Seyss-Inquart, now Chancellor, “requested” German assistance; German troops crossed on 12 March, and annexation was announced on 13 March. A plebiscite held on 10 April under Nazi control returned over 99% approval. The international response was protest and nothing more. Mussolini — unlike in 1934 — raised no objection; Britain and France lodged formal complaints; Chamberlain told the Commons nothing could have been done short of force, which Britain would not use over a union many Austrians appeared to want.

3.6 Appeasement and Munich

What appeasement was: the policy of settling international disputes by negotiating with dictators and conceding demands judged reasonable, in order to avoid war. It was not invented by Chamberlain and was not a synonym for surrender: it rested on the belief that Germany had legitimate grievances arising from 1919, and that once they were satisfied Europe would settle. Take the case for the policy seriously before criticising it — an answer treating Chamberlain as simply foolish cannot reach the top band. Seven arguments, all of which carried weight in 1938:

1. The memory of the last war. Britain had lost roughly 750,000 dead in 1914–18; the Peace Ballot of 1935 drew over 11 million responses favouring collective security and disarmament.
2. Fear of bombing. It was widely believed a future war would open with the destruction of cities from the air, and that no defence existed — Guernica (3.4) appeared to confirm it.
3. Military unreadiness. British rearmament had begun late; radar and the fighters that would win the Battle of Britain were only coming into service in 1938–40. Delay bought preparation.
4. Imperial commitments and Dominion opinion. British forces were dispersed across an empire threatened by Japan and Italy, and the Dominions made clear they would not fight over central Europe.
5. Economic constraint. Both countries were still recovering from the Depression; rearmament competed with recovery.
6. The justice of some German claims — the argument students most often omit, and the strongest. Self-determination had been applied to create Czechoslovakia and withheld from the three million Germans inside it (1.5). Many in Britain believed the Treaty unjust — and it is difficult to fight a war to defend an injustice.
7. Fear of the Soviet Union. A war that destroyed Germany might open central Europe to communism, and many British and French politicians distrusted Stalin more than Hitler.

The Sudeten crisis. Czechoslovakia's German-speaking border region held around 3 million people, and Henlein's Sudeten German Party — funded and directed from Berlin — escalated its demands through 1938, culminating in the Karlsbad demands (April) for autonomy. Czechoslovakia was not defenceless: a modern army of around 35 divisions, strong frontier fortifications, the Škoda armament works, and treaties with France and the USSR. Chamberlain flew to Germany three times: at Berchtesgaden (15 September) he accepted the principle of transferring districts with German majorities; at Godesberg (22–23 September) Hitler raised his demands — immediate military occupation by 1 October — and Chamberlain refused; for a week war looked likely (trenches dug in London parks, gas masks distributed). Then Mussolini proposed a conference. At Munich (29–30 September) Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler and Mussolini agreed the transfer of the Sudetenland between 1 and 10 October. Czechoslovakia was not present and was informed of the outcome. The Soviet Union was not invited. Chamberlain also obtained Hitler's signature on a declaration of Anglo-German goodwill, displayed on landing — “peace for our time”. The cost to Czechoslovakia was crippling: the frontier fortifications, around 70% of its heavy industry, much of its raw materials and some 800,000 Czechs passed to Germany; Poland took Teschen, Hungary territory in the south. The rump state was indefensible.

3.7 March 1939: the end of appeasement

On 15 March 1939 German troops entered Prague: Bohemia and Moravia became a German protectorate, Slovakia a nominally independent puppet state. On 23 March Germany took Memel from Lithuania. Neither action involved German-speaking populations in any significant number — and that is exactly why it mattered. Every previous step had been defensible in the language of self-determination: the Saar had voted, the Rhineland was German territory, Austria was German-speaking and largely willing, the Sudetenland held three million Germans. Prague was Czech. The occupation demonstrated that the aim had never been the reunification of Germans but the domination of central Europe — and that Hitler's signature, given at Munich five and a half months earlier, was worthless. British policy reversed within weeks: on 31 March 1939 Britain and France guaranteed Poland (with guarantees to Romania and Greece following) — a commitment to eastern Europe Britain had refused for twenty years; conscription was introduced in April, in peacetime, for the first time; rearmament accelerated sharply. Chamberlain remained Prime Minister and continued to hope for a settlement — but the policy of concession was over: the guarantee to Poland meant that the next German demand would be met with war.

3.8 The Nazi–Soviet Pact

On 23 August 1939 the two most ideologically hostile states in Europe signed a non-aggression treaty. Through the summer, Britain and France had negotiated with the USSR for an alliance to deter Germany — and the talks failed for reasons that reflect badly on all sides. The Western powers moved slowly and sent a low-ranking delegation by sea, which Stalin read as a measure of their seriousness. Poland refused to allow Soviet troops onto its territory — understandably, given the Soviet war on Poland in 1920 — but the refusal made any military guarantee impossible to execute. And Stalin's fundamental doubt was created by Munich: he had watched Britain and France dismember a country that had a Soviet treaty of alliance, without consulting Moscow, and concluded they might leave the USSR to fight Germany alone. The Pact, signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, had a public and a secret element: publicly, a ten-year non-aggression treaty with a trade undertaking; secretly, a protocol dividing eastern Europe into spheres of influence — Poland to be partitioned, the Baltic states, part of Finland and Bessarabia allotted to the Soviet sphere. Each side gained precisely what it needed. Hitler removed the risk of a two-front war, isolated Poland, secured Soviet raw materials — and calculated that Britain and France, now unable to help Poland at all, would abandon their guarantee as they had abandoned Czechoslovakia. Stalin gained territory, a buffer zone, time to rebuild an army devastated by his own purges, and the prospect of the capitalist powers exhausting one another while the USSR stayed out.

3.9 September 1939 and the question of responsibility

The outbreak. German demands on Poland concentrated on Danzig and the Polish Corridor — the two territories where the 1919 settlement had most obviously subordinated German wishes to Polish needs (see 1.3). Poland, unlike Czechoslovakia, refused to negotiate under threat, and it had the Anglo-French guarantee. On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded, following staged border incidents presented as Polish provocation. Britain and France demanded withdrawal; when no reply came, both declared war on 3 September. On 17 September the USSR invaded eastern Poland under the secret protocol. Poland was partitioned and ceased to exist as a state within about five weeks.

Pulling it together, 1918–1939

Change over time

Factor hierarchies for the main-reason essay

Question 4 always names a “main reason” or “main cause”. These are ranked argument frames for the four outcomes it can ask about — choose your own ranking and defend it with a named criterion.

Outcome A — Why the Treaty of Versailles took the form it did

Suggested criterion: counterfactual — would a negotiated treaty with the same terms have been accepted? Probably not fully, but the grievance would have been much weaker.

Outcome B — Why the League of Nations failed

Suggested criterion: enabling power. The structural flaws set the ceiling; the Depression brought down the floor; great-power self-interest pulled the trigger in each individual case. The strongest formulation explains why the failures came when they did, not merely that they happened.

Outcome C — Whether appeasement was justified

Suggested criterion: counterfactual, applied twice — what would resistance in 1936 have cost, and what would resistance in 1938 have cost? The answers are different, which is why the Rhineland and Munich should be judged separately.

Outcome D — Who was responsible for the Second World War

• On sufficiency → Hitler. Without his intent, the other factors produce treaty revision, not invasion.
• On enabling power → appeasement and the collapse of collective security. They made the intent achievable.
• On duration → Versailles. It is the one condition present throughout the whole period.
• The full candidate table is at 3.9. State your criterion, apply it, and hold it — that is what “sustained judgement” means.

Source workbench

Questions 1 and 2 are worth 16 of this section's 40 marks and are pure source work. Two reminders that carry marks: a limitation is not uselessness — a Nazi poster is poor evidence of what was happening and excellent evidence of what Germans were being told; a British cartoon attacking Chamberlain is evidence that opinion was divided at the time. Say what the source is useful for. And provenance is where the Level 4 marks are on this option — examiners consistently report that candidates analyse cartoon content confidently and neglect who published it, when, and for whom. On a cartoon you find hard to decode, the ascription is a complete second route into the top band.

Quick self-test

Cover the answers and check yourself. Each answer names the section where the full evidence lives.