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The Interwar Years
and World War II
IN THIS CHAPTER
Summary: In the 1930s, the grim economic conditions of the Great Depression
caused the political parties of the center to lose support to socialists on the
left and to fascists on the right. Mussolini’s fascists took power in Italy. Adolf
Hitler came to power in Germany and embarked on a policy of rearmament
and expansion that led to World War II. This chapter provides a review of these
events and the course of World War II, during which 50 to 60 million people lost
their lives, including six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.Key Terms:
✪^ Weimar Republic^ The name given to the liberal democratic government
established in Germany following World War I.
✪^ Spartacists Marxist revolutionaries in post–World War II Germany, led by Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who were dedicated to bringing a socialist
revolution to Germany.
✪^ New Economic Plan (NEP) A plan instituted by Lenin in the early 1920s that
allowed rural peasants and small-business operators to manage their own
land and businesses and to sell their products—a temporary compromise
with capitalism that worked well enough to get the Russian economy func-
tioning again.
✪^ Great Depression A total collapse of the economies of Europe and the United
States, triggered by the American stock market crash of 1929 and lasting
most of the 1930s.KEY IDEA22
CHAPTER
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