862 Part 6 • Cataclysm
campaign of rapid industrialization, forced millions of peasants
into collective farms, and ordered the slaughter or imprisonment
of those who resisted. Britain and France retained their parlia
mentary forms of government, despite economic, social, and po
litical tensions.
In this Europe of extremes, the search for political stability
after World War I proved elusive. After coming to power in 1933,
Hitler rearmed Germany and disdainfully violated the Treaty of
Versailles by reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936 and forging a
union with Austria. The same year, Hitler and Mussolini sup
ported a right-wing nationalist insurrection in Spain against the
Spanish Republic. They sent planes, advisers, and war materiel
to aid General Francisco Franco’s military forces, which were
victorious three years later. After Hitler’s initial aggressive moves
against Czechoslovakia were unopposed by Britain and France,
the German dictator brazenly sent German troops to occupy all
of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Just weeks after shocking the world by signing a nonaggres
sion pact with Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler began his long
planned invasion of Poland, which quickly fell. And after a
brief “phony war” of inaction in the West, in the spring of 1940
Hitler invaded France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Japan’s
sudden attack on the U.S. military bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii,
on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into World
War II. Over 17 million people were killed in the fighting, and
another 20 million civilians perished, including more than 6
million Jews systematically exterminated by the Nazis during
the Holocaust. The war finally ended in 1945, after the defeat
of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Europe and the entire world
entered a new and potentially even more dangerous period, one
in which nuclear arms made the threat of another world war
even more horrible.