Interwar years

• Democracy: a system where people have the freedom of speech and the right to choose their government
• Dictatorship: where total power is in the hands of one person and the lives of the people are controlled
• Appeasement: when a country gives up something it wants or needs so another country will not go to war with them.
• state-controlled industry: all main industries are now run by the government
• collective farming: peasants handed their land, animals and tools over to a collective farmland work co-operatively. They had to give a lot of their produce to the state and share out what was left.
• Josef Goebbels's job was to convince the German people that the Nazis were doing good things. He used propaganda and censorship to achieve this
• censorship: stopping anyone writing or broadcasting anything u don't want them to know
• propaganda: information deliberately being spread to help or harm a person, group or nation
• Gustapo: the official secret police of Nazi Germany
• SS: the private army of Hitler
• In 1933 Hitler started to build up the German army and airforce. He had to do this in secret because rearmament was forbidden by the treaty of Versailles
• In 1936 Hitler ordered for German soldiers to march in Rhineland. He justified his actions by claiming that German territory should be protected by German troops
• In 1938 Hitler wanted to unite with Austria. He sent troops to Austria and forced the Austrian leader to hold a vote. That vote was rigged, so over 99 percent of Austrians voted for unification.
• On September 1st 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. This led to Britain and France declaring war on Germany two days later
• In September 1938 Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland region in Czechoslovakia join Germany.
• Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, went to see Hitler 3 times to avoid war. In September 1938, Chamberlain and the French agreed to give the Sudetenland to Germany, if he promised not to take over the rest of Czechoslovakia. This is known as the 'Munich Agreement'
• In March 1939, German troops invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. Britain and France didn't help them. However they promised to help Poland if it was invaded
• In August 1939 Stalin and Hitler signed a non-agression pact called the Nazi-Soviet Pact. They agreed to not fight each other and divide Poland up between them.
• The Policy of Appeasement: the policy Britain and France took towards Germany in 1930s, it is often described as - giving in to Hitlers demands as long as they were reasonable and prevented war