The First World War, the peace settlement that followed and the Great Depression a decade later combined with nationalist, political, social and economic ideologies to create the circumstances in which war was likely. However, these conditions did not make the Second World War inevitable. Individuals played an essential part in turning the possibility of war into a reality.
It is hardly controversial to state that Adolf Hitler caused the Second World War. Hitler drove the key decisions to rearm, withdraw from the League of Nations, remilitarise the Rhineland, occupy the Sudetenland, invade the rest of Czechoslovakia and then, on 1 September 1939, invade Poland. This was the start of a premeditated war based on a racist and anti-Communist ideology to gain lebensraum in the east. War was, Hitler wrote in 1936, part of Germany’s ‘destiny’.
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