The Inter-War Years & the Great Depression (1919-1939) — From Versailles to the Brink of Total War

1. The Post-War Settlement and the "Twenty Years' Crisis"

E.H. Carr's classic The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939 (1939) titled the era for posterity. The Paris peace settlement (covered in detail in Topic 07) bequeathed a fragile world: Germany humiliated but not crippled, Russia ostracised but not defeated, France insecure, Britain reluctant, the USA isolationist, the new states of Central and Eastern Europe minority-ridden and economically unviable, the colonial world stirring but unliberated.

1.1 The structural flaws of 1919

• Absent guarantors — the USA Senate rejected Versailles (19 March 1920); the USSR was outside the system; Germany excluded from the League till September 1926.
• Punitive but partial peace — Versailles humiliated Germany without permanently weakening her; Foch's prophecy (June 1919): "This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years."
• Successor states — Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Austria all contained large irredentist minorities (~30 million Europeans lived outside the state of "their" nationality).
• Reparations and war debts — Germany owed 132 billion gold marks (~£6.6 billion) under the London Schedule of Payments (1 May 1921); inter-Allied debts to the USA totalled ~$10 billion; this created a circular pump that depended on continuous American lending.
• Disarmament asymmetry — only Germany was disarmed; the World Disarmament Conference (Geneva, Feb 1932 – Jun 1934) collapsed because France would not disarm and Germany would not stay disarmed alone.

1.2 The 1920s vs the 1930s

2. Weimar Germany (1919-33)

2.1 Birth of the Republic

• Proclaimed 9 November 1918 by the SPD leader Philipp Scheidemann from a window of the Reichstag during the German Revolution; Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated; Friedrich Ebert (SPD) became Chancellor.
• Spartacist Uprising (5-15 January 1919) led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg — crushed by SPD-aligned Freikorps; both leaders murdered 15 January 1919.
• Weimar Constitution adopted 11 August 1919 at Weimar (chosen because Berlin was unsafe).
  • President elected for 7-year term — Article 48 emergency powers (rule by decree) proved fatal.
  • Chancellor responsible to Reichstag.
  • Proportional representation — produced 21 cabinets in 14 years.
  • Universal suffrage including women.
  • Bill of rights including social rights (Articles 109-118).

2.2 Crises of the early Republic

• "Stab-in-the-back" myth (Dolchstoßlegende) — Hindenburg's testimony to the Reichstag committee (18 November 1919) blamed defeat on the home front rather than military exhaustion; this Big Lie poisoned Weimar from the start.
• Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) — signed under protest; "war guilt clause" Article 231 turned reparations into a moral indictment.
• Kapp Putsch (13-17 March 1920) — right-wing coup attempt under Wolfgang Kapp; defeated by a general strike.
• Ruhr Occupation & Hyperinflation (1923) — when Germany defaulted on reparations, France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr (11 January 1923 – 25 August 1925); German government printed money to pay strikers; by November 1923 1 USD = 4.2 trillion marks; middle-class savings annihilated; Beer Hall Putsch (Munich, 8-9 November 1923) — Hitler's failed coup, jailed at Landsberg where he wrote Mein Kampf.

2.3 Stresemann Era (1923-29)

• Gustav Stresemann (Chancellor briefly Aug-Nov 1923; Foreign Minister 1923-29) — replaced mark with Rentenmark (15 Nov 1923, later Reichsmark); accepted Dawes Plan; achieved Locarno; brought Germany into the League.
• "Golden Twenties" of Berlin — Weimar culture flowered: Bauhaus (founded Weimar 1919, moved Dessau 1925, Berlin 1932); Brecht; Marlene Dietrich; Fritz Lang; Thomas Mann won Nobel 1929.
• But the recovery was loan-based; ~$4 billion of US capital flowed in 1924-29. When that stopped, the structure collapsed.

3. Italy and the Rise of Fascism

3.1 Post-war Italy — "the mutilated victory"

• Italy entered WWI hoping for Trieste, Trentino, South Tyrol, Istria, Dalmatia (promised by the Treaty of London, 26 April 1915); received less at Versailles; Gabriele D'Annunzio's "vittoria mutilata" rhetoric and his seizure of Fiume (September 1919 – December 1920) galvanised right-wing nationalism.
• Post-war social crisis: ~600,000 war dead, ~1 million wounded, inflation, mass unemployment; Biennio Rosso ("Two Red Years", 1919-20) — factory occupations in Turin, peasant land seizures.
• Liberal state under Giovanni Giolitti seemed unable to restore order; many industrialists, landlords and middle-class voters turned to the Fascists as a counter-revolutionary instrument.

3.2 Mussolini's seizure of power

• Benito Mussolini — born 29 July 1883; ex-socialist editor of Avanti!; expelled from PSI in November 1914 for supporting Italian entry into WWI; founded Il Popolo d'Italia.
• Fasci di Combattimento (Fighting Bands) founded Milan, 23 March 1919; reorganised as National Fascist Party (PNF) 9 November 1921.
• Squadristi — black-shirted paramilitaries; from 1920 conducted anti-socialist violence (~3,000 killed by 1922).
• March on Rome, 28 October 1922 — Mussolini stayed in Milan; King Victor Emmanuel III refused to authorise martial law and on 29 October invited Mussolini to form a government. Aged 39, the youngest PM in Italian history.

3.3 Building the dictatorship (1922-29)

• Acerbo Law (November 1923) — party with most votes (and ≥25%) gets two-thirds of seats; fascists won 65% in April 1924 elections.
• Matteotti Crisis (10 June 1924) — socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti murdered after exposing electoral fraud; Mussolini took political responsibility (3 January 1925 speech) and abolished opposition.
• Press freedom, parties, trade unions suppressed 1925-26; OVRA secret police created 1927.
• Lateran Treaty (11 February 1929) with Pope Pius XI — Catholic Church recognised the Italian state; Vatican City created as sovereign state; Catholicism became state religion.
• Corporate State — Labour Charter (April 1927); 22 corporations grouping employers and (Fascist) trade unions; in practice favoured industrial elites.
• Battle for Wheat (1925), Battle for the Lira (1926-27), Battle for Births (1927); land reclamation in the Pontine Marshes.

3.4 The doctrine of Fascism

• Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism (1932 Enciclopedia Italiana):
  • State is absolute, individuals and groups relative — "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" (Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State).
  • Rejected liberal individualism, parliamentary democracy and Marxist class struggle.
  • Glorified war: "Only war brings to the highest tension all human energy."
  • Nationalism, hierarchy, leader-cult, mass mobilisation, militarised politics.
• Distinguished from Nazism: Italian Fascism was less racially obsessed (anti-Semitism imported only with the 1938 Racial Laws), more accommodating to monarchy and Church.

4. Diplomacy in the Twenties — Locarno, Kellogg-Briand

4.1 Genoa Conference (10 April – 19 May 1922)

• 34 states, including USSR and Germany. Soviet-German Treaty of Rapallo (16 April 1922) mutually renounced reparations and restored relations — a diplomatic earthquake; the two outcasts joined hands; secret military cooperation followed.

4.2 Locarno Treaties (5-16 October 1925)

• Negotiated at Locarno (Switzerland); signed in London 1 December 1925.
• Main Rhineland Pact: Germany, France, Belgium recognised the western frontiers of Versailles; Britain and Italy guaranteed; the Rhineland's demilitarisation reaffirmed.
• Critically, Germany did not guarantee its eastern frontiers with Poland and Czechoslovakia — a signal of future revisionism.
• Architects: Stresemann (Germany), Briand (France), Austen Chamberlain (Britain). All three Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
• Germany admitted to the League of Nations as permanent Council member, 8 September 1926.

4.3 Kellogg-Briand Pact (Pact of Paris, 27 August 1928)

• Signatories renounced war "as an instrument of national policy"; eventually signed by 62 states.
• No enforcement mechanism; no provision against defensive war.
• "Nothing more than an international kiss" (US senator); but legally underpinned the post-1945 trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo.

4.4 Naval limitation

• Washington Naval Conference (12 Nov 1921 – 6 Feb 1922) — Five-Power Treaty fixed battleship ratios at 5:5:3:1.75:1.75 (USA:Britain:Japan:France:Italy); Four-Power Pacific Treaty; Nine-Power Treaty on China (Open Door).
• London Naval Treaty (22 April 1930) — extended limits to cruisers, destroyers, submarines.
• Second London Treaty (25 March 1936) — collapsed; Japan withdrew; naval race resumed.

4.5 The "Spirit of Locarno" — illusion or substance?

• Reduced tensions on Franco-German border; allowed economic recovery; built the legal architecture of post-1945 international order.
• But left Eastern Europe insecure; depended on continued goodwill of Stresemann (died 3 October 1929); was undone by the Depression and the rise of Hitler.

5. Economic Recovery — Dawes, Young, the Gold Standard

5.1 Reparations regime

• London Schedule of Payments (1 May 1921) — 132 billion gold marks; A, B, C bonds. The C bonds (~82 billion) were essentially fictional.
• German default November 1922; Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr January 1923; hyperinflation; passive resistance abandoned September 1923.

5.2 Dawes Plan (16 August 1924)

• Devised by Chicago banker Charles Dawes (later US Vice President).
• Reorganised German payments on a sliding scale; $200 million US loan to stabilise the Reichsmark; Allied evacuation of the Ruhr.
• Triggered a flood of American capital into Germany — ~$2.6 billion in five years.
• Dawes won the Nobel Peace Prize 1925.

5.3 Young Plan (7 June 1929)

• Devised by Owen D. Young; reduced reparations to ~112 billion marks; final payment 1988 (!); created the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) at Basel.
• Briefly opposed in Germany by the Stahlhelm/Nazi/DNVP campaign for the "Freedom Law" — referendum failed in December 1929 but gave Hitler his first national platform.
• Effectively died in the Depression; Hoover Moratorium (20 June 1931) suspended reparations and war debts for a year; Lausanne Conference (16 June – 9 July 1932) reduced reparations to a token 3 billion marks — never paid after Hitler took office.

5.4 The Gold Standard restored

• Wartime suspension reversed in the 1920s — Britain returned at pre-war parity (£1 = $4.86) on 28 April 1925 under Churchill; Keynes immediately attacked the move as deflationary (The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, 1925).
• Most major economies on gold by 1928; the "Golden Twenties" rested on an over-valued pound, deflationary policies, and pyramided lending.
• The system unravelled at the first crisis: Austria's Creditanstalt collapsed 11 May 1931; the German banking crisis followed in July; Britain off gold 21 September 1931; USA in March 1933; France held on till September 1936.

6. The Roaring Twenties — USA, Culture, Society

6.1 American boom (1922-29)

• USA emerged from WWI as the world's largest creditor; held ~50% of world gold reserves by 1929.
• Industrial output rose ~64% 1921-29; productivity gains from electrification, scientific management (Taylorism), the moving assembly line (Ford Model T launched 1 October 1908; production peaked 1923 at 2 million cars/year).
• Consumer revolution — radio (NBC 1926, CBS 1927), cinema (talkies from The Jazz Singer, 6 Oct 1927), cars, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners — all bought on instalment credit.
• Stock market mania: Dow Jones rose from 63 (Aug 1921) to 381 (3 Sep 1929) — ~6x in eight years.

6.2 Politics and culture

• Republican ascendancy — Harding (1921-23), Coolidge (1923-29), Hoover (1929-33); slogan "the chief business of America is business" (Coolidge, 1925).
• Prohibition (Volstead Act, 28 Oct 1919; 18th Amendment, in force 17 Jan 1920 – 5 Dec 1933) — bootlegging, speakeasies, Al Capone, the rise of organised crime.
• Immigration restriction — Emergency Quota Act 1921, Johnson-Reed Act 26 May 1924; closed the door on Asians and limited Southern/Eastern Europeans.
• Red Scare (1919-20) — Palmer Raids deported ~500 radicals.
• Scopes "Monkey" Trial (Dayton, Tennessee, 10-21 July 1925) on teaching evolution.
• Harlem Renaissance — Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong; Jazz Age literature — F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925), Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926).
• Women's suffrage — 19th Amendment, 26 August 1920; "flapper" culture.

6.3 Hidden fragilities

• Agriculture in chronic depression after 1920 — falling commodity prices, mounting farm debt; rural America did not roar.
• Income concentration — top 1% received ~24% of national income by 1928 (highest until the 21st century).
• Speculative credit pyramid — brokers' loans for stock margin rose from $1 billion (1921) to $8.5 billion (Sep 1929).
• Federal Reserve raised rates 9 Aug 1929 to cool speculation — instead, it pricked the bubble.

7. The Wall Street Crash (October 1929)

7.1 Immediate causes

• Speculative excess — buying on margin (as little as 10% down); pyramid trusts and holding companies.
• Federal Reserve tightening — rate hike to 6% in August 1929.
• Slowing real economy — industrial production peaked in June 1929; auto sales falling.
• Loss of confidence — a self-reinforcing spiral.

7.2 Structural causes

• Maldistribution of purchasing power — the underconsumption critique.
• Agricultural over-capacity since WWI; commodity glut.
• Inadequate regulation — no SEC, no FDIC, no Glass-Steagall separation.
• International imbalances — US trade surplus + creditor status drained gold from Europe.

8. The Great Depression — Spread & Mechanism

8.1 From crash to Depression

• The 1929 crash on its own would have been a recession; the Depression was the policy response that followed.
• Bank failures — ~9,000 US banks failed 1930-33; depositors lost ~$7 billion; money supply contracted ~33%.
• Smoot-Hawley Tariff (17 June 1930) raised US tariffs on ~20,000 goods to the highest in a century; world trade fell ~66% in volume 1929-32 as countries retaliated.
• Industrial production: USA −46%, Germany −41%, Britain −23%, France −24% between 1929 and 1932.
• Unemployment peaks: USA 25% (1933, ~13 million), Germany 30% (1932, ~6 million), Britain 22% (1932, ~3 million).
• World trade fell from $36 billion (1929) to $12 billion (1932).

8.2 Transmission to Europe

• US short-term loans to Germany were recalled after the crash; German banking collapsed.
• Creditanstalt (Austria's largest bank, owned by the Rothschilds) failed 11 May 1931.
• German Danatbank failed July 1931; banking holiday declared.
• Britain forced off gold 21 September 1931 (pound devalued ~25%); about 30 other states followed.
• USA off gold 19 April 1933; gold clauses in contracts abolished; gold price raised from $20.67 to $35/oz (Gold Reserve Act, 30 January 1934).
• The "Gold Bloc" (France, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy) held on until September 1936 — and paid for it in prolonged depression.

8.3 The economic-theory revolution

• Classical economics held that markets self-corrected; the Depression seemed to disprove this.
• John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (4 February 1936) argued that economies could remain in under-employment equilibrium; government deficit spending was necessary to restore demand.
• The Keynesian revolution would shape the post-1945 welfare state, the Bretton Woods system, and Indian planning.
• Milton Friedman & Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (1963) — argued the Fed's failure to expand money supply made the recession a depression. Modern view: both demand failures and monetary contraction mattered.

9. Responses — Hoover, FDR's New Deal

9.1 Hoover (1929-33) — "trickle-up"

• Believed in voluntary action — held conferences with industrialists asking them not to cut wages.
• Reconstruction Finance Corporation (22 January 1932) — lent to banks and railroads.
• Bonus Army (May-July 1932) — 17,000 WWI veterans demanded early bonus payment; dispersed by Douglas MacArthur with tanks and tear gas, 28 July 1932 — politically fatal.
• Lost election of 8 November 1932 to FDR by 472 to 59 electoral votes; Republicans associated with depression for a generation.

9.2 Franklin D. Roosevelt & the New Deal

• Inaugurated 4 March 1933 (last March inauguration; 20th Amendment moved it to 20 January). "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
• Bank Holiday, 6-9 March 1933; Emergency Banking Act (9 Mar 1933); restored confidence within days.
• "Fireside chats" on radio.

9.3 The First Hundred Days (4 Mar – 16 Jun 1933) — Three Rs: Relief, Recovery, Reform

9.4 The Second New Deal (1935-38)

• Works Progress Administration (WPA, 6 Apr 1935) — Harry Hopkins; ~8.5 million jobs over 8 years; Federal Writers' / Theatre / Art Projects.
• National Labor Relations / Wagner Act (5 Jul 1935) — guaranteed collective bargaining; created NLRB.
• Social Security Act (14 Aug 1935) — old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, aid to dependent children.
• Fair Labor Standards Act (25 Jun 1938) — minimum wage (25 cents/hour), 40-hour week, child labour ban.

9.5 Supreme Court showdown

• Schechter Poultry v. United States (27 May 1935) struck down NIRA; Butler v. US (6 Jan 1936) struck down AAA.
• FDR's "court-packing" plan (5 Feb 1937) failed but the Court turned — "switch in time that saved nine" — and upheld the Wagner Act and Social Security in 1937.

9.6 New Deal — verdict

• Did not end the Depression — unemployment was still 14.6% in 1940; only WWII spending truly ended it.
• But preserved democracy, built a permanent welfare state, gave the federal government decisive economic responsibility, and legitimised state intervention. As Hofstadter wrote, it was a "third American revolution."

10. The Depression in Europe — Britain, France, Germany

10.1 Britain

• Already in chronic stagnation since 1920 ("the dole" since 1911); ~3 million unemployed by January 1933.
• 1931 financial crisis — Labour PM Ramsay MacDonald formed a National Government, 24 August 1931, with Conservatives and Liberals; cut unemployment benefits 10%; abandoned gold standard 21 September 1931.
• Import Duties Act (29 February 1932) ended Free Trade — 10% general tariff; Ottawa Conference (Jul-Aug 1932) created Imperial Preference.
• Recovery from 1933 — cheap money, housing boom in the South; but "two Britains" — depressed industrial North/Wales/Scotland (Jarrow Crusade, 5-31 October 1936).
• Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (1 October 1932) — Cable Street battle, 4 October 1936; failed to break into politics.

10.2 France

• Depression came late (~1932) but lasted longer; political instability — six governments in 1932-34.
• 6 February 1934 — Place de la Concorde riots by right-wing leagues; left perceived a fascist threat.
• Popular Front — Communist + Socialist + Radical electoral alliance (Jul 1935); won elections April-May 1936; Léon Blum first Socialist (and first Jewish) PM, 4 June 1936.
• Matignon Agreements (7 June 1936) — 40-hour week, paid holidays, collective bargaining. Devaluation of the franc 1 October 1936.
• Popular Front fell apart by April 1938; France remained politically paralysed on the eve of war.

10.3 Germany — depression as detonator

• Germany was the worst-hit major economy because of its dependence on American short-term loans.
• By 1932: ~6 million unemployed (30% of workforce); industrial production ~58% of 1928 level.
• Brüning Chancellorship (March 1930 – May 1932) — pro-cyclical austerity by emergency decree under Article 48; "Hunger Chancellor"; collapse of moderate centre.
• Reichstag elections — Nazis: 12 seats (May 1928) → 107 (Sep 1930) → 230 (Jul 1932) → 196 (Nov 1932); Communists: 54 (1928) → 100 (Nov 1932); together >50% by November 1932 — a majority against the Republic.
• Brüning succeeded by Papen (Jul-Dec 1932), Schleicher (Dec 1932 – Jan 1933); intrigues in Hindenburg's circle culminated in Hitler's appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933.

11. Depression in Asia & the Colonial World — with India in focus

The Depression was not just a North-Atlantic event. It transmitted to colonies through a brutal price-scissor — primary commodity prices collapsed faster than the prices of manufactured imports, hollowing out peasant incomes and triggering political mobilisation across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

11.1 The colonial transmission mechanism

• Commodity-price collapse (1929-32): wheat down ~60%, rice ~50%, cotton ~55%, jute ~60%, rubber ~75%, sugar ~50%, tea ~40%.
• Sticky import prices: Manchester cotton cloth, kerosene, salt, machinery fell far less — the rural terms-of-trade collapsed by 30-50%.
• Fixed nominal obligations: land revenue, rent, money-lender interest stayed unchanged — real burden doubled.
• Imperial preference & sterling bloc (Ottawa 1932): Britain steered colonial trade into a closed sterling area, sacrificing colonial welfare for metropolitan recovery.

11.2 India during the Depression (1929-39)

11.3 Regional impact in India

11.4 The political turn — Civil Disobedience as a peasant movement

• Lahore Congress, 31 December 1929: Purna Swaraj resolution at midnight on the Ravi; flag hoisted by Nehru.
• 26 January 1930: first observance of Independence Day — pledge taken across 5,000 places.
• Salt Satyagraha (12 March – 6 April 1930): Gandhi's Dandi March — 240 miles, 24 days, 78 satyagrahis; salt picked up at Dandi on 6 April; movement spreads from Peshawar to Madras.
• No-rent / no-revenue campaigns: UP zamindari areas (Pratapgarh, Rae Bareli), Gujarat (Bardoli legacy), Andhra. Peasants link cause to falling prices.
• Repression: ~92,000 arrests by mid-1931; ordinances banning Congress; firing on Sholapur and Peshawar.
• Gandhi-Irwin Pact, 5 March 1931: Congress suspends CDM, attends Second Round Table; political prisoners released; salt manufacture for personal use allowed.
• Second phase (January 1932 – April 1934): after the failure of Second Round Table, Willingdon launches "Civil Martial Law" — 120,000 arrests, Congress declared illegal; movement gradually withdrawn.

11.5 Constitutional response — Government of India Act, 1935

The colonial state's institutional answer to the legitimacy crisis of the Depression decade.

• All-India Federation (never came into being — princes did not accede); provincial autonomy from 1 April 1937.
• Bicameral legislatures in 6 provinces; separate electorates retained (post-Poona Pact 24 September 1932).
• 1937 provincial elections: Congress wins clear majorities in 7 of 11 provinces, forms ministries in 8 — first experience of governance.
• Reserve Bank of India established (1 April 1935); Federal Court (1937).
• Nehru called it a "machine with strong brakes but no engine"; Jinnah called it "thoroughly rotten, fundamentally bad" — yet both parties contested under it.

11.6 Beyond India — Asia and Latin America

• China: silver-based currency initially insulated; but US Silver Purchase Act 1934 drained silver from China — deflation, banking crisis 1934-35; Nanjing government nationalised silver and shifted to a managed currency (fabi) on 4 November 1935.
• Latin America: commodity collapse triggered Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) — Vargas in Brazil (1930 coup), Cárdenas in Mexico (oil expropriation 18 March 1938).
• Southeast Asia: Vietnamese peasant uprisings (Nghệ-Tĩnh Soviets 1930-31, crushed by French); Burmese Saya San rebellion (December 1930 – April 1932).
• Egypt, Iraq, Iran: nationalist movements grew on the back of commodity collapse and reduced metropolitan capacity to police the periphery.

12. Rise of Hitler & Nazi Germany (1933-39)

The conversion of a parliamentary democracy into a totalitarian dictatorship in six months — and into a war-economy in six years — is the textbook case of how depression, humiliation, and revanchism combine.

12.1 The legal seizure of power — January-March 1933

12.2 Gleichschaltung — "coordination"

• Federal states stripped of autonomy (Reich Governors Law, 7 April 1933).
• Civil service purged of Jews and political opponents (Law for Restoration of Professional Civil Service, 7 April 1933).
• Schools, universities, courts, professional associations, cultural bodies brought under Nazi control.
• Concordat with Vatican (20 July 1933) — Church withdraws from political life in return for protection of religious activities (soon violated).

12.3 Consolidation — 1934

• Night of the Long Knives (30 June – 2 July 1934): SA leadership (Röhm) and conservative critics (Schleicher, Strasser) murdered by SS; ~85-200 dead. Army acquiesces — Hitler now its master.
• 2 August 1934: Hindenburg dies; Hitler combines offices of Chancellor and President as Führer und Reichskanzler; armed forces swear personal oath to him.

12.4 The racial state

• Nuremberg Laws (15 September 1935): Reich Citizenship Law (Jews stripped of citizenship); Law for Protection of German Blood and Honour (forbids marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews); defines who is Jew, Mischling 1st/2nd grade.
• Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938): "Night of Broken Glass" — pogrom across Germany and Austria; ~267 synagogues burnt, ~7,500 Jewish businesses smashed, ~91 killed, ~30,000 sent to concentration camps; Jewish community fined 1 billion Reichsmarks.
• Aryanisation of Jewish property; emigration encouraged till 1941; T4 euthanasia programme begins September 1939.

12.5 The Nazi economy — Schacht, Mefo bills, Four-Year Plan

• Hjalmar Schacht (Economics Minister 1934-37, Reichsbank President 1933-39): Mefo bills — disguised government IOUs to finance rearmament off-budget (issued via shell company Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft); New Plan (September 1934) — bilateral trade and clearing agreements with SE Europe and Latin America.
• Public works: Autobahn programme (begun 1933 under Fritz Todt); Reichsarbeitsdienst conscript labour; unemployment fell from 6 million (Jan 1933) to under 1 million (1937) — partly real, partly hidden (women, Jews excluded from statistics).
• Four-Year Plan (October 1936, Hermann Göring): autarky — synthetic rubber (Buna), synthetic oil, ersatz textiles; "guns before butter"; preparation for war within four years.
• Schacht resigns 1937, removed 1939 — over budgetary recklessness.

12.6 Foreign policy — revisionism in stages (1933-39)

13. Japan in the 1930s — Militarism, Manchuria and the road to Pearl Harbour

Japan industrialised faster than any non-Western country, but the Depression hit its silk exports catastrophically (price fell 65% in 1929-31). Civilian government lost credibility; the army filled the vacuum and pursued a continental empire.

13.1 Background — Taishō democracy under strain

• Universal male suffrage (1925) coupled with Peace Preservation Law (same year — repressing socialism).
• Silk and rice prices collapse 1929-31; rural distress acute; daughters sold into prostitution; young officers radicalised.
• Naval treaty disputes (London 1930) — "fleet faction" vs "treaty faction"; civilian PM Hamaguchi shot November 1930.
• 15 May 1932 incident — PM Inukai assassinated by young naval officers; end of party government.

13.2 Mukden Incident & Manchuria — 1931-33

• 18 September 1931: Kwantung Army officers stage an explosion on the South Manchurian Railway near Mukden; blame the Chinese; invade Manchuria.
• By February 1932 Manchuria conquered; 9 March 1932: puppet state of Manchukuo declared under last Qing emperor Puyi.
• Stimson Doctrine (7 January 1932): US refuses to recognise territorial changes by aggression — moral, not legal force.
• Lytton Report (October 1932): finds Japan the aggressor; recommends autonomous Manchuria under Chinese sovereignty.
• 27 March 1933: Japan walks out of the League of Nations.
• League's collective security mortally wounded — the first big test failed.

13.3 February 26 Incident (1936)

Young army officers (Kōdōha faction) attempt coup — assassinate finance minister Takahashi, Lord Keeper Saitō, Inspector-General Watanabe; Emperor orders suppression; coup fails but the "control faction" (Tōseiha) now dominates — civilian cabinets become rubber stamps for the military.

13.4 Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45)

• Marco Polo Bridge Incident (7 July 1937): clash at Lugouqiao near Beijing; full-scale war begins (undeclared).
• Shanghai falls November 1937; Nanjing captured 13 December 1937 — Rape of Nanjing: ~200,000-300,000 civilians and POWs massacred over six weeks; mass rape and looting. War crime of the first order.
• Second United Front (KMT + CCP) agreed after Xi'an Incident (December 1936); Chiang Kai-shek leads resistance; capital moved to Chongqing.
• By 1939 Japan controls eastern China but is bogged down in a war it cannot win.

13.5 Japan's drift to Axis

• Anti-Comintern Pact (25 November 1936) with Germany.
• Border clashes with USSR at Lake Khasan (Jul-Aug 1938) and Khalkhin Gol/Nomonhan (May-Sep 1939) — Japan defeated by Zhukov; turns its expansion southward instead of northward.
• Tripartite Pact (27 September 1940) with Germany and Italy.

14. Spanish Civil War (17 July 1936 – 1 April 1939) — dress rehearsal for WWII

A constitutional struggle that became an internationalised ideological war and a laboratory for fascist warfare.

14.1 Background — the Second Spanish Republic (1931-36)

• King Alfonso XIII abdicates after municipal elections; Republic proclaimed 14 April 1931.
• Reformist biennium (Azaña, 1931-33) — land reform, anti-clerical legislation, regional autonomy for Catalonia — alienates Church, army, landowners.
• Conservative biennium (1933-36) — reforms reversed; Asturias miners' revolt (October 1934) crushed by Franco.
• 16 February 1936: Popular Front (Socialists, Communists, Republicans) wins narrow election victory.

14.2 The war

• 17-18 July 1936: military uprising in Spanish Morocco spreads to Spain; Franco airlifts the Army of Africa to mainland with German Ju-52 transports.
• Sides: Nationalists (Franco, Falange, Carlists, Church, landowners, army) vs Republicans (government, Socialists, Communists, anarchists CNT-FAI, POUM, Basque & Catalan autonomists).
• Foreign intervention: Germany (Condor Legion), Italy (Corpo Truppe Volontarie ~75,000) for Nationalists; USSR (advisers, arms, NKVD) for Republicans; International Brigades (~35,000 volunteers from 50+ countries — including the British, American Lincoln, French, German exile units).
• Non-Intervention Committee (London, August 1936) — Britain and France's policy of "neutrality" effectively starved the Republic of arms while Germany and Italy openly supplied Franco.
• Guernica (26 April 1937): Condor Legion terror-bombs the Basque town on market day — ~250-1,650 dead; Picasso's painting (June 1937) immortalises it.
• Internecine Republican violence: Barcelona May Days (3-8 May 1937) — Communists crush POUM and anarchists; documented by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia.
• End: Madrid falls 28 March 1939; Franco declares victory 1 April 1939. ~500,000 dead; ~500,000 refugees flee to France.

15. Appeasement — from the Rhineland to Munich to Poland

The British-led policy of conceding to Hitler's revisionist demands in the hope that, once Versailles's "legitimate" grievances were redressed, Germany would become a satisfied power. It failed because Hitler's goals were unlimited.

15.1 Drivers of appeasement

• Memory of WWI carnage; pacifist public opinion (Peace Ballot, June 1935 — 11.6 million signatures).
• Economic constraint after Depression; Treasury's "fourth arm of defence" doctrine.
• Strategic over-stretch — Britain defended a global empire against Germany, Italy and Japan simultaneously.
• Anti-communism — Nazi Germany seen as a buffer against Soviet expansion.
• Belief Versailles was unjust; Hitler's claims (self-determination of Germans) had some merit.
• Faith in Hitler's word ("rational statesman" view).

15.2 Escalation table

16. Failure of the League of Nations & Collective Security

The League was the institutional embodiment of Wilsonian liberal internationalism. By 1939 it was a corpse. Why?

16.1 Structural weaknesses (built-in)

• Absent giants: USA never joined (Senate rejected Treaty of Versailles 19 March 1920); USSR joined only 1934 and expelled 1939; Germany joined 1926, left 1933; Japan left 1933; Italy left 1937.
• No army: reliant on member-state contributions; "moral force" of public opinion proved illusory.
• Unanimity rule in Council on substantive matters — any one power could block.
• Tied to Versailles — defending it discredited the League with revisionists.
• Anglo-French ambivalence — Britain preferred bilateral diplomacy, France wanted hard security guarantees the League could not provide.

16.2 Test cases — the trajectory of failure

Hobsbawm's verdict: "The League had passed away long before it was officially dissolved in 1946."

16.3 Surviving achievements

• International Labour Organization (ILO) — survived into UN system.
• Health Organization (precursor to WHO); refugee work under Nansen.
• Mandate system — flawed but more accountable than direct annexation.
• Institutional template inherited by the UN.

17. Inter-war culture, science & ideas

The most creative cultural and intellectual moment of the 20th century — modernism — was also the response of an anxious civilisation to mechanised war and totalitarian politics.

17.1 Modernism in literature & arts

• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922); James Joyce, Ulysses (1922); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925); Kafka (posthumous 1925-26).
• Surrealism (André Breton Manifesto 1924; Dalí, Magritte); Dada (Tzara, Duchamp); Bauhaus (Weimar 1919 → Dessau 1925 → Berlin 1932 — closed by Nazis).
• Cinema — Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin 1925), Riefenstahl (Triumph of the Will 1935), Chaplin (Modern Times 1936), Renoir (La Grande Illusion 1937).
• Lost Generation in America — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein.

17.2 Revolutions in science

• Einstein — General Relativity confirmed by Eddington's eclipse expedition (29 May 1919); 1921 Nobel.
• Quantum mechanics — Bohr, Heisenberg (Uncertainty Principle 1927), Schrödinger, Dirac.
• Edwin Hubble — expanding universe (1929).
• Nuclear physics — Chadwick discovers neutron (1932); Hahn-Strassmann discover nuclear fission (December 1938).
• Penicillin — Fleming 1928.

17.3 Social thought

• Freud — Civilization and its Discontents (1930); Jung's analytical psychology.
• Frankfurt School — Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin (Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" 1936).
• Keynes — General Theory (4 February 1936) reshapes economics; revolution against laissez-faire.
• Karl Polanyi (later The Great Transformation 1944) — interwar as the collapse of self-regulating market civilisation.
• Antonio Gramsci — Prison Notebooks (1929-35) — concepts of hegemony and passive revolution.

17.4 Mass media as politics

• Radio — FDR's Fireside Chats (from 12 March 1933); Goebbels's Volksempfänger (cheap "people's receivers").
• Cinema as propaganda (Riefenstahl; Soviet socialist realism).
• Newsreels — Pathé, Movietone — universalise news.
• 1936 Berlin Olympics — Nazi spectacle and Jesse Owens's four golds.

18. Fascism, Nazism & Stalinist Communism — a comparative table

UPSC-2020 directly compared "Fascism and Nazism". The honest comparative answer must include Stalinist communism as the third totalitarianism — and also note the crucial differences.

19. Causes of the Second World War — the convergence

1. Versailles flaws: war-guilt clause, reparations, territorial losses, demilitarisation — created revanchist constituency in Germany.
2. Failure of collective security: League unable to handle Manchuria, Abyssinia, Rhineland, Spain.
3. Great Depression: economic nationalism, autarky, discrediting of liberal democracy; Nazi vote rose with unemployment.
4. Rise of aggressive regimes: Germany, Italy, Japan — all with expansionist programmes.
5. Appeasement: Anglo-French concessions emboldened Hitler.
6. US isolationism: Neutrality Acts (1935, 1936, 1937, 1939) removed the world's largest economy from collective security.
7. Soviet calculations: Western refusal of meaningful anti-Hitler alliance drove Stalin to Nazi-Soviet Pact (23 August 1939) — the immediate green light.
8. Hitler's ideology & agency: Lebensraum, racial supremacism — A.J.P. Taylor's "rational statesman" thesis (1961) is contested; Holocaust intent indicates the war was about more than Versailles redress.
9. Polish guarantee: 31 March 1939 — converted any German move east into world war.

20. Significance & Indian connections (1919-39)

20.1 Indian impact of inter-war crisis

• Depression accelerated nationalism: Civil Disobedience Movement, no-rent campaigns, Kisan Sabhas, working-class radicalisation.
• Constitutional advance under crisis: Government of India Act 1935 — first taste of provincial self-rule; 1937 elections; Congress ministries (Jul 1937 – Oct 1939).
• Communist & socialist currents: Communist Party of India (Tashkent 1920, Kanpur 1925); Congress Socialist Party (May 1934); Royists; Trade Union Congress.
• Foreign-policy awareness: Nehru's Glimpses of World History (letters from prison 1930-33); Congress resolutions condemning Abyssinia, Spain, Japan in China; Bose meets Mussolini and Hitler (1930s, 1941).
• Bose & the Tripuri crisis (1939): Subhas Chandra Bose re-elected Congress President (29 Jan 1939) but resigns under Gandhi's opposition; founds Forward Bloc 3 May 1939.
• Sino-Indian solidarity: Indian Medical Mission to China (1938) — Dr. Dwarkanath Kotnis (died in China 9 Dec 1942).

20.2 Outbreak of WWII and India (Sep 1939 – Aug 1940)

• 3 September 1939: Viceroy Linlithgow declares India at war without consulting Indian leaders; Congress demands Britain define war aims.
• October-November 1939: Congress ministries resign in protest; Jinnah's Muslim League declares "Day of Deliverance" (22 December 1939).
• March 1940: Lahore Resolution — Muslim League demands separate states for Muslim-majority areas.
• August Offer (8 August 1940): Viceroy promises Dominion Status after war, expansion of Executive Council, War Advisory Council, and protection of minority interests (effective veto for League) — rejected by Congress and League both.
• Individual Satyagraha (October 1940): Gandhi launches anti-war satyagraha with Vinoba Bhave (17 Oct) and Nehru (31 Oct) as first satyagrahis.

20.3 Long-term legacy of the inter-war period

• Discrediting of laissez-faire — global rise of mixed-economy welfare states post-1945.
• Bretton Woods (1944), UN (1945), IMF, World Bank, GATT — institutional architecture explicitly designed to avoid the inter-war errors.
• End of European colonial monopolies — colonies that had financed the metropoles during Depression demanded their share; decolonisation begins 1947 (India), accelerates 1956-65.
• Cold War — emerges from the wartime alliance against the Axis but reflects unresolved inter-war ideological contest between liberal capitalism and Soviet communism.
• Holocaust memory — shapes post-war human-rights regime: UDHR (1948), Genocide Convention (1948), Refugee Convention (1951).