The Second

World War Causes and Effects

Introduction World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict

lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis.

It was the most widespread war in history, with more than 100 million military personnel mobilized. In a state of "total war", the major participants placed their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources.

Marked by significant events involving the mass death of civilians, including the Holocaust and the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare, it was the deadliest conflict in human history,  resulting in 50 million to over 70 million fatalities.

The Causes• League of Nations and its failure• Treaty of Versailles• Rise of Nazism and Hitler• Policy of appeasement

The Effects

• War Crime• Formation of the United Nations• Rise of new super powers• The Woman’s strike• End of the great depression

The Causes• The main causes of World War II were nationalistic

tensions, unresolved issues, and resentments resulting from the World War I and the interwar period in Europe, plus the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

• The culmination of events that led to the outbreak of war are generally understood to be the 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany and Soviet Russia and the 1937 invasion of the Republic of China by the Empire of Japan.

• These military aggressions were the result of decisions made by the authoritarian ruling Nazi elite in Germany and by the leadership of the Kwantung Army in Japan. World War II started after these aggressive actions were met with an official declaration of war and/or armed resistance.

L e a g u e o f N a t i o n s a n d i t s f a i l u r e

• The League of Nations was an international organization set up in 1919 to help keep world peace.

• It was intended that all countries would be members of the League and that if there were disputes between countries they could be settled by negotiation rather than by force.

• If this failed then countries would stop trading with the aggressive country and if that failed then countries would use their armies to fight. In theory the League of Nations was a good idea and did have some early successes.

• But ultimately it was a failure. The whole world was hit by a depression in the late 1920s. A depression is when a country's economy falls. Trade is reduced, businesses lose income, prices fall and unemployment rises.

• In 1931, Japan was hit badly by the depression. People lost faith in the government and turned to the army to find a solution. The army invaded Manchuria in China, an area rich in minerals and resources. China appealed to the League for help. The Japanese government were told to order the army to leave Manchuria immediately. However, the army took no notice of the government and continued its conquest of Manchuria.

• The League then called for countries to stop trading with Japan but because of the depression many countries did not want to risk losing trade and did not agree to the request. The League then made a further call for Japan to withdraw from Manchuria but Japan's response was to leave the League of Nations.

League of Nations and its failure• In October 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia. The

Abyssinians did not have the strength to withstand an attack by Italy and appealed to the League of Nations for help.

• The League condemned the attack and called on member states to impose trade restrictions with Italy. However, the trade restrictions were not carried out because they would have little effect. Italy would be able to trade with non-member states, particularly America. Furthermore, Britain and France did not want to risk Italy making an attack on them.

• In order to stop Italy's aggression, the leaders of Britain and France held a meeting and decided that Italy could have two areas of land in Abyssinia provided that there were no further attacks on the African country. Although Mussolini accepted the plan, there was a public outcry in Britain and the plan was dropped.

Treaty of Versailles• The Treaty of Versailles was neither lenient enough to

appease Germany, nor harsh enough to prevent it from becoming the dominant continental power again. The treaty placed the blame, or "war guilt" on Germany and Austria-Hungary, and punished them for their "responsibility" rather than working out an agreement that would assure long-term peace.

• The treaty resulted in harsh monetary reparations, separated millions of ethnic Germans into neighboring countries ,territorial dismemberment, caused mass ethnic resettlement and caused hyperinflation of the German currency - see inflation in the Weimar Republic.

• The Weimar Republic printed trillions of marks and borrowed heavily from the United States (to later default) to pay war reparations to Britain and France, who still carried war debt from World War I.

Treaty of Versailles• The treaty created bitter resentment towards the victors of World War I,

who had promised the people of Germany that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points would be a guideline for peace; however, the US played a minor role in World War I and Wilson could not convince the Allies to agree to adopt his Fourteen Points.

• Many Germans felt that the German government had agreed to an armistice based on this understanding, while others felt that the German Revolution had been orchestrated by the "November criminals" who later assumed office in the new Weimar Republic.

• Contributing to this, following the Armistice of 1918, Allied forces, including those of the American Army, occupied the Rhineland as far east as the river with some small bridgeheads on the east bank at places like Cologne. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 the occupation was continued.

• The treaty specified three occupation Zones, which were due to be evacuated by Allied troops five, ten and finally 15 years after the formal ratification of the treaty, which took place in 1920, thus the occupation was intended to last until 1935. In fact, the last Allied troops left Germany five years prior to that date in 1930 in a good-will reaction to the Weimar Republic's policy of reconciliation in the era of Gustav Stresemann and the Locarno Pact.

Treaty of Versailles• The German colonies were taken during the war, and

Italy took the southern half of Tyrol after an armistice had been agreed upon. The war in the east ended with the collapse of Russian Empire, and German troops occupied (with varying degree of control) large parts of Eastern and Central Europe.

• After the destructive and indecisive battle of Jutland (1916) and the mutiny of its sailors in 1917, The Kaiserliche Marine spent most of the war in port, only to be turned over to the allies and scuttled at surrender by its own officers.

• The lack of an obvious military defeat was one of the pillars that held together the Dolchstosslegende and gave the Nazis another tool at their disposal.

Rise of Nazism and Hitler• Adolf Hitler was the Führer (leader) of the National Socialist

German Workers Party (Nazi Party) and of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. In that capacity he was Chancellor of Germany, head of government, and head of state, an absolute dictator.

• Having secured supreme political power without winning support from the majority of Germans, Hitler did go on to win it and remained overwhelmingly popular until the very end of his regime.

• He was a master orator, and with all of Germany's mass media under the control of his propaganda chief, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, he was able to persuade most Germans that he was their savior from the Depression, the Communists, the Versailles Treaty and the Jews.

• Nazism is the name by which Adolf Hitler's National Socialist ideas came to be known. Hitler helped build up the Nazi party after Germany's defeat in the First World War. His ideas were very extreme, and his followers were trained like soldiers.

Rise of Nazism and Hitler• Unemployment was solved by expanding the armed forces and

the armament industries. Then Hitler began seizing other countries, first Austria and part of Czechoslovakia in 1938. During World War II, with his ally Mussolini of Italy, Hitler's armies occupied most of Europe. Hitler's one more crime is the Holocaust. He committed suicide in Berlin in 1945 when Germany was defeated.

• Hitler came to power legally after the slump of 1929-32. During this crisis, six million Germans were unemployed, and many people voted for the Nazis hoping they could solve Germany's problems. Once in power, Hitler set up concentration camps for his opponents, abolished other political parties, and controlled all newspapers, radio and films. He insisted that as 'Aryans', Germans were a master race, destined to rule the world. Jews and Gypsies were systematically persecuted and murdered because they were considered members of inferior races.

Policy of Appeasement• The term appeasement is commonly understood to refer to a

diplomatic policy aimed at avoiding war by making concessions to another power.

• Historian Paul Kennedy defines it as "the policy of settling international quarrels by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise, thereby avoiding the resort to an armed conflict which would be expensive, bloody, and possibly dangerous. "

• Kenendy's definition has been widely cited by scholars. Appeasement was used by European democracies in the 1930s who wished to avoid war with the dictatorships of Germany and Italy, bearing in mind the horrors of the First World War.

• The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany between 1937 and 1939. His policies of avoiding war with Germany have been the subject of intense debate for seventy years among academics, politicians and diplomats. The historian's assessment of Chamberlain has ranged from condemnation for allowing Hitler to grow too strong, to the judgement that he had no alternative and acted in Britain's best interests.

• At the time, these concessions were widely seen as positive, and the Munich Pact among Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy prompted Chamberlain to announce that he had secured "peace for our time".

The Effects The effects of World War II had far-reaching implications for most

of the world. Many millions of lives had been lost as a result of the war. Germany was divided into four quadrants, which were controlled by the Allied Powers — the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union — and itself was one of the survivors.

The war can be identified to varying degrees as the catalyst for many continental, national and local phenomena, such as the redrawing of European borders, the birth of the United Kingdom's welfare state, the communist revolution in China and Eastern Europe, the creation of Israel, and the division of Germany and Korea and later of Vietnam.

In addition, many organizations have roots in the Second World War; for example, the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund. Technologies, such as nuclear fission, the electronic computer and the jet engine, also appeared during this period.

The Effects

• War Crime• Formation of the United Nations• Rise of new super powers• The Woman’s strike• End of the great depression

War Crime After the war, many high-ranking Germans were hanged for war crimes, as well

as the mass murder of the Jews in the Holocaust committed mainly on the area of General Government, in the Nuremberg trials. Though Hitler and many of his close conspirators committed suicide, most high-ranking officials in Germany did not escape justice so easily.

When the concentration camps throughout Europe were liberated, the world was shocked to see what horrors lay within.

Around twelve million people had been murdered in total (half of them Jews) and this number did not include those who had been used for medical experimentation or tortured by the camp guards.

Here the Allies were faced with a dilemma: since genocide had never been publicly recognized before, there were no formal laws against such mass murder. Instead, the Nuremberg Trials (November 1945), during which Hitler's remaining officials were declared guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, set a standard to judge others who would commit genocide in the future.

Similarly Japanese leaders were prosecuted in the Tokyo War Crime Trial. Although the deliberate targeting of civilians was already defined as a war

crime and it had been used extensively by both sides, most notably in Poland, Britain, Germany and Japan, those responsible were never tried for it.

In other countries, notably in Finland, the Allies demanded the political leadership to be prosecuted in “war-responsibility trials.”

Formation of the United Nations

Another result of World War II was the formation of the United Nations (UN).

After the first world war, the Allies had created the League of Nations (LoF), whose purpose was to keep peace and stability in Europe. This was the first global organization in history, but it had several problems, which led to World War II.

When they created the United Nations on October 24, 1945, the Allies made sure to improve the UN, especially by splitting the power among five major countries (United Kingdom, France, United States, China, and USSR) instead of just two or three, as in the League of Nations.

The biggest advantage the United Nations has over the League of Nations is the presence of world superpowers such as the United States and Russia, for the League had little actual international power because of the absence of these nations.

Rise of super powers However, though the UN had five major powers, there

were only two countries that were economically powerful after World War II.

The war severely injured the natural resource supply and the economy of the Western European countries, especially Britain, France, and Germany.

These countries had previously dominated the world's trade market, and now two new countries who had been relatively unharmed during the war took their places -- the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States.

The USSR had only been damaged on its western side; the east was completely unharmed.

The U.S. had only sent its armies over to Europe; none of the fighting had taken place on American soil.

The war actually boosted the American economy, ending the Great Depression and allowing the U.S. to become a superpower in the post-war global market.

The war also resulted in a major victory for women's rights advocates.

During the war, the government of every country drafted men to serve in the army. Since men had held most of the jobs at this time, the military draft left behind a vacuum in factories, offices, and farms.

This vacuum was filled by women, many of whom had never worked before. As the war progressed, these women developed their self-confidence and gained a strong sense of independence.

By the time the fighting ended and the men returned, the women refused to give up their jobs; many of them enjoyed making their own living and not having to depend on their husbands or brothers or sons for money.

The government was forced to allow women to work and to increase equality in pay (though pay is not completely equal even today).

Women continue to fight for complete equality, but World War II helped them considerably on their way.

Woman’s Strike