the history of world war ii

The history of World War II is the history of a global conflict between the Allies and the Axis powers from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945. It is generally considered to have begun on 1 September 1939, when Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland, after which the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany.

2 articles, 1 video, 1 book · about 2 hr 33 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   

   the history of world war ii · Wikipedia · 60+ min read

   Benito Mussolini's fascist movement seized power in Italy from 1922 to 1925, abolishing representative democracy and repressing socialist, left-wing and liberal forces. Its aggressive expansionist foreign policy aimed to make Italy a world power and promised a "New Roman Empire." Germany invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and split it into the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a pro-German client state, the Slovak Republic, as Germany and Italy were becoming more aggressive. Hitler's objectives were to eliminate the Soviet Union as a military power, exterminate communism, generate Lebensraum ("living space") by dispossessing the native population, and guarantee access to strategic resources needed to defeat Germany's remaining rivals.

2. Read
   

   The Dawn of WWII, According to the Chief of British Secret Intelligence - JSTOR Daily · JSTOR Daily · 2 min read

   "C.," the Chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, wrote in Foreign Affairs in April 1939 that autocratic regimes were an existential threat to liberal-democratic ideologies, in an essay titled "Will Hitler Save Democracy?"

3. Watch
   

   Women as spoils of war at the end of World War Two | DW Documentary · YouTube · 42 min watch

   In early 1945, Allied soldiers sexually abused women in Germany. The lasting trauma and the silence around it are a largely forgotten part of the war's end in Europe, and the documentary links it to sexual violence in warfare today.

4. Book
   

   The Second World War · Bookshop.org

   The Second World War by Antony Beevor is a single-volume history of the war, providing an intimate account of it.

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