In German eyes incompetents now ruled over inferior races whom Germany had defeated the last time in spite of their largely Germanic ruling elite that had-fortunately for Germany-been replaced by the Bolsheviks. Victory in the west would enable Germany to crush the in a quick war. The last war demonstrated that this was the one for which Germany must prepare most effectively. A short war against Czechoslovakia requiring no special preparation would precede the main one against the Western Powers. Rearmament was geared to the wars Hitler expected to fight. Thereafter, Hitler rapidly established the one-party state, initiated measures in the racial field, and ordered a massive program of rearmament. Members of the old elite talked President intoĪppointing Hitler as chancellor in January 1933. The large families raised by the settlers would replace the casualties incurred in the conquest of the land and provide soldiers for the next conquests. The latter he defined not as the snippets of land Germany had lost by the peace of 1919 but as many hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land for settlement by Germans displacing the local population. In his speeches and writings, he asserted that the Germans deserved to control the globe and could do so if they adopted a one-party state, redoubled their racial superiority by racial awareness and the removal of Jews, and went to war for proper aims. Unwilling to accept the defeat of 1918, increasing numbers of Germans rallied to the National Socialists (Nazis) led by. The aims of Germany were entirely different. In this case also, military aggression was the resumption of a prior policy. Mussolini's first major further step was the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936. Similarly, Italy under continued an expansionist policy that in prior decades had garnered colonial territories in Africa, the Dodecanese Islands in the, and territory from Austria-Hungary. In July 1937 this led to open hostilities with China, but however awful for the Chinese, these actions were a continuation of prior Japanese expansionist policies. In 1931 Japan seized Manchuria from China and continued its advance on the mainland. There followed war with Russia, the annexation of Korea, and entrance into on the Allied side in order to take parts of Germany's empire in the Pacific. Japan had begun imperial expansion at the end of the nineteenth century with war against China. The country that took the initiative for another world war was Germany, but because the regime that did so for novel reasons acted in a world in which others had started wars of their own, something has to be said about the latter. Furthermore, Russia, which had played a major role in the war in spite of military defeats, had collapsed internally, been taken over by the Bolsheviks, and was more interested in upsetting than maintaining the peace. The country most strengthened by the war had shoved the burden of keeping the peace on the countries most weakened by it. Both had been terribly damaged by the war and found themselves abandoned by the, which had helped save them from defeat in 1918, had participated in the writing of the peace treaties, but had then turned its back on the settlement. This situation especially affected the nominal victors, France and. This horror, on the other hand, could favor a country determined on war by restraining those who in their revulsion at war had disarmed, were reluctant to rearm, and believed that almost any sacrifices these actions entailed were likely to be less than those a new conflict would exact. On the one hand, that memory led many to have such a horror of military conflict that they shrank from the very idea. The maintenance of peace in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was both strengthened and weakened by the memory of the costs of.
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