♪ [theme song plays] ♪
[gunfire]
[narrator] September 1st 1939, German troops thrust deep
into Poland to win a swift and absolute victory.
Barely 20 years earlier, their forefathers had also been
on the march, but back into their
homeland as a defeated army.
In November 1918, after four years of World War One,
Germany's Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II,
had been forced to abdicate.
His armies were being ground down by a remorseless
offensive by British, French and US troops.
His people faced starvation.
But already a dangerous myth was taking root.
The German generals and troops claimed that they
hadn't been defeated in battle,
but betrayed by their own cowardly politicians.
Even so, at 11 in the morning on November 11th 1918,
the 11th hour of the 11th day of the
11th month, World War One came to an end.
The following month, President Woodrow Wilson
of the United States arrived in Europe
promising to create a new world order.
He persuaded the world's leaders
to sign up to a new League of Nations.
At the Treaty of Versailles, they agreed that from now on
disputes between countries would be resolved
not by fighting, but by debate in the League.
The peoples of Europe were set free.
And Germany's ally, the Austro Hungarian
empire, was dismembered.
Out of it, new nations were created.
Austria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Germany itself was greatly reduced in size.
But this process contained a time bomb.
Not everyone celebrated the birth
of countries like Czechoslovakia.
Several of them contained substantial German minorities.
One day the desire to reunite the
German peoples would come to haunt Europe.
The war torn German people also had
one final indignity inflicted on them.
They were forced to pay a massive 6.6 billion Pounds
in reparations to France and Britain,
something they could ill afford.
And when he returned to America,
Wilson's new World order immediately fell apart.
The U.S. Congress decided it could not
risk being sucked into another war in Europe.
It refused to join his League and
the U.S. withdrew into isolationism.
Germany was now a very different nation.
It was still Europe's biggest country
but its militaristic monarchy had gone.
It had become a democracy.
But its government, the so called Weimar Republic,
was soon struck by a series of hammer blows.
Street battles erupted between extreme right wing
nationalists and Communists trying start a revolution.
Then in 1923, the country was devastated by hyper inflation,
which reached hundreds of per cent a month.
Ordinary people's savings were wiped out.
This was fertile ground for a new breed of
rabble rousing right wing politicians.
Among them Adolf Hitler.
Hitler had been born in Austria.
He had fought bravely as a soldier
in World War One and been awarded the Iron Cross.
On returning to Germany he settled in Munich,
and his fiery oratory soon enabled him to seize
control of the small National Socialist or Nazi Party.
In October 1923, Hitler and his henchmen attempted an
armed coup against the Weimar government.
It failed, and he was sentenced to nine months.
In prison he wrote a book, Mein Kampf,
"My Struggle", in which he blamed
Germany's ills on the Jews
and demanded that it rebuild its strength
and seek new territories in the east.
On his release, he set about building the Nazis
into a proper, disciplined political party.
From now on, he would use the democratic
system to achieve power.
But for the next five years, Weimar Germany prospered.
Support for extremist parties, left and right, dwindled.
Then suddenly, Hitler's opportunity arrived.
In October 1929, the US stock market crashed.
Billions of dollars were lost and an
economic depression swept across the world.
Unemployment in Germany soared to over six million.
Only extremist politicians seemed to offer a solution.
Politicians like Hitler.
By 1931, his Nazis were a true mass movement.
And they had their own brownshirted thugs,
the SA stormtroops who numbered almost three million.
In the 1932 elections, the Nazis became the
largest party in Germany's parliament, the Reichstag.
But Hitler refused to join a coalition,
leaving parliament paralysed.
To break the impasse, President Hindenburg made
him Chancellor in January 1933, head of the government.
Within a month, the Reichstag burned down.
Hitler accused the communists and demanded emergency powers.
He then used them to ban all other political parties.
In August 1934 President Hindenburg died.
Hitler declared himself President.
He was now absolute leader, the Fuehrer, of Germany.
At first there was little sign of what was to come.
For the next three years the Fuehrer
concentrated on rebuilding Germany's economy.
He spent millions on public works, including the 5,000 mile
autobahn system, to soak up the unemployed.
But, in secret Hitler was also spending
lavishly on a huge rearmament programme.
Under the Versailles Treaty, the German army
had been limited to 100,000 men.
The country was forbidden to have
an air force, tanks or submarines.
This small army was trebled in size.
Then in 1935, Hitler came out into the open.
He unveiled a brand new air force, the Luftwaffe.
It had 2,500 planes, far more than Britain or France.
Unemployment plunged, and the Nazis
became enormously popular.
Now emboldened, the Fuehrer made
his first expansionist move.
In 1935, he reoccupied the Saarland district
on the French border, after it voted to return
from League of Nations' to German rule.
A year later he sent German troops into the Rhineland,
part of Germany which had been demilitarized at Versailles.
At the time, many felt that Hitler was only
claiming back what was rightfully Germany's.
Neither Britain nor France objected.
When Berlin hosted the 1936 Olympic games,
the Nazis were seen by many as
firm but fair, a government which
was restoring the nation's pride,
and which didn't threaten anyone.
Of course there were signs.
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws, forbade Jews to marry true
Aryan Germans and deprived them of their citizenship.
But when the first threats came to world peace,
they didn't come from Hitler at all,
but from somewhere else entirely.
Japan at the start of the 20th century
was already a military power.
It had defeated Russia in a war in 1905 and it
had fought alongside the Allies in World War One.
After the war, Japan was an acknowledged world power,
and it signed up to the League of Nations.
But politically, it was a mess of contradictions.
Nominally a democracy, the feudal
tradition was still strong.
Most Japanese revered their Emperor as a living god,
and regarded him as their true leader.
And the country faced major economic problems,
its population was exploding.
And it had no natural resources
to fuel its rapidly expanding industries.
Its leaders needed solutions and
they saw them in Chinese Manchuria.
Manchuria was a land of rich grain fields,
with plenty of coal and minerals.
It was a perfect target.
Japanese troops were already stationed there.
Other possible targets were the colonies ruled by the
European powers, Burma, Malaya, and Hong Kong, controlled
by Britain; Indo China, ruled by
France; and the Dutch East Indies.
But at this stage Japan had to be cautious.
It didn't want to rouse the other great power
in the Pacific, the United States.
For all its anti imperialist slogans,
the U.S. actually ran an unofficial empire
in the Pacific.
The Philippines, Guam and several
islands were under its direct rule.
It undoubtedly had the strength to take on Japan,
but since the end of World War One,
it had had other distractions.
This was America's jazz age.
Throughout the 1920s, the nation concentrated
on exploiting its vast resources.
There was an economic boom that seemed without end.
Fortunes were made both in industry and the stock markets.
America seemed lost to the increasing pursuit of pleasure.
With distractions like these, Japan's growing
pains in the Pacific seemed very far away.
America had slashed its army after World War One,
and agreed a naval reduction treaty
with Britain, France and Japan.
This, in effect, handed naval superiority
in the Pacific to the Japanese.
And then came the Great Depression.
As the economic devastation spread,
a quarter of the population lost their jobs.
Tens of thousands were made homeless,
living in Shanty towns.
Whereas before it had been distracted by pleasure,
now America was distracted by pain.
It was time for Japan to make her move.
In 1931, without even informing their own elected
government, the Japanese forces in Manchuria seized the
capital Mukden and then overran the rest of the territory.
A puppet state, Manchukuo was proclaimed
under a puppet ruler.
Henry Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, who had been
deposed in 1911, was dragged out of retirement.
At its headquarters in Geneva,
the League of Nations now faced its first great test.
Japan was universally condemned.
But her response was blunt.
Japan however finds it impossible to
accept the report adopted by the assembly.
[narrator] The Japanese then just walked out,
and the League suddenly realized there was
nothing it could do about Manchuria.
Japan was declared an international pariah,
but it didn't care.
Its leaders had turned their eyes
to further conquests, in China.
These were easy pickings, China was in a state of chaos.
The government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek
was locked in conflict with the Chinese
communist party under Mao Tse Tung.
There was civil war.
In 1936, as a precursor to invasion,
the Japanese signed a pact with Hitler.
The aim was to guard against any attack
by Soviet Russia, were it to move on China.
Then, in July 1937 the Japanese provoked an
incident with Chinese troops and invaded.
At first the Chinese were taken by surprise.
But they soon fought back fiercely,
the Communists even joining the
Kuomintang in a united front.
The Japanese responded with amphibious landings.
By the end of 1937 they had
overrun much of northern China and the coast.
The Japanese fought this war with exceptional brutality,
bombing cities indiscriminately.
Westerners living in the commercial centre,
the port of Shanghai, were now evacuated.
The city was then besieged for three months.
It suffered widespread damage, the Japanese forces
showing no pity or concern for the native population.
But it was after the capture of Nanking,
then the Chinese capital, on December the 17th, 1937
that the Japanese forces really ran amok.
Over 300,000 civilians are estimated to have been massacred
during a six week orgy of rape and indiscriminate killing.
The Japanese even attacked British and U.S. warships which
had been sent to protect their shipping and trade.
The worst incident came on December the 12th 1937.
The American gunboat Panay was sunk
by Japanese bombers, 50 crewmen died.
Despite this, the Western powers refused to intervene.
So the League of Nations could do nothing.
In the United States President Roosevelt
wanted to impose a naval blockade of Japan.
[President Roosevelt] It has become clear that acts
and policies of nations in other parts of the world
have far reaching effects on us.
[narrator] But the British would have none of it,
fearing that it might provoke a war.
So, all Roosevelt could offer was a $25 million
loan to Chiang Kai Shek to buy arms.
Even though the Communists were
now fighting alongside the Kuomintang,
the Soviet Union did little to help either.
Its only involvement was a series of clashes
along its own border with Manchuria.
But China itself received nothing.
Instead it had to fight on alone.
During 1938, the Japanese overran Canton, and pushed
the Chinese forces deeper into the west of the country.
All the rhetoric of the League of Nations,
all those promises to stop international
aggression had come to nothing.
And by now the Western powers were
facing aggression much closer to home.
Today, it is easy to laugh at Benito Mussolini,
the fascist dictator of Italy.
All that posturing seems faintly ridiculous now.
But it didn't seem that way in 1922.
Back then, Italy had seemed to be on the edge of anarchy.
The country was riven by strikes and land seizures.
The democratic government, just as in Germany,
seemed powerless in the face of such unrest.
So Benito Mussolini, a war veteran
and a journalist, decided to take a stand.
He organised a right wing nationalist party, the Fascists.
With the country paralysed by a general strike in August
1922, Mussolini ordered his followers to march on Rome.
Fearing a civil war, Italy's king,
Victor Emmanuel, asked him to form a government.
Mussolini swiftly stamped out any political opposition,
and assumed dictatorial powers.
By 1928, his position seemed secure.
Parliament was appointed rather than elected, and all power
was firmly in the hands of the Fascist Grand Council.
Like Hitler, Mussolini's first
acts made him immensely popular.
Massive programmes of public works provided
employment and transformed Italy's infrastructure.
Corruption was rooted out and the
Mafia more or less eliminated.
Italy's armed forces were built up,
including an advanced, modern air force.
In the Mediterranean, Mussolini launched a powerful navy,
bigger than the combined might of the
British and French Mediterranean fleets.
When the Great Depression came,
Italy seemed to weather it better than most.
Mussolini became a source of worldwide inspiration.
Political leaders, not least Adolf Hitler in Germany,
saw the Fascist system as a role model,
strong and purposeful in contrast to the weakness
of the democracies in Britain and France.
But Mussolini wanted more than adulation.
He wanted to recreate the Roman empire.
And he already had a target in mind
for his first imperial land grab.
His target was Abyssinia, today's Ethiopia.
Italy already had colonies on its borders
in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.
In December 1934, Italian forces provoked a clash
with Abyssinian troops at an oasis in the Ogaden region,
well inside Abyssinian territory.
Mussolini then sent reinforcements to Eritrea
and Italian Somaliland, demanding
that Abyssinia pay reparations.
The Emperor of Abyssinia, Haile Selassie appealed
in person to the League of Nations.
[Haile Selassie] [speaking in foreign language]
[narrator] He called on it to live up to its ideals.
Here was a small nation under threat
from another member of the League.
This was the supreme test.
But the League did nothing.
Britain's Foreign Minister Anthony Eden at least tried
to broker a peace deal, but Mussolini would have none of it.
In early October 1935 the Italian army invaded
from Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.
The primitive Abyssinian forces stood little chance
against a modern army equipped with artillery and tanks.
The Italian air force had total command of the air,
and harried the Abyssinians.
On occasions dropping gas bombs even though gas had been
outlawed at Versailles as a "crime against humanity".
After six months, Abyssinia was completely overrun.
The Emperor Haile Selassie fled into exile in Britain.
From its headquarters in Switzerland,
the League of Nations wrung its hands.
It did impose economic sanctions,
but they had little effect.
Mussolini's aggression had revealed two things.
The League of Nations, that great
hope for peace, was impotent.
And both Europe's supposed major powers,
the democracies Britain and France,
no longer had the stomach for a fight.
Both Britain and France had been shattered by World War One
and their economies had never really recovered.
Both had witnessed waves of strikes and unrest.
Both had suffered mass unemployment
even before the Great Depression.
Both also faced the cost of controlling empires,
now swollen by taking on Germany's former colonies
and the Middle Eastern territories
once run by the Turkish Ottoman empire.
And above all, both had been traumatised
by the horrific casualties of World War One.
A succession of British leaders, Lloyd George,
Ramsay Macdonald and above all Stanley Baldwin,
all resolved to keep Britain out of future conflicts.
Despite horrific casualties on the Western Front,
Britain had ended World War One with
a large and very effective conscript army.
This was immediately run down to a small professional
force designed to police its sprawling empire.
And when the Great Depression struck,
any ideas of modernising the army were abandoned.
It meant that Britain went into the run up
to war economically and militarily weak.
French losses during World War One
had been even worse than the British.
Ever mistrustful of the Germans,
a large conscript army was maintained,
but throughout the 1920s,
France's birth rate had declined.
It became clear that there would be a
manpower shortage by the mid to late 1930s.
France realised it could never compete with
Germany on the size of its army alone.
The solution was to adopt an entirely defensive mentality.
The Maginot Line, a series of fortifications was begun
in 1930 along the frontier with Germany
and ran as far as the Belgian border.
There it theoretically linked up with
fortifications planned by the Belgians.
This new French military approach meant that France
was only capable of waging a defensive war.
It just did not have the ability to launch an attack
on Italy, even if the British had had the troops to help.
And of course, both countries knew that their navies in the
Mediterranean were outnumbered by Mussolini's new fleet.
So when Italy conquered Abyssinia,
it made sense for both powers to do nothing.
It just seemed too remote.
Too much someone else's problem.
By now they both had to deal with
all the traumas of the Great Depression.
That seemed so much more pressing.
And above all, they were now faced with a
military threat far closer to home.
A resurgent and rearming Germany.
And Germany's power and that of Italy too,
was soon about to be demonstrated.
In supporting the rise of another dictator, in Spain.
In 1936, civil war erupted in Spain.
It was exceptionally vicious, setting family against family,
communist against fascist, believers against atheists.
In 1931, a left wing government had come to power determined
to get rid of the centuries old Spanish monarchy.
The king was forced into exile and a republic was declared.
In February 1936, the parties of the left combined in a
Popular Front to take on the forces
of the right in a general election.
The Popular Front won narrowly.
Even though its reform programme was modest,
the wave of strikes and land seizures led the right
to fear that a communist takeover was inevitable.
Within the Spanish army, long a bastion of conservative
and Catholic thinking, senior officers began
to consider the possibility of a coup.
Among them was General Francisco Franco,
a former chief of staff who had been effectively exiled
to command Spain's forces in the Canary Islands.
On July 17th 1936, the units of the army fighting
guerrillas in Spain's colony in Morocco mutinied.
The next day Franco flew to join them,
proclaiming a new Nationalist movement which
would save Spain from communism.
Mainland garrisons now joined this revolt.
The Popular Front responded by calling
for volunteers to defend the republic.
Battle lines had been drawn.
At first, Franco faced problems.
He and his army were in North Africa and he had
to get across the straits of Gibraltar back to Spain.
So he turned to the one person he thought might help.
Adolf Hitler.
Within a month, transport aircraft from Hitler's
new Luftwaffe had begun an air lift,
taking Franco's battle hardened
veterans over to southern Spain.
At this stage, the Republic still
seemed to have the advantage.
The pro Franco military uprisings in Madrid
and Barcelona, were quickly crushed leaving it
in control of most of the east of the country.
Franco's Nationalists were confined largely
to the north west and part of the south.
But the Nationalist situation was transformed when Hitler
and Mussolini started to pour in troops and weapons.
The German dictator seized the opportunity to test his
new equipment and expanding armed forces.
The first Panzer tanks were sent
along with some 12,000 troops.
And the Luftwaffe deployed its Condor Legion with
its ultra modern new bombers and fighters.
Mussolini sent a so called volunteer corps
of 50,000 men and more than 700 aircraft.
In vain did the Republicans appeal to Britain,
France and the Soviet Union for help.
But London and Paris were scared
of setting off a European war.
They declared a policy of non intervention.
Cynically, both Germany and Italy signed up to this.
But when it became obvious that they were still sending
arms to the Nationalists, Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader,
announced that he would help the Republic.
Stalin's worry was the rise of Fascism in Germany.
Hitler had made it abundantly clear that he believed
communism to be Nazism's ultimate enemy.
Stalin saw the Spanish conflict as a way of keeping
Germany and Italy occupied while building up
the Soviet Union's military strength.
About 700 military advisers were sent
along with tanks and fighter aircraft.
It was something, but no match for
the support Franco had received.
In fact the largest source of outside help for the Republic
didn't come from a country at all but
from volunteers, the International Brigades.
About 30,000 left wing Americans, British, French
and Germans signed up to fight in Spain.
With their new Fascist support, the Nationalists were
able to open two fronts, one advancing
towards Barcelona from the North.
The other led by Franco pushing
up towards Madrid from the south.
By the end of 1936, Madrid was enveloped
on three sides and virtually under siege.
The fighting was intense and often accompanied
by appalling atrocities against civilians.
The Republicans hunted down and
murdered Roman Catholic priests.
The Nationalists slaughtered anyone
accused of being communist.
German and Italian air power was used
indiscriminately against civilian targets.
Madrid was heavily bombed, but the worst incident came
in April 1937, when the Basque town of Guernica was
virtually obliterated with 6,000 civilian deaths.
The area controlled by the Republic
was steadily ground down.
It's forces fought with great gallantry, but under trained
and under equipped amateurs were no match for the
professional soldiers led by Franco or for the
combined modern weaponry of Italy and Germany.
As the war dragged on, the fighting around Madrid became
a symbol of the left's determination not
to be crushed by a Fascist dictatorship.
But behind the scenes, the Republican
alliance was falling apart.
The communists and socialists wanted to
concentrate on winning a military victory.
But the more idealistic anarchists and syndicalists
saw the war as an opportunity for a
mass revolution by the workers.
These disagreements burst out into the open in May 1937.
Fighting broke out in Barcelona
between the anarchists and communists.
It was a fatal weakening of the Republican cause.
By the end of 1938,
the Nationalists had penned their enemy
into a small enclave around Barcelona,
and another stretching eastward from Madrid to the coast.
Madrid continued to hold out, but the
international brigades were withdrawn.
More and more nations began to recognise Franco's government
as his forces closed in for the final assault on Madrid.
At the end of March 1939, its defenders exhausted
after nearly three years of fighting,
the capital finally surrendered.
A month later, Franco formally declared
hostilities at an end.
The scars of Spain's civil war took years to heal
and, in some ways, they never have.
And internationally, Franco's victory
over the Republic proved a disaster.
Hitler and Mussolini were confirmed in their
belief that the democracies of Britain and France
were impotent to resist any real pressure.
While Stalin despaired of their
willingness to confront Fascism.
Hitler in particular saw his way open to begin
the aggressive policies outlined in Mein Kampf.
Even before the Spanish civil war
ended his armies were on the march.
From the moment he became Chancellor of Germany
on January 30th 1933, Hitler had begun to put his
long term ambitions into action.
On February the 3rd he told his top commanders that
his ultimate aim was "to conquer territory in the
"east and ruthlessly Germanise it".
They were instructed to prepare for a massive expansion.
Although Germany had been forbidden tanks, a secret treaty
with the Soviet Union in 1923, had allowed the
development of tank designs and experimentation
with new mobile armoured tactics.
Energetic young German officers like Heinz Guderian
read the theories of British thinkers like
Basil Liddell Hart and Colonel John Fuller.
They even watched exercises being carried out by
the British during the 1920s on Salisbury Plain.
It was from these that they came up with the idea
of fast moving units combining tanks artillery and infantry
that could thrust fast and deep into enemy territory.
Hitler adopted their ideas with enthusiasm,
the new army was to have three Panzer divisions.
Similarly, the new air force, the Luftwaffe,
under former World War One fighter ace Hermann Goering,
had had a framework to build on.
Throughout the years in which its air force was
officially banned, Germany had kept up its design
skills by building civilian machines.
And gliding and flying clubs provided
a reserve of potential aircrew.
Hitler revealed the existence of
the Luftwaffe in March 1935.
He then announced that the army was to be increased to
300,000 men and conscription was reintroduced.
Britain and France protested feebly at this
flagrant breach of the Versailles Treaty.
But soon they reluctantly and slowly began to rearm.
Until this point, Hitler had been modest in his goals.
He had only taken back what was his,
the Rhineland and Saarland.
But now he had a grander target in mind.
His homeland Austria.
In 1934, Austrian Nazis had attempted to seize
power and unify the country with Germany.
Austrians, after all spoke German, even if they
had never been part of a German state.
In February 1938, another Nazi plot was discovered.
Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg
protested to Hitler.
Hitler responded by demanding that Austria stop mistreating
the Austrian Nazis and unite with Germany.
Schuschnigg promptly called a referendum so that
the Austrians could vote on whether to remain independent.
But on March 12th 1938, the eve of the referendum, Hitler,
fearing that it might produce the wrong result,
sent in his troops.
Complete surprise and an enthusiastic welcome
by Nazi sympathisers made it a bloodless invasion.
Within hours Hitler announced Austria's
incorporation into the Third Reich.
A sovereign nation had for the first time,
been subsumed into a greater Germany.
Once again the western democracies failed to react.
In the summer of 1938 he turned
on his next prey, Czechoslovakia.
A substantial German minority lived in the north west
of the country, an area known as the Sudetenland.
These Sudeten Germans had been part of the old
Austrian empire but had been cut off when
Czechoslovakia was created in 1919.
This was the time bomb that had started ticking
at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler encouraged Sudeten German demands for autonomy,
and then threatened the Czech government
with force if it refused to agree.
Undaunted, the Czech government ordered
general mobilisation and prepared to resist.
The Czechoslovak army was large and well equipped,
with formidable fortifications on its frontier with Germany.
Hitler backed off.
But then at the beginning of September,
concerned that war might be imminent,
the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain
decided to act as a peace maker.
He flew to meet Hitler twice.
The Nazi dictator assured him that if he could
have the Sudetenland he would make no further
territorial demands in Europe.
In Munich, on September 29th 1938,
with Mussolini acting as mediator, France and Britain
signed an agreement giving the Sudetenland to
Germany in return for a formal declaration by
Hitler that he had no more territorial ambitions.
Chamberlain flew back to Britain waving the piece
of paper which he claimed "Guarantees peace in our time."
So, on October the 1st, German troops occupied the
Sudetenland and seized the Czech frontier fortifications.
Hitler now began sizing up his next target, Poland.
Again the nominal cause was a German minority
marooned as a result of the Versailles Treaty.
Hitler demanded the return of the port of Danzig
to German control, so that East Prussia could be
linked up with the rest of Germany.
The Poles refused, and Hitler hesitated.
He was not quite ready for all out war
and he had unfinished business with Czechoslovakia.
In March 1939, the Eastern part of the country,
Slovakia, which was ethnically different to the
Czech lands, appealed to Hitler for help
in achieving greater independence.
Hitler summoned the Czechoslovak prime minister Emil Hacha
to Berlin, and browbeat him into putting
his country under German "protection".
German troops now marched into the
rest of Czechoslovakia, unopposed.
Most of the country was annexed into the Reich.
Slovakia was declared a protectorate.
For the first time, Hitler had seized
non German speaking territory.
But again there was only a feeble
protest from Britain and France.
At the end of March, he again repeated
his demand that Poland give up Danzig.
This time France and Britain declared unequivocally that
they would declare war if he attacked Poland.
But by now Hitler cared little whether they did or not,
he was sure that they would be weak
and indecisive opponents.
In Russia, Stalin had also become
increasingly concerned by Hitler's aggression.
In April Stalin proposed an alliance
with Britain and France.
But negotiations made little progress,
and finally Stalin despaired, deciding that there
was another solution to the German threat.
On August the 23rd the Soviet Union and the Third Reich,
who everyone had believed were sworn enemies,
announced a non aggression pact.
The agreement secretly specified that Poland would be
split between the two countries and Stalin would have a
free hand to take over Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Now free from any Russian threat, Hitler ordered his
armed forces to prepare for an immediate invasion.
On the evening of August the 31st,
the German Wehrmacht prepared for the assault,
its Fuehrer had made the decision
which would plunge the world into war.
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