Causes for WW2

• Long term
• Unresolved issues after WWI and the shortcomings of the Treaty of Versailles
• German resentment
• The disintegration of wartime alliances
• Reparations
• Weakness of the League of Nations and the failure of Collective Security
• Lack of members
• Failure to intervene in Abyssinia and Manchuria
• The Wall St Crash and the Great Depression
• Wall St Crash shaped the international political atmosphere in the 30s
• Short term
• Political Impact of the economic depression
• The end of the spirit of international co-operation and reparations and payments were demanded immediately
• The economic crisis in Germany played an important factor in the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party
• The Hoover Moratorium and the end of reparations
• The extent of the economic crisis meant that the Germans asked the US president Hoover to suspend the reparations which was granted by December 1931
• In June 1932 the Lausanne Conference agreed that reparations should be ended by a lump-sum payment of 3,000 million marks, relieving Germany of 90% of its outstanding debt
• The failure of disarmament
• Despite the efforts made at the Geneva Disarmament Conference 1932-33 no agreements were reached for international disarmament
• Immediate term
• Hitler’s foreign policy
• Hitler had an aggressive foreign policy which included the revision of the Treaty of Versailles and Lebensraum (living space – expansion of the German borders to the east)
• Rearmament and reintroduction of conscription (1935)
• Re-occupation of the Rhineland (1936)
• German intervention in the Spanish Civil War
• Anschluss
• The Sudetenland Crisis and invasion of Czechoslovakia
• Invasion of Poland
• Fritz Fischer
• Germany’s expansionism was to blame for the war
• The policy of appeasement
• Britain failed to intervene in these German aggressions, which led to an escalation of German actions, and ending in the invasion of Poland which was the start of WWII
• AJP Taylor 
• Blames the policy of appeasement to at least an equal amount as Hitler’s war