Original subtitles

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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.

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.

It has become clear that acts

and policies of nations in other parts of the world

have far reaching effects on us.

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.

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.