Stalin and the party leaders who survived the Great Purges

1
Stalin and the party leaders who survived the
Great Purges

• By the mid-1930s , Stalins purges had
  eliminated many leaders and other members from
  the Soviet Communist Party. This photograph of a
  meeting of a party congress in 1936 shows a
  number of the surviving leaders with Stalin, who
  sits fourth from the right in the front row.

2

• Mussolini greets his blackshirted supporters
  after their march on Rome in October 1922.
  Mussolini himself, who had journeyed to Rome by
  train, is dressed in formal attire to meet King
  Victor Emmanuel III (r. 19001946), who offered
  him the post of prime minister in a new
  government.

3
Hitler during Nazi Party rally

• During a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg in 1927,
  Adolf Hitler stops his motorcade to receive the
  applause of the surrounding crowd. In the late
  1920s, the Nazi movement was only one of many
  bringing strife to the Weimar Republic.

4
Young Nazi women saluting

• Young women among an enthusiastic crowd extend
  the Nazi salute at a party rally in 1938. Nazi
  ideology encouraged women to favor traditional
  domestic roles over employment in the workplace
  and to bear many children.

5
Capitalist, Fascist and Communist Economic Systems
6
Mao on Long March, 1933 Mao Zedong (1893-1976)
joined the Communist Party in the early 1920s and
soon became one of its leaders. In 1934-1935,
pursued by the Guomindang army, Mao Zedong led
his rag-tag army of Communist guerrillas on a
Long March (6,000 miles in one year) across the
rugged mountains of southern and western China.
Of the 100,000 Communists who left Bangxi in
October 1934, only 8,000-10,000 reached Shaanxi a
year later. In this romanticized painting, young
Mao is speaking to a group of soldiers in
spotless uniforms who look up at him with
worshipful expressions.
7
Japanese in Shanghai, 1937 The rise of Chinese
nationalism challenged the control that Japan
exercised over Manchuria through Chinese
warlords. In 1937 the Japanese military and the
ultranationalists decided to use a minor incident
near Beijing as a pretext for a general attack.
The Nationalist government joined in a united
front with the Communists and fought hard to halt
the Japanese. But Shanghai, China's leading port,
fell to the invading Japanese in November of that
year. In China, the Japanese won the battles but
they could not win the war.
8
"No pasaran" poster, Spanish Civil War "No
pasaran!" (They shall not pass)," proclaimed the
charismatic Spanish communist Dolores Ibarruri
(1895-1989), whose impassioned speeches and radio
broadcasts helped inspire the heroic defense of
Madrid during the civil war that gripped Spain
during the later 1930s. This poster depicts
Spanish soldiers defending the democratic
republic against the antidemocratic nationalists
seeking to overthrow it.
9
Germany absorbs Austria With the defeat and
dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire, Austria was
left a small, landlocked country after World War
I. Most Austrians would have welcomed unification
with Germany, but the peacemakers specifically
prohibited any such step. As it happened, Austria
was unified with Germany on Hitler's terms with
the Anschluss of March 1938. Here Austrians look
on as German troops march into Salzburg.
10
British Newspaper with headlines about Munich and
photo of Chamberlain and Mussolini

• As the front page of this British newspaper
  shows, there was general enthusiasm in Britain
  for the Munich agreement of September 1938. It
  did not last. Opinion turned decisively against
  appeasing Germany when Hitler occupied Prague in
  March 1939.

11
Steps to War

• March 1935 Hitler denounces the Treaty of
  Versailles and begins building a military
• March 1936 Hitler re-militarizes the Rhineland
• November 1936 Hitler and Italy form the Axis
• 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War
• March 1938 the Anschluss of Austria
• September 1938 the Munich Conference gives the
  Sudentenland to Hitler
• March 1939 Hitler takes the rest of
  Czechoslovakia

12
Partitions of Czechoslovakia and Poland,
19381939  

• Germanys expansion inevitably meant the
  victimization of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and
  Poland. With the failure of the Western powers
  appeasement policy and the signing of the
  Nazi-Soviet pact, the stage for the war was set.
  Hitler and the Stalin invaded and divided up
  Poland on September 1, 1939 and WWII officially
  began on September 3, 1939.