Unit 7.6 — Causes of World War II

Topics 7.4 and 7.5 covered two unresolved legacies of World War I: a fragile, debt-dependent global economy that collapsed into the Great Depression, and a betrayed promise of self-determination that fed nationalist grievance across the colonized world. Topic 7.6 shows those two threads converging with a third — the rise of fascism — to produce a second global war within a single generation.

An unsustainable peace settlement as the root cause

The exam wants you to treat the Treaty of Versailles not as a settled outcome but as an ongoing source of instability: its demilitarization terms and reparations burden on Germany (Topic 7.4) created lasting resentment rather than a durable peace, leaving a specific grievance that political movements within Germany could exploit once conditions worsened.

The Great Depression radicalizes politics

Topic 7.4's global economic collapse did more than cause hardship — it directly deepened resentment over the Versailles settlement and created the exact conditions extremist leaders needed: Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy built political movements promising rapid national recovery and restored national pride, offering a fascist alternative to both the discredited old order and to the Depression-era failures of existing democratic and capitalist governments. This is a direct causal chain worth stating explicitly: Versailles's unresolved resentment (Topic 7.5) plus the Depression's economic desperation (Topic 7.4) together created fertile ground for fascism in a way neither factor alone would have.

Germany's treaty violations, step by step

Hitler's rise converted directly into a specific, dated sequence of treaty violations worth knowing precisely. In March 1935, Hitler openly repudiated the Versailles Treaty's demilitarization terms and began rapidly rebuilding the German military. In 1936, German troops moved into the Rhineland — a demilitarized zone under the treaty — a direct military test of whether Britain and France would actually enforce the settlement they had imposed in 1919.

Appeasement: the response that failed to stop escalation

Britain and France responded to these violations with a policy of appeasement — making concessions to Hitler's demands specifically to avoid triggering another war on the scale of Topic 7.3's conflict. The clearest example is the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Britain and France allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland (German-speaking territory in Czechoslovakia) without military resistance, hoping this concession would satisfy Hitler's territorial demands. Appeasement is worth understanding as a genuine, if ultimately unsuccessful, strategic choice — an attempt to avoid repeating World War I's total-war devastation rather than simple weakness, even though it failed to prevent further escalation.

Fascist alliances: the Axis takes shape

Germany and Italy formalized their partnership through the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936, and Germany separately allied with Japan through the Anti-Comintern Pact, aimed at opposing Soviet communism. Together, these agreements formed the Axis Powers — a specific, named alliance structure worth pairing against Topic 7.2's Triple Entente/Triple Alliance system as a direct comparison of how alliance blocs formed before each world war.

Japan's expansion runs on a parallel track

Japanese expansion followed its own trajectory, building directly on the industrial and military power established since the Meiji era (Topics 5.4, 5.6, 6.2, 7.1). In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria in northern China and, within months, established the puppet state of Manchukuo under Japanese control — an act of aggressive territorial expansion that the League of Nations (Topic 7.5) proved unable to meaningfully punish, foreshadowing the same institutional weakness that would fail to stop German aggression later in the decade.

Why this matters for the exam

Topic 7.6 rewards tracing a full multi-causal chain rather than naming a single trigger: the unsustainable Versailles settlement (Topic 7.5) plus the Great Depression (Topic 7.4) enabled fascist movements to rise, Germany's dated treaty violations (1935 remilitarization, 1936 Rhineland) tested a policy of appeasement that ultimately failed, the Rome-Berlin Axis and Anti-Comintern Pact formalized a new alliance bloc, and Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria showed the League of Nations' inability to enforce collective security — all converging by the end of the decade into the war covered in Topic 7.7.

Sources: Fiveable — Causes of World War II.