Original subtitles

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 11:00 in the morning on November 11th, 1918,

the eleventh hour of the eleventh day

of the eleventh 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.

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 timebomb.

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

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 US Congress decided it could not risk

being sucked into another war in Europe.

It refused to join his League

and the US 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 brown-shirted thugs, the SA -

Storm Troops - 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 paralyzed.

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 Fuhrer, of Germany.

- Sieg Heil! - Heil! Heil!

Heil!

At first there was little sign of what was to come.

For the next three years, the Fuhrer 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 program.

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 Fuhrer 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 US 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 Puyi, 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,

and 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 center,

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 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 US warships,

which had been sent to protect their shipping and trade.

The worst incident came on December 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 organized a right-wing nationalist party,

the Fascists.

With the country paralyzed 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 programs 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 traumatized

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 modernizing 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 realized 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 program was modest,

a 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 Island.

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.

Its 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 recognize

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 3rd, he told his top commanders

that his ultimate aim was to conquer territory in the east

and ruthlessly Germanize 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 armored 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 sympathizers 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.

Seig Heil! Seig Heil!

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 mobilization 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."

And so, on October 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 been 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 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 31st,

the German Wehrmacht prepared for the assault.

Its Fuhrer had made the decision

which would plunge the world into war.