Period 6: World War II

Question 1

What was the New Economic Policy (NEP)?

Answer 1

• Lenin instituted the NEP in the early 1920s
• had capitalistic aspects like allowing farmers to sell portions
• successful in agriculture but Lenin didn’t live long enough to chaperone its expansion into other parts of the Soviet economy

Question 2

Who was Joseph Stalin?

Answer 2

• discarded the New Economic Policy
• imposed the Five Year Plans
• successfully industrialized the USSR and improved economics conditions but relied on terror tactics
• established labor camps to punish anyone who opposed him

Question 3

What were the Five Year Plans?

Answer 3

• called for expedient agricultural production via collectivization
• advocated for the construction of large, nationalized factories
• the people didn’t share in the power or the profits and had no choices regarding participation

Question 4

What is collectivization?

Answer 4

Collectivization is the process of taking over private farms and combining them into state-owned enterprises.

Question 5

What was the Great Purge?

Answer 5

• 1936 to 1938

- Stalin relied on terror tactics in his plans such as a secret police force, bogus trials, and assassinations

Question 6

Which two countries relied on American credit?

Answer 6

• France and Germany
• France had loaned money to Russia but the Bolshevik government refused to honor the czar’s debts but Germany owed it cash too
• Germany experienced extreme financial hardship because of the wartime reparations they were required to make under the Treaty of Versailles
• looked great due to growth in U.S. and European economies but growth was kinda artificial based on loans that were never going to be repaid

Question 7

What were the effects of the Great Depression?

Answer 7

• American banks stopped extending credit
• Europe ran out of money
• Germany couldn’t pay its reparations without American credit so France had no money

Question 8

What is fascism?

Answer 8

• destroy the will of the individual in favor of “the people”
• wanted a unified society but weren’t concerned with eliminating private property of class distinctions (unlike communists)
• pushed for extreme nationalism which often relied on racial identity

Question 9

Who was Benito Mussolini?

Answer 9

• created the National Fascist Party in 1919
• demanded that King Victor Emmanuel III name him and several other fascists to cabinet posts and was named prime minister
• took over Parliament in 1922
• transformed Italy into a totalitarian fascist regime by 1926

Question 10

What was the Nationalist Fascist Party?

Answer 10

• created by Benito Mussolini
• paid squads known as Blackshirts to fight socialist and communist organizations
• won over the loyalty of factory owners and landowners
• seated its first members in the Italian parliament by 1921

Question 11

What was the Nationalist Socialist Party (Nazis)?

Answer 11

• rose to power in the 1920s with Hitler as its guide
• received votes democratically and participated in the Reichstag
• increased its seats in Parliament tenfold in the election of 1930
• dominated German government by 1932

Question 12

What was the Weimar Republic?

Answer 12

• fairly conservative democratic republic of Germany
• favored because the middle class in Germany was quite conservative and a large number of Germans had been relatively prosperous before the war
• German people increasingly rejected the solutions of the Weimar Republic’s elected body, the Reichstag

Question 13

Who was Adolf Hitler?

Answer 13

• convinced that the Aryan race was the most highly evolved race and that “inferior” races such as Slavs and Jews had “corrupted” the German race
• received increasing support as the Great Depression devastated the German economy in the early 1930s
• became chancellor, or leader of the Reichstag in 1933
• seized control of government aka the Third Reich

Question 14

Who was Francisco Franco?

Answer 14

• took control of large parts of Spain in 1936 against Democratic loyalists which led to a civil war
• supported by Germany and Italy because antidemocratic
• France and Great Britain refused to aid the supporters of the Spanish democracy
• captured Madrid by 1939 and installed a dictatorship in Spain

Question 15

What was the Rhineland?

Answer 15

• a region west of the Rhine River that had been taken away from Germany after World War I
• Hitler took back the Rhineland in 1935

Question 16

How did Hitler restore Germany to its former world-power status?

Answer 16

• took back the Rhineland in 1935
• formed an alliance with Japan in 1937
• annexed Austria and moved to reclaim the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938
• invaded the remaining territories in Czechoslovakia in 1939

Question 17

What was the Munich Conference of 1938?

Answer 17

• included Hitler, Mussolini, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of England
• Hitler was given the Sudetenland without the consent of Czechoslovakia in return for the promise to cease his expansionist activities
• Chamberlain agreed to give Hitler what he wanted as a means of avoiding war, believing German claims that it would be satisfied with Austria and the northern half of Czechoslovakia and would not expand further
• Hitler stopped his expansion. for one year :)

Question 18

What was the Nazi-Soviet Pact?

Answer 18

• signed in 1939
• Stalin and Hitler agreed that Germany would not invade the Soviet Union if the Soviets stayed out of Germany’s military affairs
• determined how Eastern Europe would be divided
• gave Lithuania and eastern Poland to Germany
• gave the remainder of Poland and Finland and the Baltic States to Russia
• German forces marched into Poland and Britain declared war and France followed suit bam WWII

Question 19

What happened after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904?

Answer 19

• Japan kicked Russia out of Manchuria and established its own sphere of influence there
• British and Japan allied in 1905

Question 20

What was Manchukuo?

Answer 20

• Manchuria but renamed by Japan when invaded in 1931

- Japan established a colony there

Question 21

What was the Anti-Comintern Pact?

Answer 21

• signed in 1936 between Japan and Germany

- against communism, specifically in Russia

Question 22

What was blitzkrieg?

Answer 22

• “lightning war”

- Hitler’s war tactic that quickly destroyed everything in its path

Question 23

Who was Winston Churchill?

Answer 23

• replaced Britain’s more diplomatically minded Neville Chamberlain
• resolute and fierce prime minister
• refused to cut a deal with Germany so Hitler launched the Battle of Britain

Question 24

What was the Battle of Britain?

Answer 24

• a massive air bombing campaign in 1940 that Hitler launched after Winston Churchill refused to cut a deal with Germany
• pitted the superior numbers of the Germain air force against the smaller numbers of the Royal Air Force
• the British succeeded in keeping the German army out with the newly devised radar

Question 25

What happened when Italy attacked Greece?

Answer 25

• Italy was unable to defeat the country until 1941 when Germany helped out
• the Nazi-Soviet Pact had given Greece to Russia so Germany invaded the Soviet Union

Question 26

What was the Tripartite Pact?

Answer 26

• Japan, Rome, and Berlin

- ensured worldwide implications for a war that had, up until that time, been two regional wars

Question 27

What was the Manhattan Project?

Answer 27

• the U.S.

- the development of an atomic bomb

Question 28

What is D-Day?

Answer 28

• 1994 B-DAY
• English, American, and Canadian forces launched their biggest offensive and landed on the French beaches of Normandy
• Allied Forces battled their way across northern France and liberated France

Question 29

How did World War II end?

Answer 29

• the Red Army won against the Germans at Stalingrad in 1942 and advanced steadily west for three years
• the Allied forces closed in on Hitler’s troops from the eastern and the western fronts until they reached Berlin by 1945
• Hitler committed suicide
• President Truman of the U.S. ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan in 1945
• when the Japanese persisted, second bomb on Nagasaki
• Japanese surrendered, ending WWII

Question 30

What were the global changes of the end of World War II?

Answer 30

• the Holocaust’s horridness was revealed, creating public sympathy for the creation of Israel as a homeland for Jews
• the U.S. and Soviet Union became superpowers
• Nazi officials were sentenced for war crimes
• Japan was forced to demilitarize and establish a democracy, later embracing capitalism
• the Marshall Plan was instituted
• decline of colonialism
• women became employed or sought higher education
• international organizations were created
• start of the Cold War

Question 31

What was the Marshall Plan?

Answer 31

• named for George C. Marshall, the secretary of state who conceived of it
• 1947
• instituted by the U.S. to help rebuild the infrastructure and communities of Europe
• offered to all European countries but only accepted by Western European nations
• the economies of Western Europe recovered in less than a decade

Question 32

What is the United Nations?

Answer 32

• established in 1945 to replace the failed League of Nations
• primary goal was to mediate, and if necessary to intervene in, international disputes between nations
• as time passed the UN expanded beyond political conflicts and got more involved in the monitoring of human rights and other social problems