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The Austrian Anschluss
On March 12, 1938, German troops marched into Austria. The fact that Hitler did not have the full approval of Austrian Social Democrats, the rise of a pro-Nazi right-wing party within Austria in the mid-1930s paved the way for Hitler to make his move. In 1938, Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, bullied by Hitler during a meeting at Hitler’s retreat home he agreed to Hitler's demands. The Austrian president refused to appoint a pro-Nazi chancellor, Austria was now a nameless entity. -
The Munich Conference
Settlement reached by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. It became known in May 1938 that Hitler and his generals were drawing up a plan for the occupation of Czechoslovakia. In effort to avoid war, Chamberlain then proposed that a four-power conference be convened immediately to settle the dispute. Hitler signed a paper to resolve the problems, but this man twisted Munich words and Hitler retailated to them. -
Hitler Demands Danzig
Hitler was determined to overturn the military and territorial provisions of the Versailles treaty and include ethnic Germans in the Reich. In preparation for war with Poland, in the spring of 1939 Hitler demanded the annexation of the Free City of Danzig to Germany and extraterritorial rail access for Germany across the "Polish Corridor," the Polish frontier to East Prussia. Germany invaded Poland on Sept 1, 1939. Britain & France declared war on Germany on Sept 3, invasion of Poland became WW2 -
The Nazi-Soviet Pact
The German-Soviet Pact enabled Germany to attack Poland on September 1, 1939, without fear of Soviet intervention.An economic agreement, signed on August 19, 1939, provided that Germany would exchange manufactured goods for Soviet raw materials. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union also signed a ten-year nonaggression pact on August 23, 1939, in which each signatory promised not to attack the other. -
The Invasion of Poland
The Polish army was defeated within weeks of the invasion. From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, German units, with more than 2,000 tanks and over 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border and advanced on Warsaw in a massive encirclement attack. After heavy shelling and bombing, Warsaw surrendered to the Germans on September 27, 1939. -
The Evacuation of Dunkirk
The Germans launched their attack against the West, storming into Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg.On May 26, the British finally initiated Operation Dynamo–the evacuation of Allied forces from Dunkirk. the evacuation of Allied forces from Dunkirk on the Belgian coast ends as German forces capture the beach port. The nine-day evacuation, the largest of its kind in history and an unexpected success, saved 338,000 Allied troops from capture by the Nazis. -
The Fall of France
This tense period of anticipation – which came to be known as the ‘Phoney War’ – met an abrupt end on 10 May 1940, when Germany launched an invasion of France and the Low Countries.The German plan of attack, codenamed Case Yellow, entailed an armoured offensive through the Ardennes Forest, which bypassed the strong French frontier defences of the Maginot Line. The advance would then threaten to encircle French and British divisions to the north, stationed on the Belgian frontier. -
The Battle of Britain
The battle, which was the first major military campaign in history to be fought entirely in the air, was the result of a German plan to win air superiority over Southern Britain and the English Channel by destroying the British air force and aircraft industry. Hitler saw victory in the battle as a prelude to the invasion of Britain.The climax of the battle came on 15 September, a day in which the Luftwaffe lost 56 planes and the RAF 28. Hitler ended up postpoing the fight with Britian.
