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Italian invasion of Ethiopia
In 1935–36, an armed conflict that resulted in Ethiopia’s subjection to Italian rule. Often seen as one of the episodes that prepared the way for World War II, the war demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations when League decisions were not supported by the great powers. -
German re-occupation of the Rhineland
On 7 March 1936 German troops marched into the Rhineland. This action was directly against the Treaty of Versailles which had laid out the terms which the defeated Germany had accepted. It was Hitler’s first illegal act in foreign relations since coming to power in 1933 and it threw the European allies, especially France and Britain, into confusion. -
German Annexation of Austria
German troops march into Austria to annex the German-speaking nation for the Third Reich. In early 1938, Austrian Nazis conspired for the second time in four years to seize the Austrian government by force and unite their nation with Nazi Germany. -
German invasion of the Sudetenland
In 1931, they created the Sudeten Germans Peoples Party led by Konrad Henlein. On October 10, 1938 as a result of the Munich Agreement, German troops complete their occupation of the Sudetenland. Having successfully claimed Austria in early 1938, Adolf Hitler turned to obtaining the ethnically German Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. -
Munich Conference
It was a settlement permitting Nazi Germany's annexation of portions of Czechoslovakia along the country's borders mainly inhabited by German speakers, for which a new territorial designation "Sudetenland" was coined. -
German invasion of Poland
German forces invaded Poland from the north, south, and west. As the Germans advanced, Polish forces withdrew from their forward bases of operation close to the Polish German border to more established lines of defence to the east. After the mid-September Polish defeat in the Battle of the Bzura, the Germans gained an undisputed advantage. -
Beginning of WWII
WWII was also called Second World War, conflict that involved virtually every part of the world during the years 1939–45. The principal belligerents were the Axis powers Germany, Italy, and Japan and the Allies France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, China. The war was in many respects a continuation, after an uneasy 20-year hiatus, of the disputes left unsettled by World War I. -
Signing of the Tripartite pact
On this day in 1940, the Axis powers are formed as Germany, Italy, and Japan become allies with the signing of the Tripartite Pact in Berlin. The Pact provided for mutual assistance should any of the signatories suffer attack by any nation not already involved in the war. This formalizing of the alliance was aimed directly at “neutral” America designed to force the United States to think twice before venturing in on the side of the Allies.
