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Its code cracked by the British, the Zimmermann telegram spurred the United States to enter World War I.]
Seeds of World War II
Around the same time the Bolsheviks fought in Russia, a workers’ revolution was taking place
in Germany. The rapid unfolding of German revolutionary events led to the Weimar Republic, an unstable
parliamentary democracy whose failings, combined with the difficult terms of the Treaty of Versailles, led
to the establishment of a totalitarian state under Chancellor Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s. Hitler and his
party, the Nazis, blamed the November Criminals and Jews worldwide for the hardships befalling the
German citizenry. The Nazis initiated increasingly cruel measures against Jews, culminating in the Final
Solution, which came to be known as the Holocaust.
The most common date given for the start of the Second World War is September 1, 1939, the date of the
German invasion of Poland. Hitler had made a pact the previous month with Josef Stalin of Russia that
the two states would not antagonize one another in their pursuit of respective empires. Poland was one of
the territories that would be divided between the aggressors. Hitler violated the terms of that pact, the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, by invading the Soviet Union in June of 1941.
