 Hello, and welcome to our video summarizing all you need to know about the interwar period. My name is Barbara, and in this video, we'll examine all the key events that you need to understand between the period of 1918, which is the end of the First World War, and 1939, which is the beginning of the Second World War. This period is seen as a grey area, however, do remember that so many things happened during this period that led to the eventual escalation that resulted in the Second World War. So you do need to be aware of this, particularly if you're studying either the First World War, the Second World War, or some of the key leaders such as Adolf Hitler, but equally places like the US thinking about the stock market crash for your upcoming exams or your coursework. So let's get started. Now the interwar period refers to the pivotal 20 years that fell between the end of the First World War and the Second World War. The effects of World War I were really profound for Europe. Over 10 million people were killed and twice that number was wounded in what had been the first modern war. With the end of the First World War, the international system was seen as torn down, Europe was reorganised, and a new world was born. The European nations that had fought the Great War emerged economically and socially crippled. Also, economic depression prevailed in Europe for much of the interwar period, and detonations found it impossible to pay the debts without borrowing even more money at higher rates. Thus this led to a worsening economy across lots of European countries to an even greater degree. Germany especially was destroyed economically by World War I, and even if it had a few golden years between 1924 to 1929, ultimately it suffered very strong aftermaths and very negative consequences. For instance, the reparation payments to Britain and France, which were forced on it by the Treaty of Versailles, and they were seen as impossibly high. We're going to talk about this later. Now, of course, firstly, during the interwar period, the most important international organisation that emerged was the League of Nations. The League of Nations really represented an effort to break the pattern of traditional power politics and bring international relations into an open and cooperative forum in the name of peace and stability. President Woodrow Wilson, the then US President, had a vision of a general association of nations that took shape in this body, which was founded in 1920. The basic constitution of the League was the Covenant and Wilson's word chosen, as he said, because I'm an old Presbyterian. The Covenant was embodied in the Versailles Treaty and other peace treaties. The League's institutions established in Geneva consisted of an assembly with each member country having a veto and an equal vote and a smaller council of four permanent members, and later six, then nine, temporarily chosen by the Assembly. The basic principles of the League was the idea of collective security, whereby its signatories had pledged, rather, both to seek peaceful solutions to disputes and to assist each other against external aggression. As such, it was seen as a really novel body and potentially very far reaching. Of course, it was a predecessor to today's United Nations. It could have developed into a powerful instrument for peace. It did settle a number of practical disputes, that between, for example, Finland and Sweden, Albania and Yugoslavia, Poland and Germany, and Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And do check out our other video, which details the League of Nations from its start to its ultimate demise, where you can get lots of details about its successes, but also its failures. Now, the League of Nations also set up subordinate bodies with particular problems, among them the status of Danzig and Tsar. Also, it tackled issues of narcotics, refugees, as well as leprosy, which really ravaged most of Europe. It was complimented by a permanent court of international justice in The Hague and by the International Labour Organization. However, the League of Nations disappointed its founders' hopes. From the start, it lacked teeth, and very importantly, even if it was a brainchild of President Woodrow Wilson, the USA ultimately declined to join the League of Nations. Also, most of its members were unwilling to see it develop. It thus became little more than a permanent version of the Congress of Vienna that was founded on the old style concept of Europe. And as I mentioned before, if you do want to know more about the League of Nations in detail, do check out our other video where we detail its start, ultimate successes, but also failures and its eventual decline. Another thing that was really important that happened during the interwar period was political polarization. So now the political atmosphere of this interwar time was sharply divided between those who thought the extreme left could solve Europe's problems, and those who desired leadership from the extreme right. There were very few moderates, and this situation kept the governments of Britain, France and Eastern Europe in constant turmoil as they swung wildly between one extreme and the next. Extreme viewpoints unfortunately won out in the form of totalitarian states in Europe during the interwar years, and also communism took hold in the Soviet Union under Stalin's leadership, while fascism controlled Germany, Italy and Spain. If you do want to know more about Germany, we have videos on that. And also we do have a video on Mussolini as well. Now with regards to political polarization, the extremist nature of these disparate ideologies turned European politics into an arena for sharp conflict erupting in Spain during the late 1930s in the form of the Spanish Civil War, after which Francisco Franco became dictator. In Germany, Adolf Hitler's fascist Nazi party came to power during the 1930s and prepared once again to make war with Europe. With Britain and France tied up in their own affairs, the path to World War II lay clear. Ideologies of both fascism and communism attracted more followers during the interwar years than ever before. This is of course, as we mentioned, Europe really saw its worst economic decline during the interwar time. This was after the First World War. A lot of countries were really ravaged. And during times where there's very little economic growth, extremist parties tend to do well because people wish for a quick fix solution. So of course, fascism did really, really well during this period. All of this made the task of good government really difficult, if not impossible throughout Eastern Europe and of course, Western Europe. Instability and poorly operating often dictatorial governments were typical of these states, making them easy targets for our re-armed Germany during the late 1930s when Hitler was a leader. Also during the interwar period, there was a very important period of economic slump. So economically, Europe emerged from all the one much weakened partly by the purchases that had to be made in the US. So American financial dominance and European debt overshadowed economic relations in the first decade after the war. The deaths included those owed by the allies to each other, especially to Britain, as well as those owed especially by Britain to the US. Within this context, a significant factor was reparations. These were, in other words, the payments that the losing countries from the First World War had to keep on paying to the winning allies. And these financial penalties, particularly imposed by Germany or rather on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, really had a crippling effect on its economy. Thus, Germany, for instance, for its part was crippled not only by the war and also, of course, it was on the losing side of the First World War, but also by the settlement of the war in which it was scapegoated as the conflict aggressors. Indeed, Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to sign a war guilt clause, which it accepted starting the war, which wasn't actually true. The war had started between a Serbian nationalist, in other words, Serbia and Austro-Hungary. The Treaty of Versailles provided for the military and economic dismemberment of the German states, along with the requirement of impossible reparation payments that Germany had to make to Britain, France and other allied nations. France, having suffered the greatest destruction at the hands of Germans during World War One, was adamant about keeping Germany weak and demanded reparations without exception in the years following the Great War. Due in great parts to these efforts, Germany suffered through starvation, mass employment, rampant inflation, all made unbearable by the Great Depression. Germans wavered between two possible responses, either refusing to pay, as urged by ultra-nationalists and some industrialists, or a policy of fulfillment advocated by stracemen. They proposed to meet the initial demands of reparations so as to reestablish trust and then negotiate for better terms. This was a policy adopted by the Weimar Government or the Weimar Republic, which ruled in Germany between the end of 1918 all the way to 1930. Germany paid the first tranche only in August 1921 in response to a threat to occupy the rule, which is a rich industrial area in its country, and the money had to come from a bank loan raised in London. Thereafter, it paid in kind but not in cash until the beginning of 1923, where it announced that payments must cease. As a result, the French and the Belgians, backed by Italy, but opposed by the US and Britain, occupied the whole of the rule, which is an industrial area in Germany. With the German government's connivance, rural industrialists and workers brought production to a virtual halt, and the treasury printed a reckless flood of paper money. By 1924, the mark, which is a currency of Germany at the time, was almost worthless, which removed an important stabilizer from German economy and society. Naturally, Germans reacted bitterly towards the foreign oppressors, and dreamed of returning to the glory of the previous German Empire. This was a dream, which was permitted this session of which rather permitted the ascension of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to power in Germany, promising a future glory and European domination. Under the Nazis, Germany re-armed and began a programme of European conquest, which at first was permitted by the former Allies, who didn't want to start a war in hopes of avoiding a second war. However, it soon became clear that Germany's intentions were dangerous to European security, and just 20 years after the war to end all wars, in other words, the First World War, Europe, again, fell into a devastating conflict. Of course, the Great Depression is perhaps one of the major catastrophes that happened during the interwar period. The Great Depression was really the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. It began after the stock market crash in the US in October, 1929, which sent Wall Street, which is the financial centre of the US, into a panic, and it wiped out millions of investors' money. Lots of people who were very wealthy, who were millionaires, literally became bankrupt overnight. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and employment, as failing companies were laid off by workers in the US. However, this had a reverberating effect globally. Lots of countries relied on money from the US to rebuild their economies after the First World War. US suffering a Great Depression was unable to give them any more money, and worth still, US asked for some of these debts to be paid back. Hence, of course, the domino effect where other countries across Europe, notably, for example, Germany, also fell into a depression. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed, and nearly half of the country's banks had felled. Now, in terms of the causes, there's several causes that really led to some of the worst events that had happened during the interwar period. So throughout the 1920s, the US economy expanded rapidly, and the nation's total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, which was a period dubbed the Roaring 20s. The stock market, centered at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in a New York City, was a scene of reckless speculation, where everyone from millionaire tycoons to cooks and janitors poured the savings into stocks. As a result, the stock market went underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929. By then, production had already declined, and employment had risen, leaving stock prices much higher than the actual value. Additionally, wages at that time were low, consumer debt was proliferating, the agricultural sector of the economy was struggling due to drought and falling food prices, and banks had an excess of large loans that couldn't be liquidated. The American economy entered a mild recession during 1929, as consumer spending slowed, and unsolved goods began to pile up, which in turn slowed factory production. Nonetheless, stock prices continued to rise, and by the fall of that year, they had reached stratospheric levels that couldn't be justified by expected future earnings. This, of course, led to the stock market crash, and however, with the stock market riding high, but at any sign of a credit squeeze or a loss of confidence, everything was likely to collapse. Demand would fall, goods would pile up, and prices would plummet, and this is precisely what happened on Black Tuesday on October 24th, 1929, which was the day of the Wall Street crash. Five days later, on October 29, or Black Tuesday, some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up worthless, and those investors who'd bought stocks were wiped out completely. As consumer confidence vanished in the wake of the stock market crash in the US, the downturn in spending and investment-led factories and other businesses to slow down production, and they began firing the workers in turn. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased. Many Americans forced to buy and credit fell into debt, and the number of foreclosures and repossessions climbed steadily. The global adherence to the goal standard, which joined countries around the world to a fixed currency exchange, contributed to the spread of economic troubles from the US right of the world, especially Europe. Germany, Austria and Britain were the hardest hit. Between the end of May and the middle of July, 1931, the German Central Bank, which is called the Reich Bank, lost two billion dollars in gold and foreign currency. To compound Europe's problems, on June 17, 1930, the US enacted the Protective Smoot-Hawley-Tariff Act, increasing the average import duty level to about 50 percent. This led to a rise and unrest. So of course, the combined results were catastrophic. Highly respected banks not only in the US, but across Europe failed, first among them being the Credit Schnaut of Vienna, which collapsed in May 1931. The Bank of England at that time lost gold at the rate of 2.5 million a day and everywhere industrial production fell by 40 percent in Germany, 14 percent in Britain and 29 percent in France. Some European countries, for example, Germany in 1930 to 32 and France until 1936, responded by deflation. They maintained the external value of the currency, but reduced the export prices by cutting wages and cost. The result was social unrest. And in Germany, Chancellor Brunig's 1930 decrees of the dissolution of the Reichstag and the government by presidential order led to 107 Nazis and 77 communists being elected to parliament that September. Always remember, in times of crisis, extremist parties always went out. In France, Pierre Laval's decrees led to the 1936 success of the left wing popular front. Other countries also took to devaluation, leaving the gold standard to which Belgium, France, Italy and the Netherlands and Switzerland still clung from 1931 to 1935. Another option was to impose exchange controls to cut the economy off from world markets. This was the solution adopted by Germany in 1932 and by most of central Europe's or rather central Europe and the Balkans. It had the effect of creating a German hegemony, since those central European and Balkan countries that needed to sell the large German market were unable to repatriate the earnings and they had to buy German goods. In 1932, Germany saw exchange controls and their effects as a temporary expedient. For Hitler and the Nazi Party, however, they became part of a settled and sinister policy. Of course, another thing that happened during the interwar period was the rise of several dictatorships across Europe. So totalitarian dictatorship was the phenomenon first localized in the 20th century Europe. So Europe's first practical distinct dictatorship was established in Russia by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, which led to the widespread views on communism and of course the USSR, which established itself and the main chief leader being Stalin himself. The aims of this revolution, liquidating the capitalist economic system, increasing public wealth, raising the material and cultural standard of working people, had a wide appeal in Russia. Underlying that centralizing socialist ideology, this system relied on a one-party state, heavy censorship, the suppression of individual liberty and the elimination of political opponents and dissidents. Two years after the Russian Revolution in 1919, we saw Benito Miscellini, who founded the Fascist Party in Italy. It's interesting to note that he actually was an ex-journalist and this party, its emblem or the fascist, the bundle of rods with an axe at the center, was a symbol of state power adopted from ancient Rome. Explicitly anti-communist, it was opposed to the withering away of the state as it was to individualistic liberalism. For the fascist, wrote Miscellini, everything is a state. Hungary also experienced a great deal of instability during the war years, into war years rather. Hungary had been tied to Austria since before World War I. It formed the Austro-Hungarian Empire, due to the fact of the Habsburg Emperor of Austria, who also was a king of Hungary. After the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, Hungary declared itself independent and the government came under the control of the Liberal National Council, which was overthrown by communist forces in 1919, quickly followed by their out-sing and the onset of chaos. In January 1920, a National Constituent Assembly was elected to determine the future of Hungarian government. It decided on monarchy and Hungary became in effect a dictatorship run by the landed of aristocracy. Portugal and Spain also witnessed the rise of strong totalitarian currents. Nazi Germany, in fact, was Europe's most elaborately developed dictatorship. Characteristically, Hitler took great care with the design of its emblem, of the Nazi emblem, a black swastika with the white circle on a red background. As iconography, it has long survived its regime. So Nazi ideology regarded the state as a means rather than an end itself. And the end it envisaged was a supremacy of what Hitler believed to be the Aryan master race, blonde hair, blue eyes. The final result, Hitler's so-called final sedution, was a systematic slaughter of at least six million Jews and millions of others, whom the Nazis refer to as inferior peoples. Of course, this involves slabs, Slavic people, Romani Gypsies, and even Africans from different parts of the continent. Now, to really sum up the interwar periods, it's interesting to have a timeline that you should be aware of the key dates. So of course, in 1919, we had the Treaty of Assai signed, and this ended the First World War. In 1920, there was the first meeting of the League of Nations. In 1921, the Washington Conference was held where the US convened it, and it was attended by Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, China, Japan, and Portugal. And the conference resulted in a naval armaments treaty that set a ratio for tonnage of capital of capital ships for Britain, US, Japan, France, and Italy. In 1922, Veneto Mussolini was made Italian Premier. In 1924, Vladimir Lenin in Russia died. He was one of the key and chief figures during the Bolshevik Revolution, and he was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, who beat Trotsky to the race, and he controlled the Soviet government for several years to come. In 1924, the Catelle des Gouches won the French election, and it displays the ruling bloc national in a marked victory of the left, but proved unable to govern effectively. In 1925, the Locano Pacts was signed in an effort to stabilise relations with Germany and its neighbours. In 1926, Joseph Pilsudiski became a virtual dictator impotent. In 1931, the Spanish monarchy was overthrown and the republic was born. In 1932, General Gula Gombos came to power in Hungary, and he essentially became established a dictatorship rather. Also in 1932, the final League of Nations Disarmament Conference was held, whereby 16 nations were in attendance, including the US. However, this conference stuck its predecessors fail to secure any useful or meaningful agreement. Between 1932 to 1934, 1.1 million Communist Party members were expelled by Stalin's Central Purge Commission, created in 1933, which publicly investigated and tried many members for treason as he seeked to get rid of any opposition. In 1933, Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of Germany, and in also March of the same year, 1933, the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler the power to issue decrees from the status of law effectively working as a dictator. In 1936, the Spanish Nationalists began the Spanish Civil War. In 1938, the Munich Pact was signed, and Britain and France appeased Hitler by signing this pact, which granted Hitler control of the Czech Sudetenland. In 1939, the Spanish Civil War End, and Madrid fell to Francisco Franco's forces, effectively ending the Spanish war, and Franco essentially began his oppressive dictatorship. In September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany, and this was in response to Hitler's continued aggression in Eastern Europe, and this essentially set the stage for the Second World War. So that's all. If you found this video useful, do give us a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel. But also make sure you check out our website, which is www.firstrate tutors.com. There you'll find a slew of exam papers, model answers and informational material that you can use to not only strengthen your essay writing skills, your knowledge around key areas, including history, English, maths and so on. But also you can develop your essay writing skills. Thank you so much for listening.