Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan
Lenin died in 1924 and a power struggle emerged between two of his closest associates, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. In 1928, Stalin orchestrated the exile of Trotsky and consolidated his control over the Soviet government. Stalin rejected the gradual path laid out in the NEP and instead organized a massive and rapid conversion of the Soviet economy and society into his vision of communism. This conversion was carried out through a series of Five Year Plans. During the first Five-Year Plan, Stalin ordered the construction of massive industrial infrastructure including factories and transportation networks. To fund these projects, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture. Private farms were replaced with massive state owned and managed collectives. The grain produced on these collectives was sold abroad and the funds were used to pay for industrialization. The export of this grain, resistance to collectivization and inefficiencies on collective farms led to massive food shortages in the Ukraine. From 1932 to 1933 more than four million Ukrainians died in what is called the Great Famine.
Stalin used propaganda to create a powerful cult of personality that maintained his popularity despite the suffering he imposed on his people. Secret police rounded up political opponents, dissenters, and counter-revolutionaries. From 1936 to 1938 Stalin ordered the execution of about one million of his people and sent millions more into exile in Siberia during the Great Purge. These efforts created a totalitarian communist state and made the Soviet Union into a global industrial power.
Rise of Fascism
Fascism as a political philosophy was born in Italy in 1919 and spread to other countries in Europe and South America. A Fascist like regimes emerged in Japan during the 1930s under the military dictatorship headed by Hideki Tojo. These regimes were characterized by ultra-nationalistic antidemocratic dictatorships. The leaders of these regimes argued that democracy was ineffective in solving the problems faced by a nation and that the glory and pride of a state was best maintained by a strong totalitarian leader.
In the case of Italy, Germany and Japan these regimes emerged out of democratic states after an economic crisis. In Germany and Italy, these economic crises were made worse by perceived national humiliations resulting from the peace negotiations after World War I. The treatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles enraged many Germans and Italy’s inability to gain land during the post war negotiations angered many Italians. The inability of the democratic governments of Italy, Germany and Japan to solve the economic crisis and the blame that the German and Italian governments received for post war humiliation ultimately led to their downfall.
Benito Mussolini
Democracy failed in Italy first. Rising inflation and unemployment in the early 1920s led to social unrest and a rise in the influence of the Socialists and Communist parties in Italy. These conditions generated fear among the middle and upper classes who became impatient with the government's inability to maintain order and prosperity. Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party began to win support from these groups when Fascist party members known as Black Shirts began to attack Communist and Socialists on the streets. In 1922, with growing support from the middle and upper classes, Mussolini led a march of 30,000 Fascist party members on Rome. Fearing a revolution, King Victor Emmanuel III named Mussolini Prime Minister. Over the next several years, Mussolini consolidate his power as Fascist took control over the Italian parliament and seceded parliamentary authority to Mussolini. By 1925 Mussolini had almost complete control over government.
Now known as Il Duce, Mussolini built a totalitarian regime that abolished democracy, banned opposition political parties, jailed opponents, limited speech, censored the press, outlawed strikes, and utilized an intense propaganda machine to maintain the obedience of the citizenry. Though his methods were harsh, Mussolini was generally respected at home and abroad. Successful reforms modernized Italy with highway construction, industrial development, and literacy campaigns.
Adolf Hitler
Inspired by Mussolini, Hitler formed the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) in 1919 and in 1923 he tried to replicate Mussolini’s success in the March on Rome with a coup attempt in Munich. The Beer Hall Putsch as it is now called was a failure and resulted in a prison sentence for Hitler. Hitler served nine months of his five-year sentence during which he authored Mein Kampf a manifesto of his political beliefs and goals. In Mein Kampf Hitler reiterated Mussolini’s ideas about the weakness of democracy, and communism. He agreed with Mussolini’s conclusion that an ultra-nationalist dictatorship by a single strong leader was the best way to maintain order and restore the pride and prosperity of the state. However, Hitler augmented Mussolini’s Fascist Party platform with the principle of German racial superiority. Hitler argued that the German people (along with a few other northern European populations) were the members of the ancient Aryan “race” and therefore naturally superior to the rest of the world’s population. In Mein Kampf, Hitler established the basic goals of the Nazi party. Like the Fascists of Italy and the Militarists of Japan, the Nazis would end democracy, build a strong military, use government power to improve the economy, and expand their territory. Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo (supported by Hirohito) all believed that their nation’s success depended on the conquest of new territory.
Hitler’s rise to power was very similar to Mussolini. During the 1920s Hitler built a power base that included a Nazi Party militia called the Brown Shirts. Like the Black Shirts of Italy, Hitler’s Brown Shirts used the threat and sometimes actual violence to win political influence. After the collapse of the German economy in the Great Depression the Nazis became Germany’s largest political party. Like in Italy, they gained support from the middle and upper classes by opposing the threat of a communist revolution. In 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor (a position similar to prime minister). Hitler immediately called for new elections for the Reichstag or German parliament. He hoped that his increasing popularity would lead to a Nazi majority. Six days before the election the Reichstag building mysteriously caught fire. Nazi party leaders blamed the fire on the Communist Party and called on citizens to elect Nazis to protect the nation from the threat. Nazis won a slim majority in the Reichstag and like in Italy they began to vote to secede their power to Hitler. In 1934, Hitler was named Führer, taking complete control of the German government. Like Mussolini he built a totalitarian regime that abolished democracy, banned opposition political parties, jailed opponents, limited speech, censored the press, outlawed strikes, and utilized an intense propaganda machine and police force to maintain the obedience of the citizenry. And, like Mussolini, Hitler enjoyed widespread support because of successful reforms that dramatically reduced unemployment, increased industrial output and improved infrastructure.
General Hideki Tojo
Unlike Italy and Germany, Japan never had a single man with total government control. Instead a small group of military leaders ruled with the support of the Emperor Hirohito. Of these men Hideki Tojo emerged as the most powerful. In the Japanese parliamentary democracy of the 1920s the civil government had no control over the military. According to the constitution, the military reported directly to the Emperor. Traditionally the Japanese emperors did not yield power, this meant that the military was essential independent in its authority. Until the Great Depression, the military generally respected the authority of the civil government over the affairs of the Japanese state but when economic hard times turned the Japanese people against the civil government in 1929, the military stepped into take control. Social unrest and popular support facilitated the militaries gradual seizure of power. By 1931, the military invaded Manchuria without the authority of the civil government and by 1941 Hideki Tojo, the head of the military became prime minister.
Like in Italy and Germany, militaristic nationalism supported the power of the new regime. In Japan this nationalism was supported by a religious movement, State Shinto. State Shinto gave the Japanese regime a race based political ideology similar to the Germans. As Nazism argued that the Germans were entitled to build an empire in Europe based on their perceived racial superiority, State Shinto argued that the Japanese were a master race destined to rule Asia. Like their counterparts in Europe, the Japanese regime commanded the obedience of the population and enjoyed widespread popularity because of their success in coping with the Great Depression.
Totalitarianism
The totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy utilized three tools to exert control over both the state and the population. These tools include extensive networks of police that operated both publicly and in secret, state run propaganda networks that controlled the flow of information and built powerful cults of personality around the leader, and complex layers of legislation that legalized the dictatorial rule of the head of state and limited the civil liberties of the rest of the population.
The NKVD in the Soviet Union, the Gestapo and SS in Germany, and the OVRA in Italy served as the eyes and ears of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini respectively. Each dictator maintained an extensive network of police that had the authority to use covert methods to monitor the civilian population. These police networks benefited from a truncated judicial system that allowed for swift punishments that included death, prison, forced labor, and exile. While all three used internment camps to house political dissidents, Germany and the Soviet Union interned dissidents at levels unprecedented in human history. German concentration camps and Soviet gulags housed millions of German and Soviet citizens who challenged or were simply accused of challenging the authority of the regime.
State run propaganda networks like the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany controlled the flow of information to the population. Soviet, German, and Italian propaganda departments censored foreign and domestic media, eliminating anything deemed unfit or dangerous to the regime. State agencies in all three countries produced print, audio, and film media designed to indoctrinate the population and glorify the leader. In the Soviet Union, the glorification of Stalin was so successful that inmates sentenced to years of forced labor in Siberian gulags often wrote letters to Stalin asking for help, falsely believing that their misfortune was the product of a mistake not the policies of the leader.
The Communist, Nazi, and Fascist Parties in each country utilized the legislative bodies of each state to pass legislation that transferred massive power to the leader and severely limited the civil liberties of the population. Freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press were severely reduced in each country.
The extent of power wielded by these totalitarian regimes far surpassed the scope of power held by other authoritarian regimes. While authoritarian monarchs and dictators have managed to take almost complete control over government in most phases of human history, there are few examples of states like Nazi Germany, the Stalinist Soviet Union, and Fascist Italy in which the leader was able to wield extensive power over both the government and the population.
Causes of the Second World War
World War I left many feeling like war no longer had a place in society. Attempts were made to reduce the likelihood of conflict including the creation of the League of Nations and the Kellogg–Briand Pact which renounced war as a tool of state. These efforts failed; by the 1930s a series of regional conflicts began. Over the course of the decade, these regional conflicts drew the attention of an increasing number of global powers and by the 1940s they culminated in the Second World War.
In 1931, Japan invaded the northern Chinese territory of Manchuria. Japanese business interests were heavily invested in the regions iron and coal resources. The Japanese military used an explosion along a Japanese owned railroad in the Manchurian town of Mukden as a pretext for invasion. Once in control, the Japanese set up a puppet government to ostensibly give Manchuria independence. Members of the League of Nations saw the invasion for what it was, Japanese imperialism. The League demanded that Japan withdraw from Manchuria. Japan opted to stay in Manchuria and withdraw from the League of Nations instead. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria was the first in the series of regional conflicts that led to World War II.
Encouraged by the League’s failure to contain Japanese imperialist ambitions in Asia, Benito Mussolini of Italy ordered an invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Like the Japanese, Mussolini sought to glorify his nation through imperial conquest. Further he wished to avenge an Ethiopian defeat of Italy in the 1890s. Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, appealed to the League of Nations for help. The League condemned the invasion but none of the great powers did anything to stop him. In fact, the British allowed the Italian military to use the Suez Canal to move supplies and troops to East Africa for the invasion.
In the same year that Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Hitler announced that Germany would no longer obey the troop limits placed on them by the Treaty of Versailles. The League condemned this move but did nothing. In March of 1936, Hitler violated the treaty again by moving German troops into the demilitarized buffer between Germany and France called the Rhineland. The move for militarization of the Rhineland stunned members of the League, however they took no action. Britain argued for a policy of appeasement in the hopes of maintaining peace. In October of ‘36 Germany and Italy formed an alliance to which they added Japan in November forming the Axis Powers.
In July of 1936, Francisco Franco a Spanish General led a revolt against Spain’s Republican government in the Spanish Civil War. Franco and his supports in the military wished to establish a fascist regime similar to that of Hitler and Mussolini. A civil war broke out that lasted until Franco’s victory in 1939. Mussolini and Hitler sent troops and equipment to support Franco during the civil war; only the Soviet Union supported the forces of the Spanish Republic.
In 1937 German and Japanese aggression continued. In July of 1937 Japan mounted a full-scale invasion of China. The better equipped Japanese forces advanced quickly and by December of 1937 they took the Chinese capital city of Nanjing. In what is called the Rape of Nanjing, Japanese troops killed 200,000 prisoners of war and civilians and raped 20,000 women. The treatment of Chinese civilians in Nanjing was savagely violent and public with many photographers recording the carnage.
In November 1937 Hitler announced plans for the Anschluss, the unification of Germany and Austria. While this move was prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler carried out the annexation of Austria in March of 1938 with little resistance from other European nations. Next, Hitler turned to the German speaking region of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. Hitler demanded that this land be turned over to Germany in September of 1938. German, French, British, and Italian leaders met to discuss these demands in Munich. Hoping to maintain peace through appeasement, France and Britain agreed to the German annexation of the Sudetenland at the Munich Conference. In March of 1939 Hitler took all of Czechoslovakia. With this move it became increasing clear that appeasement would not prevent war; Britain and France pledged to declare war on Germany if Hitler threatened Poland.
Lenin died in 1924 and a power struggle emerged between two of his closest associates, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. In 1928, Stalin orchestrated the exile of Trotsky and consolidated his control over the Soviet government. Stalin rejected the gradual path laid out in the NEP and instead organized a massive and rapid conversion of the Soviet economy and society into his vision of communism. This conversion was carried out through a series of Five Year Plans. During the first Five-Year Plan, Stalin ordered the construction of massive industrial infrastructure including factories and transportation networks. To fund these projects, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture. Private farms were replaced with massive state owned and managed collectives. The grain produced on these collectives was sold abroad and the funds were used to pay for industrialization. The export of this grain, resistance to collectivization and inefficiencies on collective farms led to massive food shortages in the Ukraine. From 1932 to 1933 more than four million Ukrainians died in what is called the Great Famine.
Stalin used propaganda to create a powerful cult of personality that maintained his popularity despite the suffering he imposed on his people. Secret police rounded up political opponents, dissenters, and counter-revolutionaries. From 1936 to 1938 Stalin ordered the execution of about one million of his people and sent millions more into exile in Siberia during the Great Purge. These efforts created a totalitarian communist state and made the Soviet Union into a global industrial power.
Rise of Fascism
Fascism as a political philosophy was born in Italy in 1919 and spread to other countries in Europe and South America. A Fascist like regimes emerged in Japan during the 1930s under the military dictatorship headed by Hideki Tojo. These regimes were characterized by ultra-nationalistic antidemocratic dictatorships. The leaders of these regimes argued that democracy was ineffective in solving the problems faced by a nation and that the glory and pride of a state was best maintained by a strong totalitarian leader.
In the case of Italy, Germany and Japan these regimes emerged out of democratic states after an economic crisis. In Germany and Italy, these economic crises were made worse by perceived national humiliations resulting from the peace negotiations after World War I. The treatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles enraged many Germans and Italy’s inability to gain land during the post war negotiations angered many Italians. The inability of the democratic governments of Italy, Germany and Japan to solve the economic crisis and the blame that the German and Italian governments received for post war humiliation ultimately led to their downfall.
Benito Mussolini
Democracy failed in Italy first. Rising inflation and unemployment in the early 1920s led to social unrest and a rise in the influence of the Socialists and Communist parties in Italy. These conditions generated fear among the middle and upper classes who became impatient with the government's inability to maintain order and prosperity. Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party began to win support from these groups when Fascist party members known as Black Shirts began to attack Communist and Socialists on the streets. In 1922, with growing support from the middle and upper classes, Mussolini led a march of 30,000 Fascist party members on Rome. Fearing a revolution, King Victor Emmanuel III named Mussolini Prime Minister. Over the next several years, Mussolini consolidate his power as Fascist took control over the Italian parliament and seceded parliamentary authority to Mussolini. By 1925 Mussolini had almost complete control over government.
Now known as Il Duce, Mussolini built a totalitarian regime that abolished democracy, banned opposition political parties, jailed opponents, limited speech, censored the press, outlawed strikes, and utilized an intense propaganda machine to maintain the obedience of the citizenry. Though his methods were harsh, Mussolini was generally respected at home and abroad. Successful reforms modernized Italy with highway construction, industrial development, and literacy campaigns.
Adolf Hitler
Inspired by Mussolini, Hitler formed the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) in 1919 and in 1923 he tried to replicate Mussolini’s success in the March on Rome with a coup attempt in Munich. The Beer Hall Putsch as it is now called was a failure and resulted in a prison sentence for Hitler. Hitler served nine months of his five-year sentence during which he authored Mein Kampf a manifesto of his political beliefs and goals. In Mein Kampf Hitler reiterated Mussolini’s ideas about the weakness of democracy, and communism. He agreed with Mussolini’s conclusion that an ultra-nationalist dictatorship by a single strong leader was the best way to maintain order and restore the pride and prosperity of the state. However, Hitler augmented Mussolini’s Fascist Party platform with the principle of German racial superiority. Hitler argued that the German people (along with a few other northern European populations) were the members of the ancient Aryan “race” and therefore naturally superior to the rest of the world’s population. In Mein Kampf, Hitler established the basic goals of the Nazi party. Like the Fascists of Italy and the Militarists of Japan, the Nazis would end democracy, build a strong military, use government power to improve the economy, and expand their territory. Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo (supported by Hirohito) all believed that their nation’s success depended on the conquest of new territory.
Hitler’s rise to power was very similar to Mussolini. During the 1920s Hitler built a power base that included a Nazi Party militia called the Brown Shirts. Like the Black Shirts of Italy, Hitler’s Brown Shirts used the threat and sometimes actual violence to win political influence. After the collapse of the German economy in the Great Depression the Nazis became Germany’s largest political party. Like in Italy, they gained support from the middle and upper classes by opposing the threat of a communist revolution. In 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor (a position similar to prime minister). Hitler immediately called for new elections for the Reichstag or German parliament. He hoped that his increasing popularity would lead to a Nazi majority. Six days before the election the Reichstag building mysteriously caught fire. Nazi party leaders blamed the fire on the Communist Party and called on citizens to elect Nazis to protect the nation from the threat. Nazis won a slim majority in the Reichstag and like in Italy they began to vote to secede their power to Hitler. In 1934, Hitler was named Führer, taking complete control of the German government. Like Mussolini he built a totalitarian regime that abolished democracy, banned opposition political parties, jailed opponents, limited speech, censored the press, outlawed strikes, and utilized an intense propaganda machine and police force to maintain the obedience of the citizenry. And, like Mussolini, Hitler enjoyed widespread support because of successful reforms that dramatically reduced unemployment, increased industrial output and improved infrastructure.
General Hideki Tojo
Unlike Italy and Germany, Japan never had a single man with total government control. Instead a small group of military leaders ruled with the support of the Emperor Hirohito. Of these men Hideki Tojo emerged as the most powerful. In the Japanese parliamentary democracy of the 1920s the civil government had no control over the military. According to the constitution, the military reported directly to the Emperor. Traditionally the Japanese emperors did not yield power, this meant that the military was essential independent in its authority. Until the Great Depression, the military generally respected the authority of the civil government over the affairs of the Japanese state but when economic hard times turned the Japanese people against the civil government in 1929, the military stepped into take control. Social unrest and popular support facilitated the militaries gradual seizure of power. By 1931, the military invaded Manchuria without the authority of the civil government and by 1941 Hideki Tojo, the head of the military became prime minister.
Like in Italy and Germany, militaristic nationalism supported the power of the new regime. In Japan this nationalism was supported by a religious movement, State Shinto. State Shinto gave the Japanese regime a race based political ideology similar to the Germans. As Nazism argued that the Germans were entitled to build an empire in Europe based on their perceived racial superiority, State Shinto argued that the Japanese were a master race destined to rule Asia. Like their counterparts in Europe, the Japanese regime commanded the obedience of the population and enjoyed widespread popularity because of their success in coping with the Great Depression.
Totalitarianism
The totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy utilized three tools to exert control over both the state and the population. These tools include extensive networks of police that operated both publicly and in secret, state run propaganda networks that controlled the flow of information and built powerful cults of personality around the leader, and complex layers of legislation that legalized the dictatorial rule of the head of state and limited the civil liberties of the rest of the population.
The NKVD in the Soviet Union, the Gestapo and SS in Germany, and the OVRA in Italy served as the eyes and ears of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini respectively. Each dictator maintained an extensive network of police that had the authority to use covert methods to monitor the civilian population. These police networks benefited from a truncated judicial system that allowed for swift punishments that included death, prison, forced labor, and exile. While all three used internment camps to house political dissidents, Germany and the Soviet Union interned dissidents at levels unprecedented in human history. German concentration camps and Soviet gulags housed millions of German and Soviet citizens who challenged or were simply accused of challenging the authority of the regime.
State run propaganda networks like the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany controlled the flow of information to the population. Soviet, German, and Italian propaganda departments censored foreign and domestic media, eliminating anything deemed unfit or dangerous to the regime. State agencies in all three countries produced print, audio, and film media designed to indoctrinate the population and glorify the leader. In the Soviet Union, the glorification of Stalin was so successful that inmates sentenced to years of forced labor in Siberian gulags often wrote letters to Stalin asking for help, falsely believing that their misfortune was the product of a mistake not the policies of the leader.
The Communist, Nazi, and Fascist Parties in each country utilized the legislative bodies of each state to pass legislation that transferred massive power to the leader and severely limited the civil liberties of the population. Freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press were severely reduced in each country.
The extent of power wielded by these totalitarian regimes far surpassed the scope of power held by other authoritarian regimes. While authoritarian monarchs and dictators have managed to take almost complete control over government in most phases of human history, there are few examples of states like Nazi Germany, the Stalinist Soviet Union, and Fascist Italy in which the leader was able to wield extensive power over both the government and the population.
Causes of the Second World War
World War I left many feeling like war no longer had a place in society. Attempts were made to reduce the likelihood of conflict including the creation of the League of Nations and the Kellogg–Briand Pact which renounced war as a tool of state. These efforts failed; by the 1930s a series of regional conflicts began. Over the course of the decade, these regional conflicts drew the attention of an increasing number of global powers and by the 1940s they culminated in the Second World War.
In 1931, Japan invaded the northern Chinese territory of Manchuria. Japanese business interests were heavily invested in the regions iron and coal resources. The Japanese military used an explosion along a Japanese owned railroad in the Manchurian town of Mukden as a pretext for invasion. Once in control, the Japanese set up a puppet government to ostensibly give Manchuria independence. Members of the League of Nations saw the invasion for what it was, Japanese imperialism. The League demanded that Japan withdraw from Manchuria. Japan opted to stay in Manchuria and withdraw from the League of Nations instead. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria was the first in the series of regional conflicts that led to World War II.
Encouraged by the League’s failure to contain Japanese imperialist ambitions in Asia, Benito Mussolini of Italy ordered an invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Like the Japanese, Mussolini sought to glorify his nation through imperial conquest. Further he wished to avenge an Ethiopian defeat of Italy in the 1890s. Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, appealed to the League of Nations for help. The League condemned the invasion but none of the great powers did anything to stop him. In fact, the British allowed the Italian military to use the Suez Canal to move supplies and troops to East Africa for the invasion.
In the same year that Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Hitler announced that Germany would no longer obey the troop limits placed on them by the Treaty of Versailles. The League condemned this move but did nothing. In March of 1936, Hitler violated the treaty again by moving German troops into the demilitarized buffer between Germany and France called the Rhineland. The move for militarization of the Rhineland stunned members of the League, however they took no action. Britain argued for a policy of appeasement in the hopes of maintaining peace. In October of ‘36 Germany and Italy formed an alliance to which they added Japan in November forming the Axis Powers.
In July of 1936, Francisco Franco a Spanish General led a revolt against Spain’s Republican government in the Spanish Civil War. Franco and his supports in the military wished to establish a fascist regime similar to that of Hitler and Mussolini. A civil war broke out that lasted until Franco’s victory in 1939. Mussolini and Hitler sent troops and equipment to support Franco during the civil war; only the Soviet Union supported the forces of the Spanish Republic.
In 1937 German and Japanese aggression continued. In July of 1937 Japan mounted a full-scale invasion of China. The better equipped Japanese forces advanced quickly and by December of 1937 they took the Chinese capital city of Nanjing. In what is called the Rape of Nanjing, Japanese troops killed 200,000 prisoners of war and civilians and raped 20,000 women. The treatment of Chinese civilians in Nanjing was savagely violent and public with many photographers recording the carnage.
In November 1937 Hitler announced plans for the Anschluss, the unification of Germany and Austria. While this move was prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler carried out the annexation of Austria in March of 1938 with little resistance from other European nations. Next, Hitler turned to the German speaking region of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. Hitler demanded that this land be turned over to Germany in September of 1938. German, French, British, and Italian leaders met to discuss these demands in Munich. Hoping to maintain peace through appeasement, France and Britain agreed to the German annexation of the Sudetenland at the Munich Conference. In March of 1939 Hitler took all of Czechoslovakia. With this move it became increasing clear that appeasement would not prevent war; Britain and France pledged to declare war on Germany if Hitler threatened Poland.