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Hitler began writing Mein Kampf in 1924 in Landsberg prison. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf was part autobiography and part political treatise. Mein Kampf (which means "My Struggle") promoted the key components of Nazism: rabid antisemitism, a racist worldview, and an aggressive foreign policy geared toward gaining Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. -
Serving in the Russian Civil War before overseeing the Soviet Union's establishment in 1922, Stalin assumed leadership over the country following Lenin's death in 1924. Under Stalin, socialism in one country became a central tenet of the party's ideology. -
The March on Rome (Italian: Marcia su Roma) was an organized mass demonstration and a coup d'état in October 1922 which resulted in Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party (PNF) ascending to power in the Kingdom of Italy. -
The five-year plans for the development of the national economy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics consisted of a series of nationwide centralized economic plans in the Soviet Union, beginning in the late 1920s. -
Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931, seeking for raw materials. By 1937 Japan controlled large sections of China, and war crimes against the Chinese became commonplace. -
The term Holodomor (death by hunger, in Ukrainian) refers to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932–33 as a result of Soviet policies. The Holodomor can be seen as the culmination of an assault by the Communist Party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian peasantry, who RESISTED Soviet policies. -
The Nazi Party assumes control of the German state when German President Paul von Hindenburg appoints Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler as Chancellor at the head of a coalition government. -
They were race laws and the Germans just wanted to put out what they thought was correct. One of the laws was that if you were to come to power in Germany, you would have to be pure German. The other one was no personal doings with Jews like marriage or intercourse. -
In 1934, Stalin used the murder of Sergey Kirov as a pretext to launch the Great Purge, in which about a million people perished. Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged the murder, or at least that there was sufficient evidence to reach such a conclusion. -
Night of the Long Knives, in German history, purge of Nazi leaders by Adolf Hitler on June 30, 1934. Fearing that the paramilitary SA had become too powerful, Hitler ordered his elite SS guards to murder the organization’s leaders, including Ernst Röhm. Also killed that night were hundreds of other perceived opponents of Hitler. -
Italy invaded Ethiopia in October 1935, launching a war that would drive Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie into exile, pave the way for Italian occupation, and test the capacity and will of the League of Nations to check the aggression of expansionist states. -
The Spanish Civil War was the bloodiest conflict Western Europe had experienced since the end of World War I in 1918. It was the breeding ground for mass atrocities. About 200,000 people died as a result of systematic killings, mob violence, torture, or other brutalities. -
The Anti-Comintern Pact was an agreement between Germany, Italy and Japan, that they would work together to stop the spread of Communism around the globe. This was aimed squarely at the USSR. Germany and Italy had worked well during the Spanish Civil War and had brought about a fascist victory over communism. -
In what became known as the “Rape of Nanking,” the Japanese butchered an estimated 150,000 male “war prisoners,” massacred an additional 50,000 male civilians, and raped at least 20,000 women and girls of all ages, many of whom were mutilated or killed in the process. -
Kristallnacht, also called Night of Broken Glass or November Pogroms, was the night of November 9–10, 1938, when German Nazis attacked Jewish persons and property. The name Kristallnacht refers ironically to the litter of broken glass left in the streets after these pogroms. The violence continued during the day of November 10, and in some places, acts of violence continued for several more days.