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Stalin becomes dictator of USSR
After being elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee in April 1917, Stalin helped Lenin to evade capture by authorities and ordered the besieged Bolsheviks to surrender to avoid a bloodbath. The Bolsheviks then seized Petrograd and Stalin was appointed People's Commissar for Nationalities' Affairs -
Mussolini’s March on Rome
Mussolini's Blackshirts conquered strategic points across the country and gathered outside Rome. King Victor Emmanuel III refused to declare the state of emergency and implemented the bloodless transfer of power to the Fascists -
Hitler writes Mein Kampf
Mein Kampf (which means "My Struggle") promoted the key components of Nazism: rabid antisemitism, a racist world view, and an aggressive foreign policy geared to gaining Lebensraum (living space) in eastern Europe. -
1st “five year plan” in USSR–
The purposes of the Five-Year Plan, as set forth by responsible officials at Moscow, are the creation of a more adequate industrial development in an industrially backward country and the introduction of more efficient methods of agriculture, including large-scale, highly mechanized farming on cooperative lines -
Japan invades Manchuria
Seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries, Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. By 1937 Japan controlled large sections of China, and accusations of war crimes against the Chinese became commonplace. -
Holodomor
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. -
Hitler appointed chancellor of Germany
Hitler's emergence as chancellor on January 30, 1933, marked a crucial turning point for Germany and, ultimately, for the world. His plan, embraced by much of the German population, was to do away with politics and make Germany a powerful, unified one-party state -
Night of the Long Knives” in Germany
It also provided a legal grounding for the Nazis, as the German courts and cabinet quickly swept aside centuries of legal prohibition against extrajudicial killings to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. The Night of the Long Knives was a turning point for the German government. -
Nuremburg Laws enacted
Enlarge Law for the Safeguard of German Blood and German Honor barred marriage between Jews and other Germans. It was in Nuremberg, officially designated as the "City of the Reich Party Rallies," in the province of Bavaria, where Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party in 1935 changed the status of German Jews to that of Jews in Germany, thus "legally" establishing the framework that eventually led to the Holocaust -
Italian invasion of Ethiopia
The Second Italo-Ethiopian War, also referred to as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, was a war of aggression which was fought between Italy and Ethiopia from October 1935 to February 1937. In Ethiopia it is often referred to simply as the Italian Invasion, and in Italy as the Ethiopian War. -
The Great Purge and gulags
The Great Purge, also known as the “Great Terror,” was a brutal political campaign led by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to eliminate dissenting members of the Communist Party and anyone else he considered a threat. Although estimates vary, most experts believe at least 750,000 people were executed during the Great Purge, which took place between about 1936 and 1938. More than a million other people were sent to forced labor camps, known as Gulags. -
Spanish Civil War
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 the result of systematic killings, mob violence, torture, or other brutalities. -
The Rape of Nanking
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.After it was over bodies were left all over cities. -
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom, was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung paramilitary forces along with civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. -
Nazi Germany invades Poland
The invasion of Poland, also known as the September campaign , 1939 defensive war and Poland campaign was an attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. -
Japan bombs Pearl Harbor
Japan intended the attack as a preventive action to prevent the United States Pacific Fleet from interfering with its planned military actions in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and those of the United States.