IB History: The Second World War — notes, maps and essay questions

Chapter 1: The Gathering Storm

Versailles and Nazi revisionism. The 1919 settlement reduced German territory and armed strength. Nazi propaganda converted widespread resentment into support for expansion and falsely presented each breach as a limited correction.

Depression and political weakness. Economic crisis discredited moderate parties and helped the Nazis reach power. It also constrained British and French military spending and made another major war politically difficult.

Memory of 1914–18. Leaders and voters feared another industrial slaughter. They accepted risk now to delay war, partly because they believed additional time would improve rearmament.

Failed collective security. Weak responses to Japan in Manchuria and Italy in Abyssinia showed that League of Nations sanctions lacked enforcement. Germany learned that rapid action could outrun collective decisions.

Chapter 2: The Pact and the Partition of Poland

Soviet distrust after Munich. Stalin doubted that Britain and France would form an effective anti-German alliance. A deal with Germany offered time, territory, and distance from a future front.

Hitler avoids two fronts. The pact neutralized the USSR during the Polish campaign and opened Soviet trade. Hitler expected Britain and France either to retreat again or to fight without decisive effect.

Danzig as pretext. The status of Danzig and the Polish Corridor supplied public demands. Hitler’s wider aim was Lebensraum, or living space, and the destruction of an independent Polish state.

Chapter 3: Blitzkrieg in the West

Organization over equipment totals. France had many capable tanks but distributed much of its armor for infantry support. Germany concentrated combined-arms formations and connected them by radio.

The Ardennes gamble. The revised German plan placed its main weight through terrain the Allies considered unsuitable for a large, rapid armored advance. Surprise came from accepting operational risk.

Norway and iron ore. Control of Norway protected Swedish ore shipments and supplied Atlantic bases. German naval losses there, however, reduced its ability to cover an invasion of Britain.

The long peace — under a mushroom cloud. No great-power war since 1945: deterrence, exhaustion, institutions, or luck? Historians argue; all four probably. But the wars didn’t stop — they moved to the decolonizing world, fought by proxy, from Korea to Vietnam to Angola.

Never again — the unfinished project. Human-rights law, refugee conventions, genocide prevention: all direct answers to 1939–45, all tested and often failed since (Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia — the last on this very map). The war’s deepest lesson is not that evil was defeated once, but what it took, and how late everyone acted.