MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · April 14 · 1935
ON THIS DAY · 14 APRIL 1935
The Stresa Front
11–14 Apr 1935 — Britain, France and Italy meet on Lake Maggiore to condemn German rearmament. The “front” dissolves within months — Britain signs a naval deal with Berlin, and Abyssinia finishes it.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
On 30 January 1933 the map’s center changes color. Adolf Hitler is not swept into the chancellery — he is handed it, by conservative politicians who believe a cabinet stacked 8-to-3 against the Nazis has him “framed in.” Within eight weeks: the Reichstag fire, emergency decrees suspending civil liberty, an Enabling Act passed under SA intimidation, and the first concentration camp at Dachau. Within eight months Germany has walked out of the League of Nations and the Geneva disarmament conference — note the ● at Geneva, where Japan’s walkout in the Manchurian affair had shown the door twelve months earlier. The dictatorships are learning from each other; the democracies are not.
From Chapter 3 — Germany Turns Charcoal of The Road to War, 1931–1941 (1935).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — A republic died of its rescuers. Weimar’s final crisis was managed by men who despised it: from 1930 chancellors governed by presidential decree, and the conservative clique around…
- The turn — Stresa, April 1935. The conference on Lake Maggiore is the moment collective containment of Hitler exists on paper — Britain, France and Italy, jointly condemning…
- What it changed — The arms race resumes with one runner. By 1936 Germany is spending perhaps ten times what Britain spends on its army. The democracies begin serious rearmament only in 1936–37, and their…
Then ask the room: Hitler wrote his program in Mein Kampf a decade before power. Why did so few statesmen believe him? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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