Curated category
Politics of World War II
- Europe firstEurope first named a strategy the United States never quite followed in its own opening moves. In the first six months after the US entered World War II in…
- Restatement of Policy on GermanyIn 1946, American Occupation General Lucius D. Clay observed that Germans faced a stark choice between starvation and ideology.
- German occupation of Estonia during World War IIThe German occupation of Estonia during World War II began in the summer of 1941 and lasted until 1944, a period that would leave a permanent mark on a small…
- Four PolicemenFranklin D. Roosevelt first voiced the idea of a global police force in August 1941 during his initial meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
- Vichy FranceVichy France began on the 10th of July 1940, the day the French National Assembly voted by 569 votes to 80 to hand absolute power to an 84-year-old military…
- Declaration by United NationsOn the 1st of January 1942, four world leaders gathered in Washington D.C. and signed a single short document that would reshape the entire course of the war…
- Potsdam AgreementThe Potsdam Agreement was signed on the 1st of August 1945, at Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, as the guns fell silent across Europe but war still raged in…
- World War II by countryWorld War II by country is a subject that forces a reckoning with scale. The war drew in almost every nation on earth, and estimates of the dead range from…
- Anglo-German Naval AgreementPart V of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed severe limitations on Germany's naval forces. The treaty allowed no submarines, no naval aviation, and only…
- Occupation of Czechoslovakia (1938–1945)On the 1st of October 1938, German troops crossed into the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia began to disappear. What followed was not a sudden conquest but a…
- Morgenthau PlanThe Morgenthau Plan began as a handwritten memorandum in 1944 and very nearly erased one of the world's great industrial nations from the map.
- Anti-Comintern PactOn the 25th of November 1936, in the offices of a semi-official diplomatic bureau that operated outside Germany's formal foreign ministry, two ambassadors…
- Axis powersThe Axis powers launched the deadliest conflict in human history, and they did it with far less unity than their opponents ever imagined.
- AppeasementAppeasement, the diplomatic policy of granting concessions to an aggressive power in hopes of avoiding conflict, changed world history on the 30th of…
- Armistice of CassibileThe Armistice of Cassibile was signed on the 3rd of September 1943, in a tent at an Allied military camp in Sicily, ending Italy's participation in World War…
- Allies of World War IIThe Allies of World War II were an international military coalition that formed in opposition to the Axis powers during the war that ran from 1939 to 1945.
- Romani HolocaustThe Romani Holocaust was a genocide carried out against the Roma and Sinti people of Europe during World War II. Between 250,000 and 500,000 of them were…
- New Order (Nazism)On the 30th of January 1941, Adolf Hitler stood before his followers and proclaimed a "European New Order." The phrase sounded almost benign, like a…
- Occupation of the Baltic statesThe occupation of the Baltic states is one of modern Europe's longest and most contested erasures of national sovereignty.
- Atlantic CharterThe Atlantic Charter was born on the 14th of August 1941, in the waters of Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland, months before the United States had…
- Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity SphereThe Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was one of the most ambitious and cynical political projects of the twentieth century.
- Opposition to World War IIThe League of Nations formed its headquarters in Geneva after the First World War ended. Its goal was to prevent another global conflict through diplomacy…
- Phoney WarThe Phoney War lasted eight months, from September 1939 to May 1940, and it may be one of the strangest intervals in the history of modern warfare.