Trapped by the Extremes: Europe in the 1930sHistory 104 / April 12, 2013

Sir Oswald Mosley and the British

Union of Fascists

“Fellow travellers”:Cambridge & Oxford students

(these threelater becamespies for theSoviet Union)

Anti-government riots in Paris, February 1934(far-right movements attack the parliament

& democracy in general)

Leon Blum (socialist, on left)and Maurice Thorez (communist, center)

Renault workers on strike, 1936

The “cult of personality” surrounding Stalin

“Under the leadership of the Great Stalin –forward to communism!”

Stalin’s henchman purges “Old Bolsheviks”and the leadership of the Red Army

The Gulag:a network of forced labor camps in the

USSR

General Francisco Franco(1892-1975)

Mussolini promises Italian support for Franco;Hitler sends the “Legion Condor”

Guernica, a Spanish town leveled by German bombers

Picasso and hisGuernica painting

Soviet assistance to the Spanish

Republic

Exiled German communists fight

alongside the Spanish Republicans

(other volunteers:the “Lincoln Brigade”

from the U.S.)

Franco defeats the Republic, 1936-39

The Anschluss:Germany’s army

marches into Austria,March 1938

Jubilant crowds greet Hitlerin Vienna, Austria

Anti-Semitic outbursts in Vienna:

Jews forced to clean streets by hand

Hitler’s next target: the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia

When Hitler threatens war, British Prime MinisterNeville Chamberlain (1869-1940) comes to visit

The Munich Conference: Britain, France, Italy, and Germany

Chamberlain:“Peace in our time”

The Sudetenland, Oct. 1938:

Troops greeted fanatically –Jews and socialists rounded up

The “Night of the Broken Glass,” Nov. 9, 1938

Across Germany, synagogues burnt

to the ground

March 1939:German soldiers seize Prague and the remainder of Bohemia