what caused the armed conflict in europe in 1939

In April, this German annexation was retroactively approved in a plebiscite that was manipulated to indicate that about 99 percent of the Austrian people wanted the union (known as the ' Anschluss') with Germany.

Austria was incorporated into Germany on the following day. Hitler's action brought condemnation from Britain and France, but neither nation intervened.Īfter a prolonged period of intense propaganda inside Austria, German troops entered the country on March 12, 1938, receiving the enthusiastic support of most of the population. On March 7, 1936, however, Hitler repudiated this agreement and ordered the German armed forces ( Wehrmacht) into the demilitarized Rhineland. In the 1925 Treaty of Locarno, Germany had recognized both the inviolability of its borders with France and Belgium and the demilitarization of the Rhineland. At the same time, Hitler announced the expansion of the German army to more than 500,000 men. Military conscription was reintroduced on March 16, 1935, in open violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Thereafter, the Nazis supported rearmament and rapidly expanded arms production. The German armed forces engaged in secret rearmament even before the Nazi takeover of power.

Hitler was determined to overturn the remaining military and territorial provisions of the treaty and include ethnic Germans in the Reich as a step toward the creation of a German empire in Europe. Thus, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the financial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles (the post-World War I peace agreement) had already been revised. At the Lausanne Conference of 1932, Germany, Britain, and France agreed to the formal suspension of reparations payments imposed on the defeated countries after World War I.

What caused the armed conflict in europe in 1939