The document summarizes key events of World War 2, the Cold War, and decolonization. It describes Hitler's rise to power in Germany and the Axis invasion of multiple countries. It then discusses the Allied victory, with the US and Soviet Union joining the war. The start of the Cold War is outlined, with the division of Europe and nuclear arms race between the US and USSR. Decolonization led many colonies to gain independence, though sometimes resulted in civil wars or new dictatorships.

1. WW2 and the Cold War
and Decolonisation
4th
ESO
Maira Gil Camarón

2. The march towards war
Hitler took power in Germany:
1933: Germany stopped paying war reparations and left
the League of Nations
1933: Germany started building up the armed forces
1935: Germany introduced conscription to increase the
size of the army further
From 1936: Germany expanded its territory to create a
Greater Germany
March 1936  Hitler sent troops to the demilitarised Rhineland
February 1938  Austrian Nazis took power after the resignation
of the chancellor and they invited the Germans to “restore order” 
Hitler had achieved Anschulss, or the union of Germany and
Austria, forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles
September 1938  Germany occupied the Sudetenland
March 1939  Germany took over Bohemia and Moravia in
Czechoslovakia, and took partial control of Slovakia

4. The start of World War Two
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union made a pact : they agreed not to
attack other, and to divide up Poland and other Eastern European countries
between them  Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and
France/Great Britain declared war on Germany  The Second World
War had started

5. Timeline of the Axis advance
From April 1940, Germany invaded a number of
countries using tactics called Blitzkrieg (lightning war) 
using a concentration of tanks, planes and artillery to break
through the enemy’s lines and encircle them
April-June 1940: Germany invaded Denmark, Norway,
France, Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands. The
Vichy government was established in the south of
France
June 1940: Italy entered the war on Germany’s side
July 1940: Japan invaded French Indochina
July- October 1940: Battle of Britain
Sept 1940 – June 1941: Axis power invaded Greece,
Yugoslavia and Egypt
June 1941: Germany invaded the Soviet Union 
Operation Barbarossa
December 1941: Japan bombs Pearl Harbour
(Hawaii), bringing the United States into the war

8. Allied Victory
The German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbour meant that the United States and the
Soviet Union joined the war helping the Allies
 June 1942: Battle of Midway (Pacific Ocean)  USA
stopped the Japanese advance in the Pacific
 Oct 1942: Battle of El Alamein (Egypt)  the British
defeated the Germans and Italians and, in May 1943, they
defeated the Axis in North Africa
 Nov 1942 – Feb 1943: Battle of Stalingrad. The Germans
captured Stalingrad, but they were surrounded and they have to
go back towards Berlin
 July-Sept 1943: the Allies took Sicily and Mussolini was forced
to resign. The new Italian government surrendered to the Allies
 the Germans took control of northern Italy and the Allies
advanced from the south

9.  June 6, 1944: D-Day  the Allies land huge numbers of troops
on beaches in Normandy and started to liberate France
 Aug 1944: The Romanians switched sides and the Bulgarians surrendered
to the Soviet Union. Germany retreated from Greece, Albania and southern
Yugoslavia
 April 1945: The Soviets started their final offensive and surround Berlin.
Hitler committed suicide
 May 7, 1945: Germany surrendered  May 8, Victory in Europe Day
 August 6-9, 1945: The United States dropped atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
 August 14, 1945: Japan surrendered, ending WWII

10. D-Day

12. Atomic bomb

13. Hiroshima before and after the bomb

14. Life during World War Two
Life under German occupation
People were not allowed to go out after dark
Their identification cards were frequently checked
Some families were forced to let German soldiers to live in
their homes
The Germans controlled the news by censoring the
press and banning radios
The Germans took food and other useful products
for their troops  ordinary people didn’t have enough
food
After the war, many people who had collaborated with the
Germans were put on trial. They were blamed to send Jews
and other people to concentration camps

18. Resistance movements
They gave the Allies useful information
They helped prisoners of war and Allied pilots who had
been shot down to escape
They disrupted German supplies and infrastructure
(railways, telephone…)
They forced the Germans to keep large number of soldiers
in occupied areas to fight against the resistance
It they were caught, resistance members were often tortured
or shot

19. Anthropoid
operation
Jan Kubis
Jozef Gabzik
Reinhard Heydrich

20. The Holocaust
Kristallnacht
1938: the Nazis expelled 60,000 Polish-born Jews from Germany. On
9 November, the SA organised attacks against Jews and their shops,
homes and synagogues  the night of broken glass. Almost 100
Jews were killed and 30,000 were arrested and taken to
concentration camps. From this moments, the Nazis started treating
the Jews much worse.

21. The Final Solution
The Nazis planned to murder all of the
Jews in Europe and destroy their
culture  “the final solution to
the Jewish question”
During the war, the Nazis established
death camps with gas chamber to
kill huge number of prisoners. There
were also work camps where
prisoners had to work very hard but
were given so little food that many
died.
Jews from over all Europe were sent to
these camps. Not only Jews were sent
to those camps, but also political
opponents, homosexuals and disabled
people

23. Death marches
When the Nazis realised that the advancing Soviets were
getting close to the camps, the forced prisoners to march
westwards  death marches: so many people starved or froze
to death. Anyone who went too slowly was shot.
When Allied forces liberated areas under German occupation,
they discovered hundreds of camps and they were horrified by
what they found
By the end of the war, six million Jews had been murdered
by the Nazis  Holocaust
After the war, many of the surviving Jews emigrated to the
United States or the new state of Israel

27. The start of the Cold War
Yalta and Potsdam conferences
The Allied war leaders met in Yalta before the end of the war and
agreed that after Germany was defeated:
Germany and Berlin should be split into four zones (run by Britain,
France, USA and the Soviet Union)
There should be free elections in Eastern Europe
The United Nations should be established to replace the League
of Nations
Nazi war criminals should be put on trial (Nuremberg trials)

28. The Allied leaders realised that there would be a conflict between
capitalism and communism after WWII  during the last part of the war
they therefore raced each other to recapture the areas occupied by
Germany
July 1945, after Germany surrendered, the Allied leaders met in
Potsdam  they no longer needed to work together to win the war, and
there was growing distrust between them
Potsdam
conference:
Attlee, Truman
and Stalin

29. The start of the Cold War
The Soviet Union never allowed free elections in
Easter Europe  it made sure that these countries had loyal
communist governments
The United Stated supported the governments in Western
Europe under the Marshall Plan  the United States
gave aid to capitalist countries in Europe to help
them rebuild their economies. It hoped to stop them
becoming communist
Europe was now divided into two opposing blocs led by two
superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. A Cold
War started between the two blocs  it is called the Cold
War because there was no open war between the two
main enemies although there were always hostile to
one another

31. A New World Order
The Cold War was one of the consequences of the WWII:
Over 50 million people died (more than half of them
were civilians)
Cities, factories and agricultural land were destroyed
Europe was weakened politically and many European
countries were left deeply in debt
The atomic bombs dropped on Japan started the nuclear
age
Independence movements in Asia and Africa grew
much stronger  end to the European empires
The UN was created

34. The Iron Curtain
1946: Winston Churchill made a speech in which he said that
“an iron curtain has descended across the continent”
talking about the divide between the countries in Eastern Europe
(communism) and the countries in the West (capitalism)

36. Berlin blockade and airlift
After the war, Germany was split into four zones, each
controlled by one of the Allies. Berlin was inside the Soviet zone,
but it was also split into four sectors.
Britain, USA and France combined their sectors and
introduced a new currency to help the economy recover. Stalin did not
want a strong Germany that could threaten the Soviet Union and
started the blockade of Berlin cutting off road and rail links to
the Allied sectors of Berlin
USA and Britain supplied Berlin by air (the Berlin Airlift)
Almost one year later, Stalin ended the blockade and two weeks
afterwards, the Allied zones were made into a new country (the
Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany). The Soviet zone
became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany
1949: USA and Western European countries created a military alliance
 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO
1955: Eastern Bloc responded by establishing the Warsaw Pact

39. The nuclear arms race
During WWII, the United States set up the Manhattan project
to develop the atomic bomb and in 1949 the Soviet Union
produced its atomic bomb  nuclear arms race to reach the
mutually assured destruction: each side soon had so many
powerful weapons that if one side attacked, the other side
responded, both of them would be completely destroyed

40. Cuban missile crisis
During the 1950s, Cuba was ruled by a military dictator but in 1959, Fidel
Castro overthrew him and established a communist state becoming a
close partner of the Soviet Union
1961: the United States trained Cuban anti-communists rebels and who
tried to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, but they were easily defeated 
Castro asked the Soviets for military assistance and, in 1962, the United
States discovered that there were Soviets missiles in Cuba. The US
president, Kennedy demanded that all the Soviets weapons be removed
from Cuba and announced a naval blockade. Soviets ships carrying missiles
continued sailing towards Cuba, it seemed that there would be a nuclear
war.
The crisis continued until the agreement between Kennedy and
Khrushchev:
The Soviets ordered the ships to turn back and removed the missiles
from Cuba
The United States promised not to invade Cuba and removed the
missiles that they had in Turkey
After this crisis, the relationship between the two superpowers improved
 Détente

42. Decolonisation
It is the process of colonies gaining independence. The main
reasons for decolonisation:
In order to maintain the support of their colonies during
WWII, the Allies agreed to the principle of self-
determination: the right of nations to choose their own
government and rulers
People in the colonies wanted independence and
nationalist movements appeared
The two superpowers (United States and Soviet Union)
opposed colonialism

44. Problems with decolonisation
Colonial powers tried to keep some colonies, which resulted in
wars of independence. Even when independence was given
freely, there were problems:
Decolonisation took place during the Cold War, and both
superpowers wanted influence over the new states
 civil wars
When countries became independent, the western-
educated local elite took power. This did little to improve
the situation of ordinary people and many countries turned
into dictatorships. In a few countries, the white minority
maintained power after their independence, creating
apartheid system of government