ABSTRACT
The coming to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany was the crucial link in a chain of events that ultimately led to World War II. Hitler masked the threat Nazi Germany posed to other countries by claiming that his major foreign policy goal was to undo what he claimed were injustices imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. The Grand Alliance looked formidable on paper, especially in light of America's unmatched industrial power. In launching Operation Barbarossa, Germany sent more than three million troops, 2,500 tanks, and 2,700 aircraft against the Soviet Union. The attack on Pearl Harbor, carried out on December 7, 1941, achieved complete surprise and did great damage to the US fleet. The war's death toll, military and civilian, probably approached 60 million, including the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The most notorious act of British and French appeasement involved Czechoslovakia, by the late 1930s central Europe's only remaining democracy.
