World War Two: The Rejected Art Student and the Explosion of the World (Episode 2)

Key takeaways

• Hitler failed the entrance exam of an art school in Vienna in 1907. He did not burn the world alone: anger over Versailles, the Great Depression (about six million Germans out of work by 1932) and conservative politicians who thought they could control him carried him to power in January 1933. The Nazis never won more than half of the vote in a free election.
• Britain and France gave way again and again: rearmament, the Rhineland, Austria, then the Sudetenland at Munich in September 1938, where Czechoslovakia was not even invited. Chamberlain came home with a piece of paper and promised peace. Six months later Germany took all of Czechoslovakia.
• The Blitzkrieg broke through the Ardennes, a forest French generals thought tanks could not cross fast, and France fell in about six weeks in 1940. Hitler made France sign in the same railway carriage where Germany had surrendered in 1918.
• The war reached our region: Japan entered French Indochina in 1940 and 1941, Thailand took Battambang and part of Siem Reap (returned after the war), and Japanese troops came into Cambodia. Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 turned the wars in Europe and Asia into one world war.
• Historians estimate 70 to 85 million people died, about 3 in every 100 people on Earth, most of them civilians, including about six million Jews in the Holocaust and about 27 million people of the Soviet Union. Two superpowers were left standing, the US and the USSR, and Germany and Korea were split between them.