History isn't linear: It's more like a spiderweb than a progression of singular events through Points A, B, C, and so on. Take World War II. For a long time, historians have been trying to learn just how much America knew about what was going on in Nazi Germany, and a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum project to document newspaper headlines of the era — and going back to the 1930s — makes it pretty clear that there were enough warning signs that "Why didn't the U.S. get involved sooner?" becomes...
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"We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it!" This may sound like some of the toxic rhetoric currently dominating politics today, but those words were spoken February 20, 1939 by Fritz Kuhn, head of the German American Bund – i.e. American Nazis, on film posted by The Atlantic.
Every history class teaches that it was the attack on Pearl Harbor that finally got the U.S. involved, but here's the thing: Hitler and Nazi Germany declared war on the States before the U.S. government could issue their declaration. Hitler's play came four days after the attack on American soil, and as The Wall Street Journal explains, it came amid opinions vastly underestimating what the U.S. — relatively fresh out of the Great Depression — was capable of.
World War II was like a spider's web of human suffering, with Nazi Germany as the vicious spider at its center, scrambling for control. That spider was finally squashed, so to speak, on April 30, 1945. As the Red Army overran Berlin's last defenses. Adolf Hitler — then, perversely, the most influential man in the world — swallowed a lethal dose of cyanide and shot himself in his bunker. The rest is history.
When we're taught history lessons in school, the earth shattering events of World War II are often framed as a battle between forces of freedom and goodness and those of oppression and evil. Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, which came to power in 1933, quickly snuffed out any sense of German democracy that had emerged in the Weimar Republic after World War I. After the passing of the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler and the Nazi Party ultimate control over Germany and its people, the nation's transformation into a fascist state was almost immediate.
World War II came to an end with Japan's unconditional surrender. The date was September 2, 1945, and it was six years and a day since Germany's invasion of Poland. Around 78 million people were dead, not even including the unthinkable 6 million who died in Nazi concentration camps. After all that, it took just 18 minutes for the papers to be signed.
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