A lot of American students have the mistaken impression that World War II was caused by the Holocaust; that 's the Nazi persecution of European Jews. But, that 's definitely not the right answer. Before we can even begin to discuss the causes of WWII, we need to go back to World War I. People across the world had said that the Great War, as it was called at the time, was 'the war to end all wars. ' At its conclusion, the punishing Treaty of Versailles was supposed to have rendered Germany completely impotent.
The League of Nations was formed to prevent future wars of aggression. There were numerous treaties and agreements signed between different nations in the 1920s. What 's more, the Senate 's Nye Committee had convinced the United States
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In fact, it only encouraged Germany to create further problems and eventually start World War II (WWII) - a battle that Britain had to fight in Europe and over her own skies as well.
This pre-WWII British policy is often referred to as appeasement. Essentially, in the late 1930s, the British government rubber stamped several annexations and territorial conquests in central Europe by the German government under Adolf Hitler. There were two main motivating factors behind this policy: the idea that what Hitler was asking for was reasonable and the British government and society wanting terribly to avoid another war.
The first of these policies stemmed from Hitler 's fascist regime 's stated goal of unifying all German speakers in central Europe under the German flag. In addition, Hitler also attacked the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended World War I (WWI), as being unfair to Germany - an argument most in Western Europe and the United States accepted. It seemed reasonable to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and others that Germany should recover some of the territory it had lost after WWI, especially if that territory was occupied by a sizable German-speaking