Materials

• None identified

Instructional Activities

1. Discuss with students why dictatorships rose in Germany, Italy, Japan, and the USSR between WWI and WWII. Include the following topics in the discussion:
   • Economic crises
   • Problems associated with the Treaty of Versailles
   • Rise of Lenin and later Stalin in the USSR
   • Quick rise of economic and political power in Japan
   
   
2. Explain that in an economic crisis as severe as the Great Depression, people will more likely turn to governments to solve problems; democracies are slow to react as debates have to take place. Germany felt humiliated because of the Treaty of Versailles; Hitler offered to restore national pride to Germany, as did Mussolini in Italy.
   
   
3. Ask students to pretend they are teenagers in Germany in the 1920s. Have them write an essay or diary entry detailing life at that time period.
   
   
4. Discuss with the class the USSR under Stalin, making sure to include the following:
   • Five-year plans: Goals were set for heavy industry (e.g., steel) to produce quotas that were to be met in five years. Medals and awards were handed out as incentives to meet such goals.
   • Collectivization: Peasants were forced to give up their individual farms and become workers for the state on what were called collective farms.
   • Great Purge: Those who disagreed with Stalin were either sent to gulags (soviet prisons) or disappeared when the midnight knocks came to their homes. Many of these people were associates of Stalin and, with little or no evidence, were convicted on treason charges
   • police state: A secret police organization was established to monitor everyone and everything in the USSR.
   
   
5. Have students predict the results of the above actions by Stalin. Responses may include the following:
   • loss of civil liberties and civil rights
   • creation of a totalitarian state
   • revolt by farmers and the elimination of several million of them
   • fast creation of an industrial state.
   
   
6. Discuss Germany under Hitler. Include the following:
   • The failure of previous governments to address the country’s economic problems, thus allowing Hitler’s rise to power
   • The anti-Semitism of Nazism
   • The meaning of Nazism (National Socialism/Fascism): A dictatorship that allows private ownership
   • Hitler’s takeover of many European countries based on the claim that he needed to make a homeland for his Third Reich
   
   
7. Discuss Italy under Mussolini. Include the following:
   • The rise of Fascism
   • Nationalism
   • Invasion of Ethiopia
   
   
8. Discuss the interwar period in Japan. Include the following:
   • The rise of militarism (Japan becomes a highly-armed military state)
   • Japan’s need for raw material, especially oil, and the role of this need in bringing Japan into conflict with America
   • The invasion of Korea, Manchuria, and China to procure raw materials and to conquer old enemies
   • The roles of Hirohito and Tojo (Hirohito was thought of as a divine emperor. When the military general Tojo took power, he kept the emperor because of this perceived divinity. Japan consequently also became a totalitarian state.)
   
   
9. Have students create a chart that lists these four totalitarian states and the characteristics and actions of each.