As the 1930s unfolded, it became clear that peace would not last for long. Japan’s advances through China and its violent attack on Nanjing showed that its military-dominated government would continue to press aggressively for more territory

The rise of fascism in Italy and Germany continued unchecked. The Nazis were able to manipulate the situation to their diplomatic advantage and gain British and French acquiescence to the takeover of Austria and the Sudetenland (in Czechoslovakia) before any war began.

Atlantic Charter — a statement of British and U.S. goals and objectives for the world after World War II; negotiated by British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt. German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact — a 1939 agreement between Germany and the USSR in which the two nations agreed not to attack one another or to assist other nations in attacking the other and to divide portions…. Holocaust — the Nazi genocide that resulted in the murder of more than six million Jewish people and at least three million members of other, non-Jewish minority groups. Lebensraum — a German term meaning “living room” and referring to lands seized from countries in eastern Europe in which Adolf Hitler envisioned settling German families to supplant the….