20th-Century Global Conflicts: every key term you need (+ practice quiz)
61 flashcard terms for AP European History Unit 8, written to match the course framework. Study them here, then drill them as interactive flashcards, or test yourself with the 25-question quiz — free, no account needed.
Militarism (arms races, war plans), Alliances (Triple Alliance vs. Triple Entente), Imperialism (colonial rivalry, Balkan competition), and Nationalism (pan-Slavism, revanche, jingoism) — the powder; Sarajevo was the spark.
Alliance Blocs by 1914
Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy (which stayed neutral, then joined the Allies in 1915). Triple Entente: France, Russia, Britain — formed after Wilhelm II dropped Bismarck's Russian wire and built a fleet against Britain.
Assassination at Sarajevo (June 28, 1914)
Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb of the Black Hand network, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Austria-Hungary. Vienna's ultimatum to Serbia, backed by Germany's 'blank check,' set the alliance dominoes falling.
July Crisis & the Blank Check
Germany promised Austria unconditional support against Serbia; Russia mobilized for Serbia; Germany declared war on Russia and France; the invasion of neutral Belgium brought Britain in. A Balkan quarrel became a world war in five weeks.
Schlieffen Plan
Germany's war plan: knock out France in six weeks by a massive sweep through Belgium, then turn on slower-mobilizing Russia. It failed at the Marne (September 1914) — condemning Germany to the two-front war it was designed to avoid.
Trench Warfare — Western Front
After 1914, a 475-mile line of trenches from the Channel to Switzerland: barbed wire, machine guns, artillery, mud, rats, and 'no man's land.' Defense dominated offense — four years of slaughter for yards of ground.
Verdun and the Somme (1916)
The war's emblematic bloodbaths: Verdun — Falkenhayn's plan to 'bleed France white,' ~700,000 casualties, 'They shall not pass'; the Somme — 57,000 British casualties on day one, over a million total, for a few miles of mud.
New Weapons of WWI
Machine guns, rapid-fire artillery (most deaths), poison gas (chlorine at Ypres 1915, then phosgene and mustard), tanks (Somme 1916), aircraft (reconnaissance to dogfights), U-boats, flamethrowers — industrialized killing.
Total War — Home Fronts
Whole societies mobilized: conscription, war economies and rationing, state direction of industry (Germany's Hindenburg Program, Britain's munitions ministry), propaganda and censorship, civil liberties curtailed — the state swollen everywhere.
Women in WWI
Women filled munitions factories ('munitionettes'), transport, offices, and farms; served as nurses at the front. Their war work transformed the suffrage argument — British women (over 30) voted in 1918, German women in 1919.
Eastern Front & Gallipoli
The East stayed mobile and vast: Tannenberg (1914) made Hindenburg and Ludendorff legends; Russia bled. Gallipoli (1915) — Churchill's plan to knock out the Ottomans — failed bloodily, forging ANZAC legend and Atatürk's reputation.
Armenian Genocide (1915–1923)
The Ottoman government's deportation and massacre of its Armenian population — roughly 1.5 million dead — under cover of war: the 20th century's first genocide, its denial still contested.
U-Boats and American Entry (1917)
Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare (sinking the Lusitania 1915, resumed 1917) and the Zimmermann Telegram (proposing a Mexican alliance) brought the U.S. into the war — fresh troops, money, and materiel tipping the balance.
Russian Revolution — February 1917
War exhaustion, bread shortages, and the tsar's incompetence brought Petrograd crowds and mutinous garrisons; Nicholas II abdicated. The Provisional Government shared power with the Petrograd Soviet — and fatally stayed in the war.
Russian Revolution — October 1917
Lenin's Bolsheviks — 'Peace, Land, Bread,' 'All power to the Soviets' — seized power in a near-bloodless coup. The Constituent Assembly was dispersed; the Cheka founded; Brest-Litovsk (1918) bought peace at the cost of vast territories.
Russian Civil War (1918–1921)
Reds vs. Whites (and Greens, nationalists, and Allied intervention forces): the Bolsheviks won through the Red Army (Trotsky), interior lines, War Communism's ruthless requisition — at the cost of millions dead and famine.
Armistice & Collapse (1918)
Ludendorff's spring offensives failed; the Allies (with Americans) counterattacked; Germany's allies collapsed; revolution broke out at home (Kiel mutiny). The Kaiser abdicated; the armistice took effect November 11, 1918 — 9–10 million soldiers dead.
Treaty of Versailles (1919)
The peace imposed on Germany: Article 231 war guilt, reparations (132 billion gold marks, 1921), army capped at 100,000 with no air force or submarines, Rhineland demilitarized, Alsace-Lorraine returned, colonies stripped as mandates. 'A peace built on quicksand' — resented, and exploited by demagogues.
Wilson's Fourteen Points & the League
Wilson's program — open diplomacy, self-determination, and a League of Nations — shaped the settlement's rhetoric more than its substance. The League emerged without the U.S. (Senate rejection), toothless against determined aggressors.
New Map of Europe (1919–1923)
Four empires gone (German, Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman). New states: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary, the Baltics, Finland. Self-determination applied selectively — every new state had its own minorities; Germans were divided among several.
Weimar Republic
Germany's democracy born of defeat (1919): a model constitution burdened by Versailles's stigma, the 'stab-in-the-back' myth, putsch attempts from right (Kapp, Hitler 1923) and left, judicial bias toward the right, and chronic coalition instability.
Hyperinflation (1923)
After France occupied the Ruhr to enforce reparations, Germany's passive resistance was financed by the printing press: the mark collapsed to trillions per dollar, wiping out savings and the middle class's faith in the republic. Stresemann and the Rentenmark stabilized; the scar remained.
Locarno & the Spirit of the Twenties
Stresemann and Briand's détente: the Locarno Pact (1925) guaranteed western borders, Germany joined the League (1926), the Dawes and Young Plans rescheduled reparations on American credit, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) renounced war — stability built on U.S. loans.
Great Depression in Europe
The 1929 Wall Street crash cut the credit lifeline: banks failed (Creditanstalt 1931), trade and production collapsed, unemployment soared (6 million in Germany by 1932). Democracies discredited, extremes empowered — the Depression elected Hitler.
Mussolini & Fascist Italy
Amid postwar chaos and Red-scare strikes, Mussolini's Blackshirts marched on Rome (1922); the king appointed him premier. By 1926: one-party state, propaganda ('Il Duce'), corporatism, Lateran Accords with the pope (1929) — the fascist template: ultranationalist, anti-communist, theatrical, violent.
Fascism — Doctrine
'Everything within the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.' Anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, anti-parliamentary: the nation as supreme organism, the leader as its will, violence as hygiene, war as vitality — modernity's revolt against 1789.
Hitler's Rise (1919–1933)
From army informant to NSDAP demagogue: the failed Beer Hall Putsch (1923), Mein Kampf's program (race, space, revenge), electoral breakthrough under Depression (37% in July 1932), and backstairs intrigue — Papen and Hindenburg appointing him chancellor (January 30, 1933) to 'tame' him.
Nazi Seizure of Power (1933–1934)
The Reichstag Fire → emergency decrees; the Enabling Act (March 1933) → rule by decree; parties, unions, and states Gleichschaltung-ed; the Night of the Long Knives (1934) purging the SA and rivals; Hindenburg's death → Führer. Legality's forms, dictatorship's substance.
Nazi Racial State
Anti-Semitism as governing principle: the boycott (1933), Nuremberg Laws (1935) stripping citizenship and banning intermarriage, Aryanization of property, Kristallnacht pogrom (November 1938) — persecution escalating toward war's 'Final Solution.'
Stalin's Revolution from Above
Five-Year Plans (from 1928): breakneck industrialization — steel cities (Magnitogorsk), quotas, Stakhanovites; forced collectivization of agriculture — kulaks 'liquidated as a class,' the Ukrainian famine (Holodomor, 1932–33) killing millions; the command economy built on coercion.
Great Purge (1936–1938)
Stalin's terror devoured party, army, and society: show trials of Old Bolsheviks (confessing to fantastic crimes), the officer corps decimated (fatal in 1941), the Gulag swollen, ~700,000 shot. Totalitarianism's paranoid apogee.
Totalitarianism — Concept
The 20th-century novelty: regimes claiming total control of politics, economy, culture, and private life through party, terror, propaganda, and leader-cult — Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR the paradigm cases (with debate over the concept's limits).
Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)
Franco's Nationalist rising against the Republic became the era's ideological proxy war: Germany and Italy armed Franco (Guernica bombed — Picasso's protest), the USSR aided the Republic, the democracies embargoed. Franco's victory: a dress rehearsal for WWII.
Appeasement
Britain and France's policy of conceding to Hitler's 'last demands': rearmament ignored (1935), Rhineland remilitarized (1936), Austria annexed (Anschluss, March 1938), and Munich (September 1938) — Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland ceded without Czech consent. 'Peace for our time' (Chamberlain); Prague seized anyway (March 1939).
Nazi-Soviet Pact (August 23, 1939)
The cynical thunderclap: Hitler and Stalin's non-aggression pact with secret protocols dividing Poland and the Baltics. It freed Hitler for war and gave Stalin time and territory; Poland was invaded September 1, and Britain and France declared war September 3.
Blitzkrieg & the Fall of France (1940)
Poland in weeks; Denmark and Norway; then May 1940 — panzers through the Ardennes, Dunkirk's evacuation (338,000 saved), France's surrender in six weeks. Hitler dictated terms in the 1918 railway carriage; Vichy collaborated under Pétain; de Gaulle broadcast resistance from London.
Battle of Britain (1940)
The Luftwaffe's campaign to break the RAF before invasion — radar, Spitfires, and 'the Few' won it; the Blitz on London and Coventry followed. Hitler's first defeat: Britain, under Churchill ('we shall never surrender'), fought on alone.
Operation Barbarossa (June 22, 1941)
Hitler's invasion of the USSR — 3 million men on a 1,800-mile front, the war Mein Kampf promised for Lebensraum. Vast early victories; then Moscow held (December 1941), and the war of annihilation (Einsatzgruppen, starvation policy, commissar order) ground into the attrition Germany could not win.
Stalingrad (1942–1943)
The war's hinge: the Sixth Army trapped in the city it had nearly taken, surrendering in February 1943 (~800,000 Axis casualties). With Kursk (July 1943 — history's greatest tank battle), the Red Army seized an initiative it never lost.
The Holocaust
Nazi Germany's systematic murder of six million Jews: from persecution to ghettos to Einsatzgruppen mass shootings (Babi Yar) to the Wannsee Conference's coordinated 'Final Solution' (January 1942) and the death camps — Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor. Also murdered: Roma, disabled people (T4), Slavs, political and religious prisoners, homosexuals.
Resistance and Collaboration
Occupied Europe's spectrum: partisans (Yugoslavia's Tito, Soviet and French maquis), the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) and Warsaw Rising (1944), rescue networks (Denmark's Jews) — and collaboration from Vichy to local auxiliaries in genocide. Gray zones that still haunt national memories.
Strategic Bombing
The air war on cities: the Blitz, then Allied area bombing — Hamburg's firestorm (1943), Dresden (1945) — aiming at industry and morale; ~half a million German civilians died. Militarily debated, morally contested — total war's logic completed.
D-Day & the Western Front (1944–1945)
June 6, 1944: Overlord's landings in Normandy — the largest amphibious operation ever — opened the second front. Paris liberated (August); the Bulge (December) Hitler's last throw; the Rhine crossed (March 1945). Soviet and Western armies met on the Elbe.
End in Europe (May 1945)
Berlin stormed by the Red Army; Hitler's suicide (April 30); unconditional surrender May 8 (V-E Day). Europe in ruins: ~40 million European dead, cities leveled, 30+ million refugees and expellees — the continent's suicide completed.
Yalta and Potsdam (1945)
The Big Three's settlements: Germany divided into four occupation zones (Berlin likewise), Poland shifted west, 'free elections' promised for Eastern Europe (and not delivered), German expulsions sanctioned; at Potsdam, Truman met Stalin as the atomic age dawned — the Cold War's seams already visible.
Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946)
The International Military Tribunal tried 22 Nazi leaders for crimes against peace, war crimes, and the new charge of crimes against humanity — establishing individual accountability ('superior orders' no defense) and the documentary record of the regime's criminality.
United Nations (1945)
The League's successor, founded at San Francisco with the great powers inside: a Security Council (with veto) backed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) — the institutional lesson of two world wars.
WWI Cultural Aftershock
The 'Lost Generation': Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Owen's poetry ('the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est'), Spengler's Decline of the West, Dada's absurdist revolt — faith in progress buried in Flanders.
Interwar Modernism
Culture after the deluge: Eliot's Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses (both 1922), surrealism (Dalí, Breton) mining Freud's unconscious, Bauhaus functionalism, Weimar's brilliant, doomed cabaret culture — experiment shadowed by anxiety.
Existentialism's Roots
From the wars' rubble: existence precedes essence — meaning must be made, not found. Sartre and Camus (the Absurd, revolt, responsibility) wrote under occupation; their philosophy was resistance generalized.
Einstein and the New Physics
Relativity (1905, 1915) dissolved absolute space and time; quantum mechanics (Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg's uncertainty) dissolved determinism — science's certainties relativized just as Europe's political ones collapsed. Refugee physicists later built the atomic bomb (Manhattan Project).
Technology of the War Era
Radar (Britain's shield), penicillin (Fleming 1928, mass-produced by 1944), code-breaking (Turing and Bletchley's Enigma work — computing's birth), jets and V-2 rockets (Peenemünde — spaceflight's dark origin), and the atomic bomb — war as science's forcing house.
Stab-in-the-Back Myth
The lie that Germany's undefeated army was betrayed by home-front Jews and socialists ('November criminals') — cultivated by Ludendorff, weaponized by Hitler against Weimar and Versailles.
Reparations Quarrel
Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) predicted Versailles's reparations would wreck Europe's economy; the Ruhr occupation (1923), Dawes (1924) and Young (1929) Plans, and final cancellation (1932) traced the quarrel that poisoned the twenties.
Mandate System & Middle East
Ottoman Arab lands parceled to Britain (Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan) and France (Syria, Lebanon) as League mandates — with the contradictory wartime promises (McMahon to the Arabs, Balfour Declaration 1917 to Zionism, Sykes-Picot between the powers) seeding a century of conflict.
Irish Independence (1916–1922)
The Easter Rising (1916), executed leaders becoming martyrs; Sinn Féin's victory and the Anglo-Irish War; the 1921 Treaty creating the Irish Free State — with partitioned Ulster and a civil war over the terms: Britain's oldest question half-answered.
Popular Front Era
Against fascism's rise, left coalitions won in France and Spain (1936): Blum's reforms (40-hour week, paid holidays) besieged by capital flight and division; Spain's Front provoking Franco's rising — democracy's embattled thirties.
Guernica (1937)
The Condor Legion's terror-bombing of the Basque town — market-day civilians as targets — and Picasso's shattered mural for the Paris Exposition: the era's atrocity and its indelible protest, air war's future announced.
Katyn Massacre (1940)
The Soviet NKVD's murder of ~22,000 Polish officers and elites, blamed on Germany for fifty years — emblem of Poland's double occupation and of wartime truths sacrificed to alliance politics.
Expulsions and Ethnic Unmixing (1945–1948)
12–14 million Germans expelled from Eastern Europe; Poles, Ukrainians, and others transferred as borders moved — the settlement's brutal 'solution' to the minorities problem: homogeneous nation-states achieved by force.
Europe's Lost Supremacy
Two wars ended Europe's world dominance: economies exhausted, empires delegitimized (colonial troops and promises), and two flanking superpowers — the U.S. and USSR — inheriting the continent Europe had broken.