AP European History: Essential Questions, Concepts, Terms & People
Unit XIII Study Guide: Interwar Years & the Rise of Fascism (Ch. 26 & 27)
Broad Topics:
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European Conditions After WWI
Early Soviet Union
Fascism in Italy
Conditions in the Nations of the Former Austrian Empire
Germany’s Weimar Republic
The Great Depression
Rise of the Nazi Party in Germany
Soviet Union Under Stalin
Essential Questions:
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What were the key economic issues facing postwar Europe?
o What was the Dawes Plan, and how successful was it in resolving the debt
crises of the mid-1920s?
o What were some of the methods used by the European powers to establish and
maintain peace and military disarmament during the 1920s?
What was the political, economic, and diplomatic impact of World War I on Germany?
What were the basic causes of the Great Depression, and how did Europe deal with its
impact in the 1930s?
o What were the repercussions of the world economic collapse?
o What was the Marxist interpretation of the Great Depression?
o What was the significance of the Lausanne Conference in 1932?
o Why did the weak economic recovery of the 1930s create divisive social
changes? What were these changes (consider working-, middle-, and upper
classes)?
o What were the basic economic theories of John Maynard Keynes? What role did
he feel government should play in the economy, and how did his views differ
from “classical” economics?
What was the social, political, and economic impact of Stalinism on the Soviet Union
in the years after the Russian Revolution?
o What was the Soviet policy of “War Communism”?
o What were the key characteristics of Lenin’s New Economic Policy?
o What was the fundamental conflict between Stalin and Trotsky?
o What was the purpose of the Comintern?
o How did women fare generally under Stalin’s leadership?
o Why did Stalin adopt a policy of “Socialism in One Country,” and how did that
lead to a major drive toward rapid industrialization? What other policies were
enacted to support the goal of rapid industrialization?
o What was the role of the “Five Year Plan” in Stalin’s Soviet Union? What was
the “Gosplan”?
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o Why did Stalin initiate the policy of collectivized agriculture? How did the
people of the Soviet Union respond, and how did collectivization affect the
people? What effect did collectivization have on the urban population of the
Soviet Union?
o Why did Stalin initiate the Great Purges in the 1930s, and how was the
assassination of Sergei Kirov used as a pretext for them?
What were the core beliefs and practices of fascism as demonstrated by Mussolini in
Italy after World War I?
o What was the goal of the “corporate state,” and how did it set the relationship
between government, business, and labor in fascist Italy?
o What were the major components of fascist economic policy?
o What were some of Mussolini’s “notable” achievements?
o Why did Mussolini’s government feel it necessary to make an accommodation
with the Vatican, and what did each side receive from their signing of the
Lateran Treaty in 1929?
What was the main governmental focus in France and Great Britain during the 1920s?
o Why was Ramsay MacDonald considered a “traitor” to his Labour Party
principles?
o How was the French election of 1936 a drastic change from earlier elections in
the decade?
o What reforms were initiated by Blum’s Popular Front government in France?
Why did it fail within a year?
How did most of Ireland gain its independence from Britain?
What were some of the major ethnic, social, and religious conflicts that dominated the
newly independent nations of Eastern Europe and the Balkans? Which Eastern
European country became a model of democracy in the 1920s and 1930s, and why?
o What was the political pattern followed by many governments in Eastern
Europe in the 1930s? How supportive were they of fascism?
What were the c
How did Adolf Hitler rise to power in Germany, and how did his policies compare
with those of other totalitarian dictators of the 1920s and 1930s?
o Why did the German government resort to military force in early 1919, badly
damaging its new democracy?
o Why were the political “extremes” growing in power at the expense of the
political “center” in the 1920s?
o What efforts did Gustav Stresemann make to stabilize the economic situation in
the Weimar Republic? How successful was he? What was the significance of the
Locarno Agreements of 1925?
o Why did the Weimar republic collapse in the early 1930s?
o What were some of the economic successes of the early Nazi years, & how was
Hitler able to accomplish them?
o What did Hitler see as the role of women in the Nazi state?
o What were Hitler’s basic racist and political views, and how were these views a
reflection of some 19th and early 20th century political and scientific thinkers?
o Why were Jews primary targets of Nazi hatred? How was Nazi ideology
reflected in the Nuremberg laws?
o How did the Nazis use propaganda to make Germans feel they were all part of
a great cultural struggle?
Concepts, Terms, & People:
Benito Mussolini
Adolf Hitler
Heinrich Himmler
Vladimir Lenin
Leon Trotsky
Josef Stalin
Sergei Kirov
Gustav Stresemann
Friedrich Ebert
Paul von Hindenburg
Leni Riefenstahl
Ramsay MacDonald
Leon Blum
John Maynard Keynes
Stanley Baldwin
Salvador Dalí
Wassily Kandinsky
Franz Kafka
General Strike of 1926
Irish Republican Army
Sinn Fein (“Ourselves
Alone”)
Young Plan
French Popular Front
Weimar Republic
Ruhr Crisis
Reparations
Great Depression
Dawes Plan
War Communism
New Economic Policy
(NEP)
Comintern
Third International
“Socialism in One
Country”
Five Year Plans
Gosplan
Collectivization
Kulaks
Gulags
Great Purges
NKVD
Collectivization
Totalitarianism
Fascism
Black Shirts
Il Duce
“Believe, Obey, Fight!”
Corporate
State/Corporatism
Lateran Accord
Locarno Agreements
Nazism
National Socialism
“Stab-in-the-Back” Theory
Reichstag Fire of 1933
Enabling Acts
Third Reich
Der Führer
Mein Kampf
Lebensraum
Kraft duerch Freude
(“Strength Through
Joy”)
Gleichschaltung
Hitler Youth
Nuremburg Laws
The Triumph of the Will
Beer Hall Putsch
Swastika
Stormtroopers (SA)
Schutzstaffel (SS)
Gestapo
Kristallnacht
Night of the Long Knives
Final Solution
Kellogg-Briand Pact
Popular Front
Dadaism
Bauhaus
Expressionism
Surrealism