William Tyler
Dreams Shattered

One can argue that once Hitler took power in 1933, WWII was all but inevitable. Hitler wanted to see Germany as the dominant European power and to be rid of the shame of defeat in WWI. As war drew closer and he observed the policy of appeasement in Britain and France, he pushed against the Versailles settlement. First the Germans occupied the Rhineland, then came the Anschluss with Austria, and finally the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Only with the invasion of Poland did Hitler turn his attention to the low countries, Scandinavia, France, and Britain. Unlike in WWI, Britain was forced out of France at Dunkirk, and France surrendered in the summer of 1940. At this point German success turned into the beginnings of German defeat. Germany was defeated in the Battle of Britain in Russia and then forced backwards by the Red Army. They were defeated in North Africa as well. The tide of events finally turned when The United States entered the war, first in North Africa and then in Europe. Japan, Germany’s ally, was in no position to help as the Americans slowly but surely won the war in the Pacific. The war ending in the Allies’ favour was now just a matter of time. Yet the Germans resisted right up to the end, costing many pointless deaths on both sides.

The war years (1939-45) saw the Nazi regime at its most brutal in occupied Europe. They committed barbaric acts against both military and civilian populations. The nadir of their barbarism resulted in the Shoah and the murder of 6 million European Jews.

We teach in our schools about this war and Nazism, not from the point of view of victory, but as a brutal lesson of how even in the middle of the 20th century such evil could spawn across our continent and threaten the wider world.