Editing The World Wars (section)

===Rise of Authoritarians: Germany===
In Germany, the economic and political failures of the Weimar Republic soured people on the whole idea of democracy, which contributed to the rise of authoritarian parties on the left like the Communist KPD, which in turn led to the creation of the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party or NSDAP) party to counter them (possibly with help from other Western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations Germany was forced to pay to the rest of Europe by the Treaty of Versailles, which renegotiated or not, still put a perceived blame for the war unjustly upon them along with a variety of other complicated things that can be blamed on the [[Nazi|Nazis]]. Rounding it off was the ''Dolchstosslegende'', or "stab-in-the-back-myth", that was concocted by butthurt imperial generals like Ludendorff and Hindenburg in order to shift the blame for Germany's defeat to the Social Democrats or the [[What|historic enemy of Germany, the Jews.]] 

The concurrent deeply authoritarian political culture of many German institutions as well as reactionary and monarchist industrialists like Krupp, who all backed Hitler and nationalist and antisemitic parties similar to the NSDAP (like the DNVP) and the lack of people actually willing to give a damn about the Republic itself led to the erosion of the few democratic principles left at this point. From 1930 onward, Hindenburg, who was elected President as the candidate of a coalition of nationalist and conservative parties, reigned over Germany in a dictatorial manner and named Hitler as Chancellor and head of government in January 1933, after two governments under the centrist-conservative Party Zentrum and the Nationalist DNVP failed to stabilize the economy. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up for war, and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmament were certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France after the bloodbath of the Western Front.

To their credit, in the mid '30s the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between completing the Autobahn, hosting the Olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. When the communists tried to launch a revolution in Spain, Germany and Italy sent weapons and eventually troops to curbstomp them and test out their new toys on people with wrong opinions, while Britain looked the other way and pretended not to notice that Germany suddenly had hundreds of tanks that they were legally not supposed to have, and that France and the Soviets were doing the same thing with the communist revolutionaries. So nobody was too concerned when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in the border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. Then shit started to get real. 

In 1936, Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, which was a direct violation of both treaties. Britain and France were concerned, but neither country was ready to go to war again, so they let it slide. Hitler took this as confirmation that they wouldn't do shit to stop him and ramped up his plans for rearmament and conquest. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria more or less peacefully, then walked into Czechoslovakia and took the Sudetenland, home to 3 million ethnic Germans. The rest of the continent was getting increasingly worried, but Hitler super-duper promised that the Sudetenland would be his last territorial acquisition, cross his heart and hope to die. Britain and France were desperate to avoid war, and Hungary and Poland also wanted some of Czechoslovakia's turf, so together they strong-armed Czechoslovakia into signing the Munich Agreement, officially ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously proclaimed that the Agreement was "peace for our time" when he came home from the negotiations on 30 September 1938. A pissed-off Winston Churchill correctly predicted that Hitler wasn't going to stop at the Sudetenland, and was proven right when Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and then started side-eyeing Poland and the former German territories it now controlled.