At the end of World War I the losing powers had to give up much of their territory to create smaller independent countries. These newly formed countries tended to be very nationalistic and aggressive. For example, within two years newly reformed Poland had attacked all of its neighbors. Many of them had dictatorships. In Italy Benito Mussolini had taken over and started the ideas of Fascism. To rally people to Mussolini he created much romance and ceremony around the state such as torchlight parades and sharp looking soldiers marching the streets. Mussolini put the common good of the state before the good of the individual and emphasized in many of his speeches, “Nothing outside the state.” This exemplifies the extreme statist tendencies of many countries in the post-war period. In Russia, there was horrible famine, and after Stalin came to power in 1924 he began his ethnic cleansings and mass murders, solidifying a totalitarian state, and looking forward to the worldwide communist revolution.
In Germany Hitler was running the NSDAP party. In 1924 he attempted to take over the Bavarian capital of Munich but did not succeed. He got off with a very light sentence, and while in prison wrote, Mein Kamph. When he was released he decided to gain power by being elected into office, rather than taking over by force. In the years following his release from prison, the number of votes for the Nazi party went down, but once the depression struck Germany the Nazi party votes went up to 43%. In 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and established a one-party state. After this, he began enacting laws against the Jews, and laws to consolidate his power, such as making Hitler Youth mandatory for boys. Inflation and an unstable economy from the war period started the Great Depression in the USA but it spread throughout Europe as well. In short, the interwar period was an unstable time with dictatorships and nationalistic tendencies when World War II started in 1939.