• Totalitarianism: Political system claiming total control over all aspects of life
• Fascism: Mussolini's ultranationalist movement; corporatism, suppression of opposition
• Benito Mussolini: Italian fascist dictator; Il Duce
• March on Rome (1922): Mussolini's seizure of power
• Nazism: Hitler's German variant; added racial ideology and anti-Semitism
• Adolf Hitler: Nazi dictator; Führer
• Mein Kampf: Hitler's ideological manifesto, 1925
• Reichstag Fire / Enabling Act (1933): Vehicles for Hitler's dictatorship
• Nuremberg Laws (1935): Stripped German Jews of citizenship
• Lebensraum: "Living space"; Nazi doctrine of eastward expansion
• Joseph Stalin: Soviet dictator from late 1920s
• Five-Year Plans: Stalin's forced industrialization
• Collectivization: Forcible consolidation of peasant farms
• Kulaks: Wealthier peasants targeted as class enemies
• Ukrainian Famine / Holodomor: Deliberate famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933
• Great Purge (1936-1938): Stalin's destruction of rivals through show trials and executions
• Gulag: Soviet forced labor camp system
• Appeasement: British-French policy of concessions to Hitler
• Neville Chamberlain: British PM associated with appeasement

Munich Agreement (1938)

Allowed German annexation of Sudetenland

Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939)

Non-aggression agreement with secret partition of Eastern Europe

WWII

• Blitzkrieg: German lightning war combining tanks, infantry, air support
• Battle of Britain (1940): RAF defeated Luftwaffe, preventing German invasion of Britain
• Winston Churchill: British PM, 1940-1945 and 1951-1955
• Operation Barbarossa (June 1941): German invasion of USSR
• Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941): Japanese attack drew U.S. into war
• Battle of Stalingrad (1942-43): Soviet defensive victory that turned the Eastern Front
• Battle of Midway (1942): Decisive American naval victory in the Pacific
• D-Day (June 6, 1944): Allied invasion of Normandy
• V-E Day (May 8, 1945): Victory in Europe
• Atomic bombs (August 6 and 9, 1945): Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Cities destroyed by atomic bombs

Holocaust and Atrocities

• Holocaust / Shoah: Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews
• Anti-Semitism: Hostility and prejudice against Jewish people
• Kristallnacht (1938): Night of Broken Glass; Nazi-organized pogrom
• Einsatzgruppen: Mobile killing squads in Eastern Europe
• Wannsee Conference (January 1942): Coordination of the Final Solution
• Final Solution: Nazi policy of systematic extermination of European Jews
• Auschwitz: Largest Nazi extermination camp
• Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943): Jewish armed resistance
• Anne Frank: Young Jewish girl whose diary records her family in hiding
• Genocide: Deliberate destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group
• Rape of Nanjing (1937-1938): Japanese atrocities in China
• Nuremberg Trials: Postwar trials of Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): UN response to Nazi crimes