How did the idea of Nazism lead to WWII

Question

 WWII 

 

Answer 1

These two paragraphs from Wikipedia might help you understand the answer to your question:

 

"Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism. Germanic peoples (called the Nordic race) were depicted as the purest of the Aryan race, and were therefore the master race... Nazism also vigorously pursued what it viewed as historically German territory under the doctrine of Pan-Germanism (or Heim ins Reich), as well as additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum."

 

"The majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as a form of far-right politics.Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate over other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements."

 

So, it appears that Nazi ideology says that some people are more superior to others AND that they have the right to dominate over other people (who are inferior to them). The Nazis started their effort to take over the world by occupying nearby lands they thought still belonged to them (Sudentenland, Poland, etc....) but they didn't stop there....and eventually their goal was to dominate the entire world. They truly didn't want to stop their conquests until they had taken over every country and continent on the globe.

 

Does that help answer your question?

 

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Kelly

 

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Answer 2

That's quite a broad topic, but I would question the use of the word idea to describe the role that Nazism played in causing the Second World War. Nazism, or National Socialism, was of course an ideology spawned by the personal philosophy of Adolf Hitler and explicated most clearly in his book Mein Kampf, one of the tenets of which was that Germans were racially superior and thus had a natural right to take over the lands of "inferior" races. But it was really only after Hitler achieved political power in Germany, after first being named chancellor and then, following the death of the democratically-elected German president Hindenburg, assuming dictatorial powers by the aid of legislation passed by the Reichstag, the German national legislature (by then dominated by members of Hitler's Nazi Party), that he was able to set in motion the actual events that led to World War II, at least in the European theater, namely the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, following a half-decade of Hitler's Nazi government seizing control of European territory like the Ruhr and Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, with other European powers like Britain and France timidly appeasing Hitler on the surface but meanwhile making more and more subtle preparations and alliances for a war that finally erupted in 1939.

 

So again, it was principally the Nazis'--and particularly Hitler's--actions rather than simply their ideas (even though central to these ideas was European, if not world, domination by means of military conquest) that, in part, led directly to World War II, but there were other contributing factors also such as Japan's military aggression in Asia and the attack on Pearl Harbor, and even Italy's aggression on a lesser scale in North and eastern Africa, neither of which had anything to do with the "idea" of Nazism (though Mussolini's Fascist dictatorship in Italy predated and in some ways influenced Hitler's Nazi régime in Germany).