World History: 19. The Modern World, Lessons 3–4

European leaders feared German aggression, but they chose a policy of appeasement, or giving in to the demands of an aggressor in the hope of preventing war.

In August 1939, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin secretly signed a nonaggression pact, or an agreement in which each side promises not to attack the other.

The invasion of Poland demonstrated the German military's strategy of blitzkrieg, a German term for "lightning war."

The Nazis' mass murder of 6 million Jews in known as the Holocaust.

This deliberate attempt to exterminate an ethnic, racial, or religious group is known as genocide.

Many factories stopped making civilian goods such as cars, radios, and tires, and switched to making military goods such as ships, airplanes, and weapons.

The captured islands then acted as steppingstones to the next island.

Conflict between the two nations dominated world politics from 1945 to 1991. This period is known as the Cold War.

A superpower is a country with enough political, economic, and military strength to influence world events.

The United States favored free enterprise, an economic system based on private ownership of property.

Under President Harry Truman, the United States sought to keep the Soviet Union from expanding past those areas already under its control. This policy was known as containment.

At the same time, Nixon pursued détente, or relaxation of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev also favored glasnost, a policy of allowing open discussion about the Soviet political system.

All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another...to a very high, and in come cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

In 1949, the Chinese Communists seized the capital, Beijing, as the Nationalism army collapsed.