With all of the celebration of the 80th anniversary of D-Day let's not forget the other side of it. I am sure that the Second World War, which was the deadliest conflict that the world has ever seen, would never have happened without the economic crash of 1929.
The industrial capacity left over from the First World War was converted to turning out a wide variety of consumer products, from cars to radios. This brought about the memorable decade known as the "Roaring Twenties". But there was trouble on the horizon, in the form of economics. Workers were not being paid enough money to be able to afford the goods that they were producing. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiralled into a devastating crash.
The 1930s were a terrible time. In the U.S. projects were instituted to make work and get the economy moving. Many government buildings and projects were built in the 1930s. This includes Boulder (Hoover) Dam and the dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
In Germany the Weimar Republic was devastated by the economic collapse and never recovered. A new party, called the National Socialists or Nazis, emerged with a brilliant idea to get out of the economic depression. Unemployment would be absorbed by drastically increasing the military forces and factories brought back to full production making weapons and military equipment for them. The plan worked brilliantly but it makes no sense to maintain a vast military, unless they have something to do, and that is why there was a world war.
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