DBQ On New Authoritarian Governments

Austin Lutchmansingh DBQ Essay
2/17/12 PD5 During the interwar period (1919-1939), many new authoritarian governments began to spring up and gain lots of popularity. For example, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s fascist Italy and Stalin’s communist Russia. People became dissatisfied with their democratic governments because their countries had lost recent wars and because their country’s economies were falling apart. They felt as if their government had failed them so they turned to new totalitarian governments. All three of these governments helped their countries “bounce back” economically and militarily so people were more willing to have their individual freedom’s taken away for the good of the state. This motivated authoritarian governments to take control and “redeem” their countries for past embarrassments. For instance, Document 1 talks about the gruesome scenes of violence from World War I like “Twelve million bodies cover the gruesome scenes of imperialistic crime. The flower of youth and the best man power of the peoples have been mowed down.” These German revoultionaries talk about some of the horrors of
I think this is supposed to show how the political leader has total control of the lives of the people in his country. This picture shows the loss of freedom the Germans had to endure under the Nazis. Document 8, was an excerpt from a German textbook. It was teaching kids how to “tell the difference” between other races and Germans. This was used to marginalize other races to unite the German people. These tow documents show that the Nazi government was extremely controlling and used lots of propaganda and false science to unite its