50 Fun Facts About The Interwar Period

Which room at Versailles saw both the German Empire proclaimed in 1871 and the 1919 peace treaty signed?

The Hall of Mirrors was picked on purpose by French premier Georges Clemenceau, so Germany's defeat was sealed in the very room where its empire had been born.

Which carmaker did the Nazi German Labour Front found in 1937 to build a family car designed by Ferdinand Porsche?

Volkswagen sold its car through a savings-stamp scheme, but war came first: the factory switched to military vehicles and none of the savers ever received a car.

Which taxed commodity did Mahatma Gandhi march 240 miles to the Arabian Sea to make illegally in 1930?

Salt was a British monopoly that Indians were forbidden to make for themselves. Gandhi's 24-day walk to Dandi set off a wave of civil disobedience, and he was arrested a month later.

What name was given to the illegal bars that sold alcohol in American cities during Prohibition from 1920 to 1933?

Speakeasies got their name from the habit of speaking quietly about them so that police and neighbours would not hear. They were also known as blind pigs or blind tigers.

Which twice-divorced American socialite did King Edward VIII give up the British throne to marry in December 1936?

Wallis Simpson could not become queen because the king headed a Church of England that barred remarriage while a former spouse was alive. The couple became Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Which Basque town, bombed by Germany's Condor Legion in 1937, is the subject of Pablo Picasso's great anti-war painting?

Guernica was attacked on a Monday market day. Spain's Republican government had already commissioned Picasso for that summer's Paris exposition, and the raid gave him his theme.

Which antibiotic did Alexander Fleming discover in 1928 after noticing mould killing bacteria on a culture plate?

Penicillin only became a usable drug in the 1940s through the work of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Fleming.

Which American sprinter won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, staged as a showcase for Nazi Germany?

Jesse Owens won the 100 metres, 200 metres, long jump and sprint relay, and nobody won those same four events at one Games again until Carl Lewis in 1984.

What name was given to the drought-hit Great Plains of the 1930s, whose black blizzards drove farmers to California?

The Dust Bowl was partly man-made: a decade of deep ploughing had stripped away the prairie grasses that held the soil, so drought and wind simply carried it off.

Which tiny independent state was created in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty, signed by Benito Mussolini's government?

Vatican City ended the 'Roman question', the standoff between the popes and Italy that had dragged on since Italian troops captured Rome in 1870.

Which US president won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for founding the League of Nations, which America never joined?

Woodrow Wilson turned down a Republican compromise that would have let the Senate ratify the treaty, then suffered a stroke in October 1919 that left him incapacitated.

Which book did Adolf Hitler begin in Landsberg Prison while serving a sentence for his failed coup of November 1923?

Mein Kampf was first meant to carry a far longer title about four and a half years of struggle against lies, stupidity and cowardice. His publisher, Max Amann, is said to have suggested the shorter one.

What nickname did Benito Mussolini's paramilitary squads earn from the uniform they wore on the March on Rome in 1922?

Blackshirts copied their look from the Arditi, Italy's elite troops of the First World War, and topped it with a black fez.

What name did Franklin D. Roosevelt give his 1930s programme of public works and relief against the Great Depression?

The New Deal took its name from a phrase added at the last minute to Roosevelt's 1932 nomination speech. A quarter of the workforce was unemployed when he took office.

Which country did Nazi Germany annex in March 1938 in the union known as the Anschluss?

Austria had called a referendum on staying independent, but Hitler forced its cancellation and crossed the border at his own birthplace, Braunau am Inn.

Which American pilot flew the Spirit of St. Louis alone and nonstop from New York to Paris in May 1927?

Charles Lindbergh was chasing the $25,000 Orteig Prize and flew alone for over 33 hours, finding his way through fog and ice by dead reckoning.

Which general led the Nationalists to victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and then ruled Spain until 1975?

Francisco Franco had been packed off to a posting in the Canary Islands by the Popular Front government in 1936, only months before the army revolt that he came to lead.

Which ideology of Benito Mussolini's Italy is named after a bundle of rods carried before magistrates in ancient Rome?

Fascism borrows its name from the fasces, rods tied around an axe as a symbol of a magistrate's authority. Mussolini founded his first 'fasces of combat' in Milan in 1919.

Which chain of French border forts, built in the 1930s and named after a war minister, did Germany outflank in 1940?

The Maginot Line itself held, but it stopped short of the Belgian frontier, so in 1940 German armour drove through the Ardennes forest just beyond its northern end.

What name was given to the young women of the 1920s who bobbed their hair, wore knee-length skirts and danced to jazz?

Flappers were seen as brash for smoking in public, drinking, driving cars and wearing heavy make-up, all in open disdain for the codes of decent behaviour of the day.

Which Swiss city became the headquarters of the League of Nations in November 1920, when the body moved from London?

Geneva suited a peace body because Switzerland had been neutral for centuries and the city was already home to the International Red Cross.

Which US president was in his first year in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929?

Herbert Hoover had won by a landslide in 1928, but as the slump deepened his name was pinned on shanty towns and he lost just as heavily to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

Which Berlin building burned in February 1933, handing Adolf Hitler a pretext to suspend civil liberties across Germany?

The Reichstag fire was blamed on Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe, who was found inside and later executed. The Nazis used it to arrest communist deputies en masse.

Which rival of Joseph Stalin built the Red Army, was deported from the Soviet Union in 1929 and later settled in Mexico?

Leon Trotsky held that the revolution could survive only by spreading to richer countries, the opposite of Stalin's line. A Stalinist agent killed him in Mexico City in 1940.

Which name is given to the November 1938 pogrom in which Nazi mobs wrecked Jewish shops and synagogues across Germany?

Kristallnacht is a euphemism for the shards of broken glass left in the streets. The pretext was the shooting of a German diplomat in Paris by 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan.

Which African country, ruled by Emperor Haile Selassie, did Benito Mussolini's Italy invade in October 1935?

Ethiopia was a fellow member of the League of Nations, whose failure to stop the invasion left it discredited. Italian aircraft dropped mustard gas in breach of a 1925 treaty.

Which country did Germany invade on 1 September 1939, a week after secretly agreeing with Stalin to carve it up?

Poland was attacked the morning after German units staged a fake raid on their own radio station at Gleiwitz. The Red Army marched in from the east on 17 September.

Which German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia did the Munich Agreement of 1938 hand to Adolf Hitler?

Sudetenland held Czechoslovakia's border fortifications, so its loss stripped the country of its defences. Czechoslovak leaders were not even invited to the conference.

What did Joseph Stalin launch in 1928 to set targets for Soviet industrial growth?

Five-Year Plans were drawn up by the state planning committee Gosplan and favoured heavy industry over consumer goods. Stalin declared the first finished early, in about four years.

Which region of China did Japan seize in 1931 after its own officers staged a railway bombing near Mukden?

Manchuria was turned into the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. When a League of Nations commission said it must be handed back, Japan simply walked out of the League.

Which demilitarised region of Germany did Adolf Hitler send troops into in March 1936, defying the Treaty of Versailles?

The Rhineland gamble involved only about 20,000 soldiers, yet neither France nor Britain was prepared for a military response, so they did not act.

Which policy toward Adolf Hitler did Neville Chamberlain champion until Germany seized Czechoslovakia in March 1939?

Appeasement grew out of the failure of the League of Nations to keep the peace. After Prague fell, Chamberlain switched to resisting any further German aggression.

Which Chinese communist rose to lead his party on the Long March of 1934–35, a retreat from Chiang Kai-shek's armies?

Mao Zedong's forces trekked roughly 10,000 km to a new base in Shaanxi, in China's north-west. Of about 100,000 who set out, only some 8,000 arrived.

Which Anatolian city became the capital of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Turkey in 1923, replacing Constantinople?

Ankara was then a small town known in the West as Angora, the name that still clings to breeds of goat, cat and rabbit.

Which field marshal, Germany's president from 1925, appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor in January 1933?

Paul von Hindenburg was 85 and famous as the victor of Tannenberg in 1914. When he died in 1934, Hitler merged the presidency into his own office.

Which German industrial region did French and Belgian troops occupy in 1923 after Germany defaulted on reparations?

The Ruhr answered with passive resistance that largely shut down its economy, and the crisis helped tip the German mark into the hyperinflation of 1923.

Which British economist attacked the Versailles treaty in his 1919 bestseller The Economic Consequences of the Peace?

John Maynard Keynes had been a Treasury delegate at the peace conference and resigned in despair. His book fixed the idea of a 'Carthaginian peace' meant to crush Germany.

Which foreign-policy stance lay behind America's Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, banning arms sales to nations at war?

Isolationism fed on the belief that bankers and arms makers had dragged America into the First World War. The 1935 act embargoed the arms trade with every side in a war.

Which body, founded in Moscow under Vladimir Lenin in 1919, steered communist parties abroad towards revolution?

The Comintern made foreign parties accept twenty-one conditions before they could join. Stalin dissolved it in 1943 as a gesture to his wartime allies.

Which 1928 agreement, first signed in Paris, committed Germany, France and the United States to renounce war?

The Kellogg–Briand Pact is named after the American secretary of state and French foreign minister behind it. Its ban on war was later written into the United Nations Charter.

Which 1924 scheme, named after an American banker, rescheduled German reparations and propped up the mark with a loan?

The Dawes Plan earned its chief author, by then US vice president, the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize. The Young Plan replaced it in 1929.

Which Swiss town hosted the 1925 conference at which Germany accepted its western borders as drawn at Versailles?

Locarno eased tensions enough for Germany to enter the League of Nations in 1926, and for a few years diplomats spoke hopefully of a new 'spirit' named after the town.

Which German chancellor tamed the 1923 hyperinflation and later shared the Nobel Peace Prize as foreign minister?

Gustav Stresemann was chancellor for only a few months of 1923, long enough to bring in a new currency. He died in October 1929, weeks before the Wall Street Crash.

Which 1930 US law raised duties on over 20,000 imported goods and provoked other countries into retaliating in kind?

The Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act was signed despite a petition from 1,028 American economists urging a veto. Canada and other trading partners hit back and world trade slumped.

Which Marxist theorist, a central figure in Berlin's Spartacist uprising, was murdered by Freikorps soldiers in 1919?

Rosa Luxemburg was shot and her body thrown into Berlin's Landwehr Canal, where a memorial now marks the spot. Her comrade Karl Liebknecht was killed too.

Which 1920 coup attempt in Berlin collapsed after four days when German workers answered it with a general strike?

The Kapp Putsch drove the legitimate government out of Berlin, but that government called the strike as it fled, and large parts of the population joined it.

Which Italian socialist deputy was kidnapped and killed in 1924 after accusing Mussolini's party of election fraud?

Giacomo Matteotti's death became a turning point: Mussolini assumed responsibility for it in a speech that is generally seen as the start of his dictatorship.

Which French premier signed the 1938 Munich Agreement alongside Hitler, Mussolini and Britain's prime minister?

Édouard Daladier expected a hostile reception when he flew back to Paris and was instead cheered by crowds relieved that there would be no war.

Which Chicago gangster, grown rich on bootleg liquor during Prohibition, was finally convicted in 1931 of tax evasion?

Al Capone was moved in 1934 to the newly opened Alcatraz, where good behaviour earned him a place playing banjo in the prison band.

What label did Joseph Stalin's regime pin on the better-off peasants it deported during the collectivisation of farms?

Kulaks were sent in their millions to remote special settlements between 1930 and 1933, and their forced labour became a cornerstone of the Gulag system.