The Interwar Period
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50 free The Interwar Period trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The two decades between the armistice of 1918 and the outbreak of the Second World War reshaped the world. Empires broke up, new countries appeared on the map, a boom gave way to the worst slump of the century, and democracies across Europe fell to dictators who promised order and revenge. This quiz covers the whole period: the peace treaties and the League of Nations, the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition, the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, the ideologies of left and right, the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, the Spanish Civil War, and the crises of the late 1930s that led back to war. There are questions on Asia, science, sport and everyday life too. It is pitched for world history students revising the interwar years, teachers who want a ready-made multiple-choice set, and anyone who enjoys twentieth-century history. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print the questions for a class or a quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which room at Versailles saw both the German Empire proclaimed in 1871 and the 1919 peace treaty signed?
The Hall of Mirrors
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.
Q 02Which carmaker did the Nazi German Labour Front found in 1937 to build a family car designed by Ferdinand Porsche?
Volkswagen
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.
Q 03Which taxed commodity did Mahatma Gandhi march 240 miles to the Arabian Sea to make illegally in 1930?
Salt
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.
Q 04What name was given to the illegal bars that sold alcohol in American cities during Prohibition from 1920 to 1933?
Speakeasies
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.
Q 05Which twice-divorced American socialite did King Edward VIII give up the British throne to marry in December 1936?
Wallis Simpson
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.
Q 06Which Basque town, bombed by Germany's Condor Legion in 1937, is the subject of Pablo Picasso's great anti-war painting?
Guernica
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.
Q 07Which antibiotic did Alexander Fleming discover in 1928 after noticing mould killing bacteria on a culture plate?
Penicillin
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.
Q 08Which American sprinter won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, staged as a showcase for Nazi Germany?
Jesse Owens
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.
Q 09What name was given to the drought-hit Great Plains of the 1930s, whose black blizzards drove farmers to California?
The Dust Bowl
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.
Q 10Which tiny independent state was created in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty, signed by Benito Mussolini's government?
Vatican City
Vatican City ended the 'Roman question', the standoff between the popes and Italy that had dragged on since Italian troops captured Rome in 1870.
Q 11Which US president won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for founding the League of Nations, which America never joined?
Woodrow Wilson
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.
Q 12Which book did Adolf Hitler begin in Landsberg Prison while serving a sentence for his failed coup of November 1923?
Mein Kampf
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.
Q 13What nickname did Benito Mussolini's paramilitary squads earn from the uniform they wore on the March on Rome in 1922?
Q 21Which Swiss city became the headquarters of the League of Nations in November 1920, when the body moved from London?
Geneva
Geneva suited a peace body because Switzerland had been neutral for centuries and the city was already home to the International Red Cross.
Q 22Which US president was in his first year in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929?
Herbert Hoover
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.
Q 23Which Berlin building burned in February 1933, handing Adolf Hitler a pretext to suspend civil liberties across Germany?
The Reichstag
Blackshirts
Blackshirts copied their look from the Arditi, Italy's elite troops of the First World War, and topped it with a black fez.
Q 14What name did Franklin D. Roosevelt give his 1930s programme of public works and relief against the Great Depression?
The New Deal
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.
Q 15Which country did Nazi Germany annex in March 1938 in the union known as the Anschluss?
Austria
Austria had called a referendum on staying independent, but Hitler forced its cancellation and crossed the border at his own birthplace, Braunau am Inn.
Q 16Which American pilot flew the Spirit of St. Louis alone and nonstop from New York to Paris in May 1927?
Charles Lindbergh
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.
Q 17Which general led the Nationalists to victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and then ruled Spain until 1975?
Francisco Franco
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.
Q 18Which ideology of Benito Mussolini's Italy is named after a bundle of rods carried before magistrates in ancient Rome?
Fascism
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.
Q 19Which chain of French border forts, built in the 1930s and named after a war minister, did Germany outflank in 1940?
The Maginot Line
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.
Q 20What name was given to the young women of the 1920s who bobbed their hair, wore knee-length skirts and danced to jazz?
Flappers
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.
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.
Q 24Which rival of Joseph Stalin built the Red Army, was deported from the Soviet Union in 1929 and later settled in Mexico?
Leon Trotsky
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.
Q 25Which name is given to the November 1938 pogrom in which Nazi mobs wrecked Jewish shops and synagogues across Germany?
Kristallnacht
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.
Q 26Which African country, ruled by Emperor Haile Selassie, did Benito Mussolini's Italy invade in October 1935?
Ethiopia
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.
Q 27Which country did Germany invade on 1 September 1939, a week after secretly agreeing with Stalin to carve it up?
Poland
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.
Q 28Which German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia did the Munich Agreement of 1938 hand to Adolf Hitler?
Sudetenland
Sudetenland held Czechoslovakia's border fortifications, so its loss stripped the country of its defences. Czechoslovak leaders were not even invited to the conference.
Q 29What did Joseph Stalin launch in 1928 to set targets for Soviet industrial growth?
Five-Year Plans
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.
Q 30Which region of China did Japan seize in 1931 after its own officers staged a railway bombing near Mukden?
Manchuria
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.