Over the coming weeks we look at the steps that lead to the outbreak of World War II that begin with the thundering sound of the Blitzkrieg German invasion of Poland in September 1939.

There are thousands of sites on the web, endless books written and miles of documentaries rolls filmed about this topic, so why this post?

Most of the material you will find talks about what happened, but hardly touches upon why it happened, and more significantly, what the consequences were. This post fills this gap.

These are the steps that lead to the outbreak of World War II:

• The Japanese Invasion of Manchuria
• Hitler withdraws Germany from the League of Nations
• German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact
• The Assasination of Dollfuss
• The Failure to Contain Hitler
• The Italian Invasion of Abyssinia
• The Spanish Civil War
• The Rome-Berlin Axis
• The Anschluss of Austria
• The Invasion of Czechoslovakia
• The Pact of Steel
• The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

See also:

• The Road to World War I