Another was Czechoslovakia - its awkward name reflects the Allies' decision to combine areas dominated by two different ethnic groups, Czechs and Slovaks, into a single nation. One of these new countries was Poland, which before 1919 had last existed as an independent nation in 1795. The red lines show the new borders drawn by the victorious Allies at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. This map shows how World War I reshaped Europe. That war ended in Germany's defeat, and in 1919 the victorious allies carved up territory that had been part of Germany, Austria-Hungary (Germany's defeated ally), and Russia (which had fallen to the Bolsheviks) into an array of new countries. The invasion of Poland occurred almost exactly 25 years after the start of World War I in August 1914. The Polish military wasn't powerful enough to resist him, and Hitler calculated - correctly, as it turns out - that Europe's other powers wouldn't intervene in time. Annexing Poland was a step in that larger plan. The short answer is that Adolf Hitler was a ruthless dictator with dreams of conquering all of Europe. The troops march in formation toward a wooden bridge, constructed by the Nazis across the San River, near Jarolaw, Poland. Hitler salutes as he oversees troops during the Nazi occupation of Poland. The United States wouldn't join the war against Hitler until December 1941, a full two years after the war began. France and Britain did declare war on Germany two days after the invasion of Poland, but it would take them another eight months before they engaged in full-scale war with the Nazis. So it's easy to forget how slowly and reluctantly the worlds most powerful democracies mobilized to stop him. Today, 75 years later, Hitler is regarded as one of history's great villains. But the invasion plunged the world into a war that would continue for almost six years and claim the lives of tens of millions of people. The battle for Poland only lasted about a month before a Nazi victory. On September 1, 1939, the German army under Adolf Hitler launched an invasion of Poland that triggered the start of World War II (though by 1939 Japan and China were already at war).
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