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On November 5, 1937, Hitler met with his most trusted military advisors for a top-secret briefing. The third Reich’s future, he told them, depended on solving the need for lebensraum. Where would new living space come from? Not from overseas colonies, he declared, but from those nations nearest Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. When someone protested that annexing those countries could provoke war, Hitler replied, “Germany’s problems can be solved only by means of force, and …

…France declared war on Germany on September 3. The blitzkrieg tactics worked perfectly, however. The fighting was over in three weeks, long before France, Britain, and their allies could respond. In the last week of fighting, the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east, grabbing some of its territory. The portion Germany annexed contained almost two-thirds of Poland’s population. By the end of the month, Poland had ceased to exist-and World War II had begun.