Complete Grade 9 History study guide in English, aligned to the CAPS curriculum. 16 chapters with explanations, worked examples, exercises with solutions, and original practice papers with memos.

Chapters

Chapter 1. The World after World War One: Versailles, Depression and the Rise of Fascism FREE

1.1 The end of the Great War

In November 1918 the guns of World War One finally fell silent. The war had lasted more than four years and had killed about 17 million people. Europe was exhausted: cities and farmland lay in ruins, millions of soldiers were returning home wounded, and the winning countries were deep in debt. In January 1919 the leaders of the victorious nations gathered in Paris to write the peace. The three most powerful men at the table were Woodrow Wilson of the United States of America, David Lloyd George of Britain and Georges Clemenceau of France. Together they are known as the Big Three.

Each leader wanted something different from the peace. Wilson wanted a fair settlement and a new world organisation, the League of Nations, that would prevent future wars by letting countries talk instead of fight. Lloyd George wanted Britain to stay strong and wanted trade with Germany to recover, because British factories needed customers. Clemenceau wanted Germany punished so severely that it could never threaten France again; France had been invaded by Germany twice in fifty years, and much of the fighting had destroyed French soil. The treaty that finally emerged was a compromise between these aims, but it leaned heavily towards punishment.

1.2 The Treaty of Versailles, 1919

Germany was not invited to negotiate the treaty. On 28 June 1919 the German delegation was simply handed the final document and told to sign it. Many Germans therefore called it the Diktat, the dictated peace. You can remember the main terms with the word BRAT:

B for Blame: Article 231, known as the war guilt clause, forced Germany to accept full blame for starting the war. Germans of every political party found this clause humiliating.
R for Reparations: Germany had to pay the winners for war damage. In 1921 the amount was fixed at 132 billion gold marks, which was about 6,6 billion British pounds at the time, an enormous sum for a damaged economy.
A for Army: the German army was limited to 100 000 men. Germany was allowed no air force, no submarines and only six battleships. The Rhineland, the strip of German land bordering France, had to remain free of German soldiers.
T for Territory: Germany lost about 13 percent of its land in Europe, including Alsace-Lorraine, which went back to France, and it lost all of its overseas colonies, including German South West Africa, which was placed under South African control.

To most Germans the treaty felt like a deliberate humiliation rather than a fair peace. A dangerous myth spread that the German army had never really been defeated on the battlefield but had been stabbed in the back by politicians who signed the surrender and the treaty. This resentment did not fade. Extreme politicians, including Adolf Hitler, would later build their movements on the promise to tear up the Treaty of Versailles.

1.3 The League of Nations

The League of Nations was founded in 1920 with its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Its central idea was collective security: if one member was attacked, all members would act together against the attacker, first with words, then with trade boycotts, and only in the last resort with force. For the first time in history there was a permanent world organisation whose job was to keep the peace.

The League, however, was weak from the very start. The United States of America never joined, because the American Senate refused to approve membership, so the richest country in the world stayed outside. The League had no army of its own and depended on members to supply soldiers, which they were rarely willing to do. Important decisions required all members to agree, so a single country could block action. Germany was excluded until 1926 and the Soviet Union until 1934, which made the League look like a club for the winners of the war. When powerful countries broke the rules in the 1930s, the League proved unable to stop them, and the road to a second world war lay open.

1.4 The Great Depression

During the 1920s the German economy slowly recovered, largely with the help of American loans arranged under the Dawes Plan of 1924. This recovery rested on a fragile foundation: it depended on money continuing to flow from the United States of America.

In October 1929 share prices on the New York stock exchange collapsed in the event known as the Wall Street Crash. American banks, desperate for cash, recalled their loans from Europe. Factories closed, world trade shrank, and unemployment soared across the industrial world. Germany was hit hardest of all the great powers precisely because its recovery had been built on American credit. By 1932 about 6 million Germans were unemployed, roughly one worker in every three. Families lost their homes and their savings, and soup kitchens appeared in every city.

The Depression mattered for politics as much as for the economy. Desperate, frightened people stopped trusting the moderate parties that seemed unable to help them, and they began to listen to extreme parties that promised strong leadership, work and national pride. Without the Great Depression it is unlikely that the Nazi Party would ever have come to power.

1.5 The rise of fascism

Fascism is a political system with the following key features: extreme nationalism, in which the nation is valued above everything else; a single all-powerful leader who must be obeyed without question; the belief that the state matters more than the individual; hatred of communism and of democracy; the use of violence and fear against opponents; and constant propaganda, uniforms, flags and mass rallies to create excitement and obedience.

The first fascist state was created in Italy. In October 1922 Benito Mussolini and his blackshirted followers staged the March on Rome, and the frightened king appointed Mussolini prime minister. Within a few years Mussolini had banned opposition parties and ruled as Il Duce, the leader. In Germany the National Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazi Party, copied many fascist methods and added a poisonous ideology of race. In the prosperous year of 1928 the Nazis won only 12 seats in the German parliament; in July 1932, in the depths of the Depression, they won 230 seats and became the largest party. On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. How he then destroyed German democracy is the story of the next chapter.

1.6 Skill focus: working with sources

Historians do not simply remember the past; they reconstruct it from sources, and learning to question sources is the core skill of this whole year. A primary source was created at the time of the event: a letter, a photograph, a poster, a speech, a newspaper from that week. A secondary source was created later by someone studying the event: a textbook, a documentary, an article by a historian.

Every source has a point of view. Before you trust a source, interrogate it: Who created it? When? Why was it created, and who was the intended audience? What does it show, and just as important, what does it leave out? A source that is one-sided is said to show bias. A biased source is not useless; it is excellent evidence of what its creator wanted people to believe.

Worked example: a German newspaper headline from June 1919 read, in English translation, We will never accept this shameful treaty. Step 1: identify the type. It was created at the time, so it is a primary source. Step 2: identify the point of view. It is a German voice, angry and one-sided, so it shows bias against the treaty. Step 3: decide what it proves. It is reliable evidence that many Germans felt the treaty was shameful in 1919. It is not proof that the treaty actually was unfair; to judge that, we must weigh the terms of the treaty itself. Final answer: primary source, biased, reliable about German feelings but not about the fairness of the treaty.