The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany presented the country and its exiles with the first of several crises. The disastrous outcome of the war for Nazi Germany meant that not just Germany's but Austria's fate would be decided in London, Washington and Moscow

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Despite British setbacks and failures in Greece and an overstretched force in North Africa, Churchill was determined to seize Syria from the French Vichy collaborationist regime. The fighting to take Damascus was far harder and more difficult that Churchill had anticipated.

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Paranoia and the obsessional belief that the party and state were infiltrated by enemies and saboteurs created a culture of confession and interrogation. This existed at all levels of society from the bottom to the top and found its ultimate expression in the terror of the late 1930s.

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With ever more alarming new unfolding in Europe and the fate of Britain hanging in the balance, Franklin Roosevelt decided to stand for re-election for a second time, breaking with tradition that a president serves a maximum two terms. Facing him was the former Democrat Wendell Wilkie, a political outsider who rejected isolationism just as Roosevelt did.

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The formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain had direct organisational, financial and ideological input from Lenin himself. He saw it as essential to have a political foothold in Britain, following the British decision to intervene against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.

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The Nazi regime's consolidation of power led to an assault on the structures of Germany's federal system. It resulted in the creation of regional governors, but these were local tyrants soon left without any real power

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A series of strategic errors, missed opportunities and disasters handed Germany victory in Greece and Crete and led to two further allied evacuations. However, the fall of Crete was the most costly airborne operation ever mounted by Germany.

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In 1946 General George Marshall met both Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai Shek, and concluded that the nationalist cause in China was lost. From this fateful decision a gradual change in American policy towards Chiang developed with profound consequences.

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After the initial chaotic phase of the development of the camp system, by 1936 new purpose build camp complexes that dwarfed their predecessors emerged. Sachsenhausen in 1936 was part of this new model camp system, designed to work as a means of transforming and 'educating' inmates into becoming ideal members of the racial community.

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In the post war years a rise in union militancy was matched by an increase in anti union hostility by the federal government and a decline in union power due to a changing labour force and the privatisation of social security. This led to a gradual decline in union power.

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