Interwar Period Study Guide: 51 Flashcards from Versailles to Munich

Twenty years, nine months and twenty-one days: that is how long the interbellum lasted, from the Armistice of 11 November 1918 to the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Flip It deck QK7838 – Interwar Period packs those two decades into 51 cards. The cards are accurate but jump between continents and themes, so the main job is putting them back in order.

Cards worth learning first

What the deck covers

Versailles (colonies, Alsace-Lorraine, the Polish districts, no real army), the League of Nations, Rapallo, Locarno and German entry to the League in 1926, the Washington Naval Conference and London Naval Treaty, the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, flappers and Art Deco, women's suffrage, the March on Rome, the Beer Hall Putsch, Black Tuesday, crop prices down 60%, unemployment at 25–33%, fascist ideology, the Twenty-One Demands, the Racial Equality Proposal, the May 15 Incident, Manchukuo, Nanjing, Khalkhin Gol, the Spanish Civil War (Franco vs. the Republic and the International Brigades), Amritsar, independence for Egypt (1922) and Iraq (1932), the Balfour Declaration and the 1936 Arab revolt, the Statute of Westminster, and the Anschluss.

Study tips for this deck

Build three timelines, not one. The cards are grouped by theme, so dates from Europe, East Asia and the British Empire get mixed together. Tag every card Europe, Japan/China or Empire. Then put each group in order: Versailles 1919 → Ruhr and hyperinflation 1923 → Locarno 1925 → crash 1929 → Anschluss and Munich 1938, and separately Twenty-One Demands 1915 → Manchuria 1931 → May 15 1932 → Shanghai 1937 → Khalkhin Gol 1939. If you can see the two timelines next to each other, you understand why 1937–39 felt like one war starting on two fronts.

Fix three backs and add the missing cards. Card 20 gives the start of women's suffrage, not equal voting rights. Britain gave the vote to some women in 1918 but only gave equal suffrage in 1928, and Canada's 1917 law covered some women only. Card 50's "99% voted in favour" was a plebiscite held under Nazi control in April 1938, so learn it as propaganda, not as real consent. Card 4's "first world" is a Cold War label, so read it as "industrialised countries". Then write the cards the deck skips: Hitler becomes chancellor (January 1933), the Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928), the remilitarisation of the Rhineland (1936), the New Deal and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939). Without that last one, the jump from Munich to Poland makes no sense.

Where to go next

Find QK7838 in the Flip It library at flip-it.app. For what came after 1945, read the Cold War study guide. For the longer story behind Locarno and the League, see European unification from Bismarck to the EU.