There is also another disease at loose in the world. It is called anti-Semitism. It is hatred of Jews. Hitler uses that old idea to explain Germany's problems . It is convenient. Whatever is wrong must be the fault of Jews. Inflation? Depression? It is all because of the Jews. So in Germany, as soon as the Nazis come to power, Jews are persecuted for no reason except their religion. Liane Reif-Lehrer was a Jewish girl born in Vienna, Austria, in 1934. Later on she wrote, "I should have been a normal little girl, happy with my special doll, my big brother, and my doting parents. But the world around me was going mad, and the life I should have had was not to be."

The Nazis use the technology of the modern world for purposes of murder. They build factories for killing. Then they hunt down the Jews of Europe and send them to be slaughtered . They don't kill just Jews. Hitler hates Slavs (who live in eastern Europe), gypsies, people who are crippled, and anyone who doesn't agree with him. The Nazis kill as many of those people as they can. And they enslave others.

How can three nations—Germany, Italy, and Japan, soon to be known as the Axis in the coming war—be a threat to the whole world? In the same way that a lone wolf doesn't try to attack a whole flock. He picks them off, one by one.

In 1938 Hitler takes over Austria, and then Czechoslovakia, and the democracies let him do it. When the Nazis march into Poland in 1939, finally Britain and France respond. They declare war on Germany .