1. Invasion of Poland
Mentions – 5
Tensions between European countries regarding Hitler’s possible expansions of his people’s ‘living space’ reached the boiling point on September the 1st, 1939. That’s when more than one million German troops, with the blessing of the Soviet Union, invaded their closest neighbor, thus causing the beginning of the deadliest and most widespread war ever recorded in the history of the human kind. Two days later, Britain and France got involved, by taking Poland’s side. In the following months and years, 30 more countries accompanied them. If we put aside the aftermath of the World War II and the creation of the bipolar world with the rise of the Soviet Union and the United States of America, what puts this event in the first place on our list of the 11 most important historical events that changed the world forever? The concentration camps, genocide, slave labor, war crimes, the death of more than 5 million people, the Holocaust? Each of these horrors is the reason good enough. In the end, we are left with the thought that we definitely should measure twice and cut once, because what’s done cannot be undone.
