OCR GCSE History A (Explaining the Modern World) Period study with non-British depth study: International relations 1918-2001 + Germany 1925-1955: the people and the state November 2020 question paper J410/02

Outline the actions of Al-Qaeda in the period 1995–2001.

Explain why countries lost confidence in the League of Nations in the 1930s.

Study Interpretation A.

Do you think this interpretation is a fair comment on Chamberlain and the policy of Appeasement between 1937 and 1939? Use your knowledge and other interpretations of British policy towards

Germany between these dates to support your answer.

Study Interpretation B.

Explain why not all historians and commentators have agreed with this interpretation of the early stages of the Cold War. Use other interpretations and your knowledge to support your answer.

() Spelling, punctuation and grammar and the use of specialist terminology

Interpretation B

American leaders had come to believe it was necessary and right to expand America’s influence. America’s policies offered the Russians no real choice. Particularly after the atom bomb was created and used, the attitude of the United States left the Soviets with only one real option; either to accept American dominance or to confront them.

From ‘The Tragedy of American Diplomacy’, written by the US historian William Appleman Williams and first published in the USA in 1960.

Describe one feature of the Nazis’ National Community.

Explain why there was so little opposition to the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1939.

Study Sources A and B. Why do Sources A and B give such different views of Weimar Germany in

the late 1920s?

Source A

All the parties have lied and betrayed the people. Not one has attempted to put into practice what it promised. The parties pay attention to the people only during elections. Do the parties really represent Germany? Do we have to agree to a future of being disappointed and betrayed by them? We say no! If the parties are bad, then throw them out and join the people in fighting the parties!

An extract from a Nazi leaflet published in Germany in 1927 and then reissued in 1931.

Source B

By 1928 the Republic and its democratic parties seemed to have found their feet. One hardly heard of Hitler or the Nazis except as the subject of jokes. In the election of that year the Nazi Party got less than one million out of a total of thirty-one million votes and had only twelve of the Reichstag’s 491 members. The Nationalists also lost heavily. In contrast, the Social Democrats received more than nine million votes, with 153 seats in the Reichstag, making them easily the largest political party in Germany.

An extract from a book written in the 1940s by American journalist William Shirer describing Weimar Germany. Shirer lived and worked in Berlin throughout the 1920s and 1930s but he had to flee to the USA in 1940 to avoid arrest by the Nazis.

8* ‘Defeat and occupation were the largest impacts of the Second World War on the German people.’

How far do you agree with this statement?