<P> Adolf Hitler, after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the German government in 1923, eventually became the Chancellor of Germany in 1933 . He abolished democracy, espousing a radical, racially motivated revision of the world order, and soon began a massive rearmament campaign . Meanwhile, France, to secure its alliance, allowed Italy a free hand in Ethiopia, which Italy desired as a colonial possession . The situation was aggravated in early 1935 when the Territory of the Saar Basin was legally reunited with Germany and Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, accelerated his rearmament programme, and introduced conscription . </P> <P> To contain Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy formed the Stresa Front in April 1935, a key step towards military globalization; however, that June, the United Kingdom made an independent naval agreement with Germany, easing prior restrictions . The Soviet Union, concerned by Germany's goals of capturing vast areas of Eastern Europe, drafted a treaty of mutual assistance with France . Before taking effect though, the Franco - Soviet pact was required to go through the bureaucracy of the League of Nations, which rendered it essentially toothless . The United States, concerned with events in Europe and Asia, passed the Neutrality Act in August of the same year . </P> <P> Hitler defied the Versailles and Locarno treaties by remilitarising the Rhineland in March 1936, encountering little opposition . In October 1936, Germany and Italy formed the Rome--Berlin Axis . A month later, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Italy would join in the following year . </P> <P> The Kuomintang (KMT) party in China launched a unification campaign against regional warlords and nominally unified China in the mid-1920s, but was soon embroiled in a civil war against its former Chinese Communist Party allies and new regional warlords . In 1931, an increasingly militaristic Empire of Japan, which had long sought influence in China as the first step of what its government saw as the country's right to rule Asia, used the Mukden Incident as a pretext to launch an invasion of Manchuria and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo . </P>

Is it world war 2 or world war ii