Can someone tell me what totalitarianism had to do with World War II.?

Question:Hitler was a dictator which was totalitarianism so no one could argue with him.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Hitler was a dictator which was totalitarianism so no one could argue with him.

Several of the major players in World War II were totalitarian governments:

Nazi Germany
Japan
Italy
Soviet Russia.

Of course many of these countries probably would have went to war anyways, because their leaders enjoyed such popularity... none the less, i'd be curious to see how a vote would have turned in a free society where there was no fear of persecution for speaking out in terms of going to war. Much of Europe was sick of it already. But, no one really had a choice seeing as a feature of a totalitarian governement is one total leader with near absolute power. So if the leader wants war, there's war.

Germany's totalitarian is Hitler and the Soviet Union's #1 totalitarian was Stalin.

Mr.L is right for totalitarianism was synonymous with Fascism and there is little to distinguish the two apart - good luck !
:0)

There is actually a debate about whether totalitarianism and fascism are, in fact, synonymous. Authoritarianism, fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, totalitarianism, are all different in origin, belief and other details. It depends how deeply you need to analyse them. One could see the French Revolution as a proto-Socialist and therefore proto-Stalinist event, but we could not say the same about Nazism. It has completely different origins, of course. One could say that widepsread European totalitarianism was a peculiarity of World War II and that it was much more successful with the advent of modern media techonology, but it isn't as if authoritarianism had not existed prior to 1939 or that it did not continue to exist well afterward or that it does not continue to exist now. See debates on Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951.