This article is published on the internet only. This is the version of October, 2013. This version is largely a remedial lesson in pre-war history for those who know only what they have learnt via school textbooks, popular encyclopaedias, movies etc. The article therefore does to a considerable extent go back to original sources and has to provide a lot of information that is not generally known. This does make the article rather long. For those who already know the history of the period well, however, I have kept available the June 2001 version of the article -- which is MUCH shorter. You can find it
here. To make this longer version more navigable there is a clickable index at the end