Once munitions had been built, Hitler took the Rhineland in the west, Austria in the south, and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, all of which were occupied by a large percentage of Germanic people. He also began attacks and created unfair laws against the Jews, but even this did little to provoke the west until Hitler took a land he had no legitimate claim to, Poland, in September 1939.
World War II (WWII) began with sweeping Nazi success as they overtook France and Poland and were soon bombing London, Moscow, and Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Russia). However, the war escalated and truly became a world war, which eventually led to the defeat of Hitler's Germany in May 1945.
Unlike after WWI, the peace talks for WWII resulted in Germany paying back none of the damage they caused during WWII and were even absolved of much of their WWI debts. However, it shrunk the country significantly and they became occupied by the Soviets, Americans, Brits, and French; the Soviet zone later becoming East Germany and the other three unifying to become West Germany.
The Cold War was magnified in Germany, specifically Berlin as East Berlin had a wall erected around it overnight in 1961. In 1989 communism collapsed in Germany as the world's favorite analogy of communism, the Berlin Wall, was torn down and in 1990 the two countries were unified.
Since the fall of communism in Germany the country has taken on a leading role in the European Union (EU) and now has open borders with their historic enemy, France. Despite this, the country has struggled at times to advance the east's economy to the level of the west and has undergone the painful re-education of their past, including the Holocaust. These drastic changes in such a short period of time have led to disunity and a lack of identity among many youths, who argue who they truly are.