Word: afrika
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Died. General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, 56, German tank expert who earned the title of "Butcher of Guernica" in the Spanish Civil War, was Rommel's onetime second-in-command of the Afrika Korps and achieved high rank on the Yugoslavs' war-criminal list for his massacres in Serbia; of a heart attack; in Söcking, Germany...
...July 22, 1943 in prison camp at Medicine Hat, Alta., Sergeant Schwalb and another Afrika Korps man, Private Adolf Kratz, decided that a fellow prisoner, August Plaszek, was an anti-Nazi "swine," apparently because he objected to the ironhanded rule of the prisoners by a Nazi clique. So Schwalb and Kratz hanged Plaszek. They were tried for murder in a civil court, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged...
First to go was Walter Beyer, a 32-year-old sergeant still wearing parts of his Afrika Korps uniform. As he heard the sentence read and translated by an interpreter, his face was drawn, his eyes flicked nervously from one face to another. But he held his chin high. Said he: "I can't see why this is being done to me." When they placed the black hood over his head, he pivoted on his heel, marched smartly to the edge of the shaft, maintained his military bearing...
...scales, thereby giving potential weapon superiority to Hitler's enemies. But the actual weapon advantage was still his. The Wehrmacht rode that advantage for 15 months, but the ride was no longer easy. The Wehrmacht now had to skimp. The results showed clearly in the Mediterranean: the Afrika Korps recovered Italian Cyrenaica but lacked enough power to crush beseiged Tobruk; then lost Cyrenaica again to Auchinleck; finally, reinforced, overran the British army to push across Egypt to El Alamein. At that point only a decimated British army which had lost most of its equipment stood between Rommel and Cairo...
...Passengers boarding the Pennsylvania Limited at Washington, D.C. one day last week peered curiously at the 16 prisoners of war in the private car at the end of the train. They were Germans-mostly veterans of the ill-fated Afrika Korps; they looked smug and well-fed in their khaki uniforms stenciled with large P.W.s. Three U.S. Army noncoms watched over them...