Word: baltics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From East Prussia strong German forces drove north into Lithuania. The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) afforded a particularly tempting target. Russia seized them in June 1940-as the Germans did after the Red revolt in 1917. The people remain disaffected, and Adolf Hitler made the most of their feelings...
Revolt against the Russians was reported breaking out in Estonia; the Germans set up a puppet Government for Lithuania. If the Germans could quickly sew up the Baltic littoral, they would not only have developed the northern arm of the master pincers; they would also have deprived Russia of bases for her large fleet of submarines, which might prove embarrassing to the German flow of ore from Sweden...
...basis of this attack, and also as the southern jaw of the master pincers, German troops, supported by Rumanians, cut into Bessarabia, the area which Russia grabbed from Rumania in June 1940. Main Russian defenses were behind the Dnieper; Bessarabia looked as easy to take as the Baltic States...
...Swedish spokesmen declared that Sweden would stay neutral. But there were rumors that Sweden's forces, including her pocket battleships expressly designed for Baltic fighting, would soon be used against Russia...
...must have thought of the Knights of the Sword and the Teutonic Knights, who Germanized the shores of the Baltic, where the Hohenzollerns were to found their Kingdom, and of Friedrich Wilhelm, the Elector of Brandenburg, who helped bring about the Treaty of Westphalia after the Thirty Years' War that reduced Germany to ruin. It was Friedrich Wilhelm who started the Hohenzollerns on the road to the leadership of Germany, and his son, Friedrich I, who persuaded the Holy Roman Emperor to style him King in Prussia. Of Friedrich's grandson, Frederick the Great, the Kaiser must have...