Word: berlin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...German peace feeler was a desperate maneuver by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, the police and the concentration camps, who had escaped from Berlin to the north German port of Lübeck. There he told a diplomat from neutral Sweden that Germany was willing to surrender to the Americans and British. At worst, Himmler thought, this would enable Germany to throw all its troops against the Soviets; at best, the Western Allies would join the German defense. Himmler seems even to have cherished the illusion that the Allies would support him, the lord of the Holocaust...
...acerbic. "Has he anything to surrender?" the new President asked Churchill on the transatlantic telephone. The two quickly agreed to tell the Swedish diplomat (and to reassure " the ever suspicious Stalin) that Germany must surrender unconditionally to all the Allies. No more was heard from Himmler. Inside the Berlin bunker, Hitler denounced him as a traitor. He dismissed Himmler from his government positions and expelled him from the Nazi Party...
...doused with gasoline and set afire. Even before the flames died down, renewed shelling drove the survivors underground again. Goebbels and Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann decided to try offering the Soviets a deal. On May 1 they sent a general to Soviet headquarters to propose a surrender of Berlin in exchange for their own safety in leaving the city. During the long interval before the general returned with a Soviet rejection, Goebbels decided that he too must die. He ordered one of the bunker's doctors to inject sedatives into his six children, who had taken refuge with...
...noon on Monday, May 7, millions had heard the news, but the Allied governments still refused to confirm the story, apparently because of a Soviet request for a delay until a formal surrender in Berlin could be arranged. Several hundred thousand people milled around for five hours in New York's Times Square, sober, uncertain whether to celebrate or not. Ticker tape fluttered through the air, then stopped. Finally Mayor Fiorello La Guardia bellowed through a loudspeaker, "Go home ... or return to your jobs...
...should alter its basic weapons strategy from targeting populations to a counterforce capability. That goes against those who support the idea of mutual assured destruction as a deterrent. But I think MAD is obsolete. What American President is going to risk New York and Chicago to save Berlin? As I look back on World War II and on the war in the Pacific, I think the whole concept of targeting civilian populations was morally wrong. In World War I, there were 16 million deaths. In World War II, there were 55 million. Much of the difference was that targets were...