Word: berliner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...losing the war across France and Belgium faster than the Allied armies, running short of fuel, could win it. Lieut. General George Patton in the south lay only 100 miles from the Rhine and, like Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in the north, he was convinced that he could reach Berlin in a matter of weeks...
...Second Army had blitzed across the last bridge at Arnhem, which spanned the Lower Rhine, and driven into Germany. All the bridges except the one at Arnhem were swiftly captured. But a week and a day after it began, Operation Market-Garden phased into a withdrawal, ironically coded Operation Berlin. By then the Allies had lost 17,000 troops, or 1% times the casualties of the Normandy invasion. "The most momentous airborne offensive ever conceived" also turned out to be-in the words of Cornelius Ryan, "one of the greatest miscalculations of the European...
balked, however, when the East Germans began interfering with West German traffic on the roadways leading to West Berlin. The harassment by the Communists was in protest against Bonn's opening a branch of the West German Federal Environmental Protection Agency in West Berlin. Only after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made it clear to the Soviets that he held them responsible for the East German action in violation of prior East-West agreements and the spirit of detente did the flow of traffic return to normal...
During the talks, the U.S. demanded that the East Germans agree to compensate the victims of Nazism. East Berlin insisted that as a "new state" it shared no responsibility for Nazi atrocities, but the U.S. refused to budge. The G.D.R. finally pledged to process the claims of Jews and others who had their property taken by the Nazis. While it is too early to estimate what the claims might cost the G.D.R., West Germany has already voluntarily paid out about $15 billion to claimants...
...East Berlin regime probably made a concession in order to participate in the rising tide of trade between Eastern Europe and the U.S. It may have also been seeking a respectability that it feels it will gain by winning America's recognition. But East Germany may discover that respectability could be slow in coming as long as it remains one of Europe's most repressive police states, still finding it necessary to limit the freedom of its 17 million citizens by walls, barbed wire and the presence of 20 Soviet divisions...