Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Khrushchev's more crucial decision to give Nixon a chance to shine in Russia was a conscious effort to persuade the U.S. to bypass NATO, the Big Four and the U.N., in favor of direct dealings with Moscow. Khrushchev had been almost indifferent-as well as rude-to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Now, in return for his welcome to Nixon, Nikita unabashedly hoped to get an invitation to the U.S. And judging from the sounds emerging from Washington-and from Nixon himself in Moscow (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), he was likely in due course...
...European diplomats were openly discussing it. "You don't know General de Gaulle," snapped a French government official, "if you think he is going to stand idly by and let Russia and the U.S. settle everything." In Britain, the Economist surprisingly took the opposite tack. Ignoring the usual British argument that the West would be lost without the benefit of Britain's deeper diplomatic savvy, the Economist saw an Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting as "an alternative to the summit," iaatly declared: "The job can be done better in Washington than anywhere else...
...crowded last days of war, May 1945, a convoy of Nazi trucks, speeding away from the advancing U.S. troops, was hastily abandoned in upper Austria, 37 miles east of Germany's Berchtesgaden. One stalled truck yielded 23 chests crammed with expertly forged British ?5 and ?10 notes with total face value of several million dollars. At a lake near by, bank notes tossed overboard from a second truck began to float ashore. In the months that followed, U.S. Navy divers and British frogmen plunged to the 200-ft. to 250-ft. depths of Austria's Toplitz Lake...
Testing the Fakes. The mass counterfeiting of British money was an audacious Nazi trick with a double purpose: to undermine British currency and to finance Gestapo operations abroad. For special Section 6-F-4 of the Reich Security Office, it proved to be a tough job. It took top German engravers seven months to get a satisfactory plate made (the figure of Britannia gave them particular trouble), and still longer to match the bluish rag paper that the real notes were printed on. Dates and serial numbers were carefully checked against real ones. At last came the test. A Gestapo...
...isolated Block 19 of Sachen-hausen concentration camp under the supervision of SS Officer Bernhard Kriiger. His team of some 160 inmates, mostly Jews once employed in printing and banking, got special rations and good treatment. By early 1943 the Sachenhausen presses were turning out 250,000 bogus British notes each month...