Word: danzig
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week a diplomatic drama as strange as a Wagnerian opera unrolled in the Bavarian Alps. The setting was Wagnerian-Führer Adolf Hitler's Berghof at Berchtesgaden, a mountain hideaway 15 miles from music-haunted Salzburg, 600 miles from Danzig, 1,300 miles from Moscow, and 3,000 feet above sea level. Facing the cloud-capped mountains the brown and white Berghof itself-huge echoing rooms, wide halls, bedrooms for 40 guests, guards' turrets, flower gardens, machine-gun nests-seemed as unreal as the home of the Troll kings...
...Croatia and the seacoast of Dalmatia stretching down the Adriatic. Eastward lies fertile Hungary, and Rumania with its oil wells, its grain, its ports on the Danube and Black Sea. Northeast, across what had been Czecho-Slovakia, lies Poland and the minute spot on the map known as Danzig, the present battlefield in Europe's war of nerves...
...parading their naval might and displaying confidence in any impending struggle; Rumania, where natives, irritated at charges that they are lukewarm in their resistance to aggression, are now declaring they can resist alone; Turkey, key to the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean; Poland, unshaken by the struggle over Danzig, counting on its muddy roads to bog down motorized infantry in the event of invasion and on the spirit of its people to fight if necessary, to ignore provocations until...
...only point their guns in vain. Military maneuvers are but an adjunct in this weird conflict. It has its positions that must be taken, its genius, Adolf Hitler, its victims, like Dr. Benes of Czecho-Slovakia, its troops, the hardened ranks of editors and orators, its battlegrounds, like Danzig, its staff headquarters, like Berchtesgaden. And it has its heroes...
...grew eloquent: 2,000,000 men under arms in Germany, with 500,000 to be added in August; heavy concentrations of German troops on the Polish frontier from Danzig to Cracow; five German divisions in motion near Breslau; schools in Bohemia transformed into hospitals; troops and supplies moving east through Ostmark*-all this convinced him that "it would be disastrous, it would be pathetic, it would be shameful for the House to write itself off as an effective and potent factor in the situation. . . ." If things were in dead balance, no move should be taken that might weaken resistance...