Word: french
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...start was less than auspicious. He joined a tiny Bavarian outfit that called itself the German Workers Party. He began making speeches, denouncing Bolsheviks, capitalists, the Jews, the French. Germany had lost the war only because it had been betrayed at home by a "stab in the back." By 1923, as the new Weimar Republic was sinking into deep economic troubles, Hitler staged an absurd "beer-hall putsch" and led a march through Munich. He was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison (he served nine months). "You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over," he declared...
Larger forces were aggravating the conflicts that Hitler would eventually exploit. In 1923 the Germans stalled on their reparations payments and the French seized the industrial Ruhr to compel payment. The German mark, declining ever since the war, began plunging: 7,000 to the dollar in January, 160,000 in July, 1 million in August. A kind of madness swept the country. People carried suitcases of money to a store to buy a sausage. And the mark kept falling, to an all-time low of 4.2 trillion that November. Everything was for sale, all savings were destroyed, and nothing seemed...
...dawn on March 7, 1936, Hitler made the first bold use of his growing Wehrmacht. Though his generals had warned him that the French would resist and that Germany was still too weak to fight, Hitler sent three battalions across the Rhine to occupy the supposedly demilitarized Rhineland. "We have no ) territorial demands to make in Europe," he proclaimed. "Germany will never break the peace!" It was all bluff. "If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs," Hitler later said. "A retreat on our part would have...
...fully prepared to back up his policies by force, even if only obliquely or by proxy. When General Francisco Franco launched a military revolt against the Republican government of Spain in 1936, Hitler saw a chance not only to acquire a new ally but also to discomfit the neighboring French. He sent bombers, tanks and "volunteers." Goring used Spain as a training ground for "my young Luftwaffe." Its most notorious action, one that other nations would soon experience, was the aerial destruction of the Basque town of Guernica...
Rumors, possibly false, suddenly spread in May 1938 that German troops were concentrating on the Czech frontier. Bene ordered a partial mobilization, the British expressed "grave concern," and the French warned Berlin that they were ready to fight. One of Hitler's top generals thereupon announced that it had all been a mistake, that there had been no German troop movements. By appearing to stand firm for the first time, the Allies seemed to have made Hitler back down. But this apparent victory had two important results: the Allies were appalled at how near to war they had come...