Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...burst into the Chancellery in Vienna and shot down Conservative Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. That was supposed to be the start of a Nazi coup, but Justice Minister Kurt von Schuschnigg rallied the police and had the assassins arrested. Italy, which had guaranteed Austrian independence, mobilized four divisions on the frontier. Hitler backed down. By 1938, however, he had built a threatening army and had won the support of Italy's Mussolini (they had signed a secret protocol in 1936 creating what Mussolini called the Rome-Berlin axis). It was time to try again...
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...
...Czechoslovakia. They were not. Chamberlain then had to persuade Bene to give Germany every area inhabited more than 50% by Germans. That would mean the surrender of the entire Sudetenland, which represented not only one-fifth of Czechoslovakia's territory but also its industrial heartland and its defensible natural frontier. Bene at first refused, but when the British and French told him that he would have to fight alone, he gave...
...other big neighbor, Soviet Russia, and Hitler had achieved that just the previous week by suddenly concluding a treaty of cooperation with his supposed archenemy Joseph Stalin. And so, at the appointed hour of 4:45 a.m. (Poland time), Hitler struck all along the 1,750-mile Polish frontier. The catastrophic war of revenge that he alone wanted was now his to command...
...this point, even with fighting under way all along the Polish frontier, it was still conceivable that Hitler might once again achieve his goal without a major war. Italy's Benito Mussolini, who had promised to join Hitler's side in case of war, telephoned Berlin to say that he wished to remain neutral; Mussolini had been telling the British and French all that week that if they , would agree to a new four-power conference (much like the one at Munich that had carved up Czechoslovakia the previous year), he might be able to arrange some kind of compromise...