Word: generality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first week in January, everything suddenly changed. Papen, bent on revenge for having been replaced as Chancellor by General Kurt von Schleicher, decided to make a deal with Hitler. At a secret meeting, several prominent financiers promised credit to the financially pressed Nazis. Once again, Hindenburg proposed a Papen-Hitler coalition, only with Hitler as Chancellor. & This time Hitler agreed. And so, on Jan. 30, 1933, this half-educated ex- Austrian with a genius for manipulation and deceit became, quite legally, the leader of Germany...
Unlike the Allied leaders, though, Hitler was 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...
Without the slightest warning, Germany's General Walther von Brauchitsch sent the Fourth Army smashing through the disputed Polish Corridor, isolating the Free City of Danzig; the Eighth and Tenth Armies striking over the Vistula plain toward Warsaw; the Fourteenth Army driving across Silesia toward Cracow -- 1.5 million men in all, led by a fearsome new military force, the 2,700 fast-moving panzers (tanks) of the German armored divisions...
Overhead, another new German weapon seized control of the skies: the Junkers-87 Stuka dive bomber, which plunged down to blast road junctions and railroad lines; it also had a device that emitted screams to spread terror among its victims. And then there were the heavy bombers. General Wladyslaw Anders, who would eventually lead the Polish exile army through the battles of North Africa and Italy, heard the ominous drone of Heinkel-111s overhead and later remembered that "squadron after squadron of aircraft could be seen flying in file, like cranes, to Warsaw." At 6 a.m. those deadly cranes began...
...Poles were amazed at the speed of the German successes -- even the Germans were surprised -- but the defenders counted on two allies to save them. One was General Mud, who traditionally emerged from the September rains that regularly converted the Vistula River into an impassable barrier and the vulnerable fields of central Poland into a morass. The other ally was the Anglo-French partnership, which bound the two great powers of the West to defend Poland by armed force...