Word: germanic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Germany too the treatment of Jews kept getting worse. The Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 deprived them of German citizenship and forbade them to marry or have sexual relations with "Aryans." In 1938 they were barred from practicing law or medicine or engaging in commerce. Along with such laws came all forms of discrimination -- signs barring them from grocery stores or drugstores or even whole towns -- and the constant threat of violence from any bad-tempered policeman, any unruly crowd...
...November 1938, after a Jewish student assassinated the Third Secretary at the German embassy in Paris, the Nazis staged a nationwide pogrom, burning Jewish homes and synagogues and smashing so many windows that the rampage became known as Kristallnacht (death toll: 91). Yet again the Western Allies protested but did nothing. London maintained its strict limits on Jews' going to British-ruled Palestine, and the U.S. resisted any increase in its immigration quotas...
...Austria, Hitler's war of nerves began with a wave of terrorist bombings and street riots. Berlin sponsored this violence with payments to Konrad Henlein, leader of Czechoslovakia's Sudeten German Party. It also gave him his instructions, which Henlein himself once summed up: "We must always demand so much from the Czechs that we can never be satisfied." When Czech President Eduard Bene first asked Henlein what he wanted, the list included political autonomy, payment of damages, separate citizenship for Sudeten Germans and freedom to practice "the ideology of Germans." Bene refused...
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...
...unscrupulous improviser like Hitler, but he nonetheless invited himself to a meeting with the Fuhrer. Hitler received him in Berchtesgaden, and soon began ranting about the Czechs. He said he would not "tolerate any longer that a small, second-rate country should treat the mighty thousand-year-old German Reich as something inferior." Shocked, Chamberlain threatened to leave. Hitler, who had never ) previously asked to take over part of Czechoslovakia, now claimed that he wanted "the principle . . . of self-determination...