Word: germanism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After the war started, even Hitler was surprised at the suddenness of his success. Yet many of his seemingly invincible tanks were very lightly armored and carried no offensive weapons heavier than machine guns. More important, the German war machine depended heavily on imported supplies: Swedish steel, Rumanian oil, South African chromium. The blitzkrieg was in part a response to the fact that a Germany blockaded by Britain did not then have the resources to wage war for more than six months. In addition to his natural gall and guile, though, Hitler had one attribute indispensable to a commander: luck...
...quickly conquered Poland, most of Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, Hitler confronted his next great choice: whether to invade England, his last belligerent enemy. It is now known that he seriously planned an invasion in the summer of 1940. And in outlining the future, the German army issued orders that all able-bodied British males between the ages of 17 and 45 were to be interned and shipped to the Continent. The list of people to be arrested by the Gestapo ranged from Bertrand Russell to Chaim Weizmann to Virginia Woolf...
...major dissenters were the German commanders who feared British naval and aerial supremacy, and that was why Hitler called off the invasion. But the Germans thought Britain was virtually defeated whether Hitler invaded or not, and a number of historians agree. "Even if he didn't invade us, he could have put resources into the war at sea . . . and starved us out," says Howard. "There's very little chance that we would have been able to survive." The strategist B.H. Liddell Hart, in History of the Second World War, applied the term "slow suicide" to Churchill's policy of fighting...
...question in any such speculation about a partial or complete Hitler victory is whether peace would have brought any kind of stability. Could Hitler have established a continental network of satellite states under German domination, like that in Vichy France? And could such a network of satellites have lasted as long as the one created by Stalin after the war? It was partly wartime hysteria that led to the savagery of Nazi rule in the occupied lands, not only against the Jews but also against the Slavs, some of whom had originally welcomed the Wehrmacht for liberating them from Stalin...
...British sent all kinds of boats. Big ones, little ones, paddle steamers, yachts, everything. It was gorgeous weather, hot and beautiful. Guys were lying on the dunes, shirts off, watching the combat between the British and German fighters. When they'd see a German fighter go down, they'd applaud...