Word: germanism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even as he spoke, German artillery had already started firing, and tanks were rolling eastward. For a time, everything went as Hitler planned. The Red Army was caught by surprise, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers fell prisoner. Within three weeks the German line had moved forward some 400 miles, to Smolensk and almost to Leningrad. But with the central army group in striking distance of Moscow, Hitler delayed its advance to concentrate on capturing the industrial and agricultural resources of the Ukraine, and it was not until October that he began a new drive on the capital...
...cold rain began falling. "The infantryman slithers in the mud, while many teams of horses are needed to drag each gun forward," one German general recounted. "All wheeled vehicles sink up to their axles in slime." The first snow fell on Oct. 6. A month later, the temperatures fell below zero. Tank engines began to freeze. The troops, who had been issued no winter clothing, suffered frostbite...
...Berlin, the Nazi authorities were fretting over another problem. In the early years of Nazism, one of Hitler's goals had been to harass Germany's half a million Jews into leaving. Now he was planning a more extreme policy: rounding up and killing every Jew in all of German-occupied Europe. Himmler's special commandos had shot tens of thousands of Jews in Poland, but the Nazis sought more efficient methods. Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, summoned representatives of all major government departments to the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to inform them of what he called "the final solution...
Hitler had hoped to attack the Low Countries in the fall of 1939, as soon as possible after the conquest of Poland, but the plan was delayed first by objections from the German generals, then by bad weather, then by a bizarre twist of fortune. A Luftwaffe major who carried a set of the invasion plans in his briefcase was sitting in an officers club in Munster and bemoaning the long train trip to a planning conference in Cologne the next day; another major, who was getting too old for active duty, offered to fly him there so that...
...supply depots 100 ft. underground. To the north of the Ardennes Forest, which was only lightly fortified because the French considered it "impenetrable," a "Little Maginot Line" guarded the Franco-Belgian border, but the French planned to march into neutral Belgium themselves at the first sign of a German invasion...