Word: germanize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...paradox is that East Germany's 40th birthday party should have been a glorious moment for the 77-year-old Honecker. Largely because of his grimly orthodox leadership, "Honi" could boast of giving the German Democratic Republic the strongest economy, the finest industry and one of the best-fed, best-housed and best-educated populations in the East bloc. It was the world's most successful -- or least unsuccessful -- example of Marxist government...
...refugees' flight seemed not only a dramatic act of rejection by his own people but also a challenge to the legitimacy -- and perhaps the very existence -- of Honecker's country. Beneath the flags and banners, East Germans are increasingly questioning who and what they are -- and not liking the answers. Those who have made their way to the West since the beginning of the year have done so not out of material desperation or fear of persecution but in blunt renunciation of the East German system. "It is a suffocating place, and we didn't see any chance...
...under terms dictated by the Honecker regime, the special refugee trains were required to travel back through East German territory before depositing their human cargo in Bavaria. The face-saving yet ultimately self-defeating scheme was designed to permit authorities to engage in the fiction that they were "expelling" disloyal citizens. In the end, this petty legalism only encouraged more to flee. As the freedom trains slowed along hills and at curves, daring East Germans hopped aboard and joined the flight to the West...
...accuse Bonn of trying "to turn East Germany upside down with a comprehensive % attack." West Germany flatly denied that it had reneged on a pledge to shut its doors to new refugees. "There was no such agreement," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jurgen Chrobog. "We would never accept that German people should stand outside a German embassy with small children without giving shelter and care. The East Germans wanted to build a wall around our embassy. Now they're building a wall around themselves...
...after day new throngs poured in. There were so many abandoned Trabant and Wartburg automobiles on Prague streets that police began towing away any vehicle with East German stickers on it. On Tuesday, Ambassador Hermann Huber ordered the embassy gates closed when the refugee population had reached 5,000, then hours later, as the night turned bitterly cold, reopened them to families with children. A new round of departures was scheduled and then delayed. East German officials, moreover, insisted that the second group of trains make the trip from Prague to the West German city of Hof at night, rendering...