Word: gleiwitz
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Dates: during 1945-1945
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...Germans were staggered. It was a cruel blow. At Gleiwitz was a synthetic fuel plant that employed 38,000. It had been moved to "safe" Silesia from the air-vulnerable Ruhr. Near by was a great new engine works, also built far from the Allied bomber fields. At Beuthen was the biggest zinc mine in Europe. Out of Katowice had poured automobiles, chemicals, machine tools. Out of the basin had gone much of the coal for the industries and railroads of the eastern Reich and Czechoslovakia...
...German command was plainly shaken. It was not proper that Marshal Ivan Konev's First Ukrainian Army had been able to penetrate six deep belts of defense between the starting point of his offensive and Gleiwitz. It was not in the books that his Russians could so quickly chew up the ring of gun points, trenches, minefields, tank traps that circled Gleiwitz and the other heavily populated cities...
...Gleiwitz Kaput. The taking of Gleiwitz had been typical of Konev's technique. All through the fortified belts his tank-tipped spearheads had been in too much of a hurry to fight. If they rolled up to a strong point, they veered off until they found a soft spot, then zipped through. They had gone so fast that, in some cases, prepared defenses were not even manned...
...Russians made for Gleiwitz frontally-where the defense belt was deepest. Near it they veered a dozen miles to the north, found the weakness, came up on the main Katowice-Berlin highway. A fast run up the Autostrasse to important Breslau was the reasonable thing for the Germans to expect. Instead, Konev's tanks turned left, cut cross-country to a road that entered Gleiwitz from the southwest...
...Gleiwitz was also typical of the Russians' complexity of maneuver all along the front. The industrial basin had not been Konev's only aim. More important was his second objective: crossing the unfrozen Oder River...