Word: haussmann
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...other officers had been originally indicted. The case against Brigadier General Otto Rasch was suspended when he became bedridden with Parkinson's disease; the case against Major Emil Haussmann was closed when, midway through the trial, he killed himself...
...defend Paris, however, was a task made surpassingly difficult by the plan of the city. Following six decades of revolution and rioting during which its streets were barricaded on some six occasions, Napoleon III commissioned Baron Eugene Georges Haussmann in 1853 to beautify the city and in doing so to eliminate the tangled mass of crooked streets so ideal for riots and street fighting. The wide boulevards and strategically located focal points such as the Etoile thus came into being. Haussmann figured that barricades could not be easily erected across wide boulevards, nor could the favorite technique of shooting...
History was not too kind to Planner Haussmann. Twenty years later Paris fell to the besieging Germans, after which it was seized and held for 80 days by revolting Communards (see cuts...
...only is the Paris plan vulnerable to internal disorder, it is far from invulnerable to seizure from without. An invading general whose troops break through the ring of old forts and gain access to the boulevards has the same advantages that Haussmann's revolt-breakers were supposed to enjoy. And the old masonry buildings become bomb traps since the limestone of which they are constructed shatters easily, each splinter becoming itself a missile...