Word: held
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hindenburg and the other conservatives were confident that they could keep Hitler under control. They held eight of the eleven Cabinet seats, including such power centers as the Foreign Ministry and the Economics Ministry. What they did not seem to appreciate was that Goring was not only a national Minister Without Portfolio but also the Prussian interior minister; that put him in charge of the police in the state of Prussia, which covered Berlin and two-thirds of Germany...
...their last free (or semifree) elections, held March 5, 1933, the Germans gave their new dictator 44% of their votes. Hitler never won a majority in an election, but that 44% brought the Nazis, along with their right-wing allies of the Nationalist Party, their first majority in the Reichstag. So Hitler presented the Reichstag with an "enabling act" that would surrender most of its powers to what was now very much his Cabinet. Some Communists and socialists -- those not already in jail -- protested, but while the Nazi delegates cheered and shouted, the Reichstag docilely voted itself out of business...
...Germans," recalled William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, who went to report on Germany in 1934, "and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope...
Having won everything, Hitler still could not be satisfied. The following spring, deciding that he now wanted more than just the Sudetenland, he held a conference with Czech President Emil Hacha in Berlin (Bene had resigned and gone into exile after Munich). Hacha was 66 and suffering from heart trouble, so it did not help to have the meeting begin at 1:15 a.m. on March 15, 1939. Hitler told his guest that the Czechs were still guilty of "Bene tendencies," and therefore the Wehrmacht would invade Czechoslovakia at 6 that morning. The only question was whether the Czechs would...
...still remember that sunny September day, the whizzing sound of German planes strafing defenseless refugees, exploding bombs, the stench of burning and dead horses at the roadside. I thought the heavens had fallen in on me. Relations between Lithuania and Poland were not very good, and we were held up at the border, adding to our sense of alarm and fear. We were convinced that we would return home soon, that a British-French offensive would enable the Polish army to go on fighting against the overwhelming forces of the enemy. Not for a moment did I think I would...