Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hitler's impulsive attack on Yugoslavia had delayed his invasion of Russia by a month -- which was to become critically important when the first snows began to fall. But the Germans expected little trouble when they rescheduled Operation Barbarossa for June...
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...
...Hitler ordered the start of an all-out drive on Moscow, which the Wehrmacht now surrounded on three sides, only 20 to 30 miles outside the city. One infantry unit got as far as the suburb of Khimki, from which the Germans could actually see the towers of the Kremlin, but that was as far as they could go before Soviet tanks drove them out again. And all along the front, the Soviet defenders held fast. Then, on Dec. 6, the Soviets somehow produced 100 new divisions and launched a counteroffensive that sent the Germans reeling back 50 miles...
Back in 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...
...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...