Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They had some very practical reasons. Hitler had substantially revived the economy. Unemployment, so pivotal in bringing him to power, had dropped from 6 million to less than 1 million between 1933 and 1937, this at a time when the U.S. was still wallowing in the Depression. National production and income doubled during the same period. This was partly owing to Hitler's rearmament policy, but also to more benign forms of public spending. The world's first major highway system, the autobahns, began snaking across the country, and there was talk of providing every citizen with a cheap, standardized...
...most impressive of the new public buildings was the Olympic stadium in Berlin, and there Hitler welcomed the powerful and famous of other lands -- for example, the celebrated American aviator Charles Lindbergh -- to his refurbished capital. And despite the fuss over a black American, Jesse Owens, winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the team that scored the most points overall was Nazi Germany...
...inevitable that an economically reviving Germany would increase its pressure for major revisions in the Versailles Treaty. When the new President Roosevelt proposed the abolition of all major offensive weapons, Hitler was quick to agree -- easy enough since Germany had been forbidden to possess such weapons. "Germany would also be perfectly ready to disband her entire military establishment . . . if the neighboring countries will do the same," Hitler declared. That "if" was the shield behind which he planned to rearm. When Britain and France declined, Hitler indignantly announced that Germany was leaving the Geneva disarmament talks and the League of Nations...
...secret, Hitler had already told his generals that he wanted to triple the German army from the Versailles ceiling of 100,000 men to 300,000 by October 1934. The navy, which was not supposed to have any ships of more than 10,000 tons, got orders to start building two 26,000-ton battle cruisers. In the spring of 1935, Hitler announced that he was reintroducing universal military service to create an army of 500,000 men. The Allies protested but did nothing...
...dawn on March 7, 1936, Hitler made the first bold use of his growing Wehrmacht. Though his generals had warned him that the French would resist and that Germany was still too weak to fight, Hitler sent three battalions across the Rhine to occupy the supposedly demilitarized Rhineland. "We have no ) territorial demands to make in Europe," he proclaimed. "Germany will never break the peace!" It was all bluff. "If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs," Hitler later said. "A retreat on our part would have...