Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...part, too, it was a matter of paranoia. Hitler suspected that Churchill fought on largely because he hoped to inveigle Stalin into joining him. And Hitler was himself so treacherous that he could not believe Stalin was not planning to betray him. Stalin intensified those suspicions by his own aggressiveness. On virtually the day the Germans occupied Paris, the Soviets seized the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. A few weeks after that, they demanded and got Rumania to give up its provinces of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Hitler saw this as a threat to his access to Rumania...
...Hitler's moment of supreme triumph, in the spring of 1941, he boldly made his supreme error, the error that was to destroy him. He decided to invade Soviet Russia. Exactly why he made this catastrophic miscalculation will never be known for sure. In part it was ideology. He had begun his political career by attacking the Bolsheviks, and he dreamed of Germany's finding Lebensraum by colonizing the vast lands to the east. He had written in Mein Kampf: "When we speak of new territory in Europe today, we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states...
Even before the Battle of Britain, Hitler wanted his generals to start planning an invasion of Russia in the fall of 1940. They managed to talk him into delaying until the following May. Germany signed a trade agreement with the U.S.S.R. as late as January 1941, but a month earlier Hitler had told his commanders, "The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign." The battle plan called for some 148 divisions -- more than 3 million men -- to attack in three main drives along a 1,000-mile front. One army group would strike...
...most obvious speculations about Hitler focus on what would have happened if he had met more resistance, from the beginning. While Hitler's will to power seemed almost demoniac in its ferocity, that was partly because he encountered such feeble opposition. Starting in Germany, if the democratic forces had united against him, he would never have come to power. If even just the conservatives had opposed him, he could not have become Chancellor. And if the French had resisted his reoccupation of the Rhineland, his regime would have collapsed...
...that the German generals were ready to overthrow the dictator if the Czechoslovak crisis of 1938 led to actual fighting. But when the British and French caved in at Munich, so did the German generals. Assassins, too, narrowly failed on several occasions. In November 1939, for instance, Hitler made a speech in Munich, then left ahead of schedule -- just 13 minutes before a time bomb went off and killed several bystanders...