Word: hitlers
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...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...
...Hitler decided to rethink the whole strategy. The French defense was based on the "Maginot Line," a chain of fortifications that stretched 200 miles along the frontier from Switzerland north as far as Luxembourg. Built at a cost of $200 million (a substantial sum at a time when a workman earned about $3 a day), the Maginot Line was considered invulnerable; its strongest outposts bristled with antitank guns, machine guns and barbed wire, and boasted concrete walls 10 ft. thick as well as supply depots 100 ft. underground. To the north of the Ardennes Forest, which was only lightly fortified...
...France, again just as in 1914. By contrast, a strong armored offensive right through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes could lead to a breakthrough all the way to the English Channel. The Allied armies would be encircled and cut off; all France would lie open. Manstein's memorandums never reached Hitler, but the two men met at a dinner, and the Fuhrer was so impressed by the general's bold plan that he ordered it adopted...