Word: hitlers
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...Finland's well-trained and determined army of 300,000 had fought the Red Army to a standstill. Churchill's plan was to land a British expeditionary force at the northern Norwegian port of Narvik, cut across to the Swedish iron mines at Gallivare (which provided Hitler with almost 50% of the iron he needed for his war machine), then join the Finnish resistance. Before Churchill could get his force under way, however, the Soviets overwhelmed the Finns in March...
Still determined to intercept those shipments of Swedish iron ore flowing south from Narvik to Hitler, Churchill then worked out a plan to lay mines along the Norwegian coast and even to seize the main Norwegian ports. That was supposed to begin April 8, 1940, but Hitler learned of the plan. British troops were already embarked in Scotland when the news came that the Germans were moving to land in both Denmark and Norway...
...contrast to France, where the Germans had surprised everyone by being relatively "correct," the conquest of Russia was to be even more ruthless than that of Poland. "This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences," Hitler told his generals, "and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies." More specifically, Hitler announced that he was assigning Heinrich Himmler, head of the dreaded SS, to carry out "special tasks" in the "liquidation" of all "commissars," meaning anyone in a leadership position. Beyond that, Hitler planned to plunder...
...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...