Word: rheydt
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Accounts that German civilians have welcomed the advancing Allies infuriate him. "I cannot understand the fact that hardly any resistance was offered in Cologne," he complains. Especially painful is the report from his home town. "The news that Rheydt received the Americans with white flags makes me blush," he admits. "One of these white flags flew from the house where I was born." Denouncing the "cynicism of the Americans" for singing God Bless America at the end of a service in Cologne Cathedral, he writes on April 2: "What humiliations have we still to suffer before the moment of deliverance...
...Jewish victims of Hitler. This was just the beginning, but it quickly inspired imitators.* In the Hessian town of Seligenstadt, an 85-year-old Jew received a letter threatening him with crucifixion. Vandals scrawled "Death to the Jews" in red paint on park benches in Braunschweig, and in Rheydt the word "Swine" was scratched on a Jew's shopwindow. In the Ruhr, and to the north near Hamburg, swastikas and "Heil Hitlers" appeared on walls...
From the outside, Schloss Rheydt is just another moated Rhineland castle. Within, it is an art lover's eyeful. There the British have collected German ecclesiastical art treasures, rescued by the Western Allies from their wartime hideouts...
...west bank and around which the Nazis had organized their strongest perimeter defense. Then, instead of crossing the Erft, the Ninth (six infantry and three armored divisions) wheeled north. The move appeared to achieve some tactical surprise. Big industrial towns fell like ripe fruit: München-Gladbach, Krefeld, Rheydt (birthplace of Propagandist Paul Joseph Goebbels). Krefeld, with a peacetime population of 170,000, surpassed Aachen as the biggest prize yet in the west...
Last week the Air Ministry sadly posted 26-year-old Guy Gibson as missing-ten weeks after he had failed to return from a mission as master bomber in a night attack on Rheydt, now in the path of the U.S.-British advance to the Rhineland...