Word: rhine
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...thousand years ago in the piney fastness of the Teutoburg Forest, near where the city of Bielefeldr is today, an army of German tribesmen lay in wait for three Roman legions advancing from the Rhine. Led by the chieftain Arminius, the Germans ambushed the veteran legionaries and massacred them. Rome never again tried to extend its empire far beyond the Rhine. The Roman historian Tacitus called Arminius' ferocious style of warfare the furor Teutonicus: given to drinking and fighting, the Germans, he wrote, were tough, hardened warriors "fanatically loyal to their leaders." Concluded Tacitus: "Rest is unwelcome to the race...
Along the Rhine in 1945, barbed-wire fences enclosed tightly packed masses of German prisoners of war. Without tents, they dug crude foxholes and hoarded scraps of cardboard against the bitter spring weather. Without food or water, some resorted to eating grass and drinking their urine. Many died of dysentery, pneumonia, exhaustion, brought on by the cruel neglect of their American captors...
...view of this account, in which they had repeatedly been attacked and despoiled by the French, by Napoleon, by Louis XIV. Indeed, this conflict went back beyond the birth of either nation, to the time when the Romans subdued the Gauls but not the Germans, thus establishing the Rhine as the frontier of what was then considered the civilized world...
...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...
...East Germany's system of athletics may be the acclaimed model of scientific selection, but Witt ended up the sweetheart of Karl-Marx-Stadt for the purest reasons: her kindergarten happened to be next door to the skating hall, and her parents were softhearted. In Valley Girl German (Rhine Valley), she explains, "I bugged them until they finally gave in and registered me for skating classes. They never thought it would...