Word: rhinelands
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...called "policy of appeasement," as it operated to allow German expansion into the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, was the final explosion of inter-war diplomatic confusion. Under Hitler, Germany achieved sufficient strength to demand serious and thoughtful consideration of her status. The West, wanting to settle the First World War once and for all, but feeling that this could not possibly involve another war, convinced itself that Hitler was justified in almost all his claims. Or, that resistance was pointless, for it could only cause further disruption of orderly diplomacy...
Russia's Ambassador to the League of Nations, Maxim Litvinov, was outspoken in his opposition to the aggressive crimes against Ethiopia, Spain, the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia. At first Litvinov, was only ignored; by 1940, Russia was officially ejected for an aggression in Finland. The meaning of appeasement, to Fleming showed a Western preference for Hitler over the Reds. Best of all would be, as then-Senator Harry Truman put it, "If we see that Germany is winning the war we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that...
Theatrical Destruction. With scholarly detachment, Taylor states the case for appeasing Hitler and for resisting him, but his sympathies obviously lie with the appeasers. Germany, he argues, had a right as a great power to reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936, even though Winston Churchill, among others, felt that Hitler could have been easily stopped and probably toppled from power. At Munich, writes Taylor, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain saved the peace and served the principle of self-determination, i.e., by handing a slice of Czechoslovakia to Germany because a lot of Germans lived there. Writes Taylor: "It was a triumph...
...Wunderkind. The son of a successful Rhineland lawyer, Abs studied law at Bonn University, but quit to learn banking. After apprenticeships in Paris, Amsterdam, London and New York, he joined a private banking house in Berlin in 1929 and quickly attracted attention by his grasp of international finance. His appointment in 1937 as head of the Deutsche Bank's foreign department established him at 36 as the Wunderkind of German banking. Though he is a devout Catholic and did not join the Nazi Party, Abs, as a top banker, was inevitably involved in the Nazis' financial wheeling...
After the war, Abs stayed in seclusion on his Rhineland estate until 1948, when he was tapped to run the agency that dispersed to German industry the credits generated by Marshall Plan aid. By insisting on first rebuilding Germany's heavy industry, Abs became, along with Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard, a major architect of the German "economic miracle." In 1953, after Adenauer asked him to settle up Allied war claims against Germany, Abs succeeded in re-establishing West Germany's international financial credit at the relatively modest cost of $3.3 billion-a feat for which the German government...