Word: ruhr
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...1860s August Thyssen (pronounced tissen) started his steel business in a cow house outside Mulheim, in the Ruhr Valley, making hoop-iron at first. In 50 years he came to own coal fields in the Ruhr and iron-ore concessions in Lorraine and Northern France, and to employ 25,000 workers. When he died in 1926 at 84 he left an estate worth more than...
...Fritz, the second son, buckled down, learned the steel business, eventually became sole manager of his father's empire. During World War I the Thyssen works boomed, Thyssen the Younger turned tough as his dad when the French occupied the Ruhr in 1921 and began issuing demands to German industrialists. Fritz Thyssen refused to obey, was hauled before a French court-martial, was tried and imprisoned for a short time. Thereafter he was a strident nationalist, consistently anti-French. Instead of accepting with resignation the Weimar Republic, which accepted the Versailles Treaty, he put his money for a time...
Then the rosy picture began to fade. The State began to interfere more & more with Big Business, to bear down on profits and increase taxes. Two years ago the Ruhr industrialist complained of being followed, of having his telephone tapped and his mail opened by the Gestapo. A long trip to South America followed, after which matters were patched up for a time. But no one could have been more dismayed or surprised by the Nazi-Communist Pact than Fritz Thyssen, die-hard hater of Socialism. Last summer Herr Thyssen warned the Nazis against going to war. A few weeks...
...German censors, the neutral correspondents also gave the impression that "this is a strange war." They heard little firing, saw few effects of it. They saw only one airplane encounter. They visited evacuated Saarbrücken, reported freight trains still hauling away coal, steel and manufacturing equipment (to the Ruhr) in full view of the French. On the Rhine they stood with German officers in full view of poilus on the other side fishing, sawing wood, washing clothes. They heard stories and saw signs of badinage between the lines. Net effect of what they wrote was to underscore Senator Borah...
...didn't the Allies at once bomb the Ruhr and the Rhineland? Wouldn't that have brought a sizable part of the German Air Force racing back out of Poland? Perhaps, but it would also have brought reprisal bombing of Allied industries. The German anti-aircraft defense had not been tested, and neither had the Allied. The possible price in their own civilians' lives gave the Allies pause. So did their fear that not yet were they Germany's match...