Word: seconds
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...recollections are part of our look back at one of the 20th century's watershed events -- the beginning of World War II. (A second installment next week will trace the war up to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.) Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski spoke to John Borrell about his family's flight to Lithuania three weeks after the invasion, while Otto von Habsburg, son of Austria-Hungary's last Emperor, detailed for Gertraud Lessing the incongruously lavish meal he ate at the Ritz in Paris the night the government fled the city. Franz Spelman, who visited filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler...
...second important consequence was convincing Stalin that the Western powers would never resist Hitler's increasingly aggressive expansion eastward. Stalin had several times proposed a treaty with the Western powers to check Hitler's ambitions, but he had been ignored. With the treachery characteristic of him -- he had purged dozens of his top army officers on false charges of conspiring with the Germans to overthrow him -- he began exploring the possibility of signing an alliance with those same Germans. To Hitler, who had been ranting about "the struggle against Bolshevism" for nearly 20 years, it seemed like an offer...
...restaurants, cinemas, dance halls," wrote Christopher Isherwood in The Berlin Stories, which eventually became Cabaret. "Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair-legs or leaded clubs." In September 1930 the Nazis won 6.5 million votes, and their 107 Reichstag seats made them the second strongest party...
...orderly negotiations. He had no experience in dealing with an unscrupulous improviser like Hitler, but he nonetheless invited himself to a meeting with the Fuhrer. Hitler received him in Berchtesgaden, and soon began ranting about the Czechs. He said he would not "tolerate any longer that a small, second-rate country should treat the mighty thousand-year-old German Reich as something inferior." Shocked, Chamberlain threatened to leave. Hitler, who had never ) previously asked to take over part of Czechoslovakia, now claimed that he wanted "the principle . . . of self-determination...
...front. Blessed by dry weather, the armored spearheads advanced as much as 30 miles a day. As early as Sept. 5, Germany's Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in his journal: "As of today, the enemy is practically beaten." The next day, the Wehrmacht captured Cracow, Poland's second city. Two days later, the first tanks of the 4th Panzer Division reached the suburbs of Warsaw, where they encountered sniper fire from apartment windows and found major streets blocked by overturned buses. While the tanks paused for reinforcements, the Luftwaffe kept up its bombing of the battered capital...