Word: secretes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first week in January, everything suddenly changed. Papen, bent on revenge for having been replaced as Chancellor by General Kurt von Schleicher, decided to make a deal with Hitler. At a secret meeting, several prominent financiers promised credit to the financially pressed Nazis. Once again, Hindenburg proposed a Papen-Hitler coalition, only with Hitler as Chancellor. & This time Hitler agreed. And so, on Jan. 30, 1933, this half-educated ex- Austrian with a genius for manipulation and deceit became, quite legally, the leader of Germany...
...secret, Hitler had already told his generals that he wanted to triple the German army from the Versailles ceiling of 100,000 men to 300,000 by October 1934. The navy, which was not supposed to have any ships of more than 10,000 tons, got orders to start building two 26,000-ton battle cruisers. In the spring of 1935, Hitler announced that he was reintroducing universal military service to create an army of 500,000 men. The Allies protested but did nothing...
...Minister Kurt von Schuschnigg rallied the police and had the assassins arrested. Italy, which had guaranteed Austrian independence, mobilized four divisions on the frontier. Hitler backed down. By 1938, however, he had built a threatening army and had won the support of Italy's Mussolini (they had signed a secret protocol in 1936 creating what Mussolini called the Rome-Berlin axis). It was time to try again...
...grotesque misstatement of the ugly reality. Five months earlier, the secret plan known as Operation White had declared, "The task of the Wehrmacht is to destroy the Polish armed forces. To this end, a surprise attack is to be aimed at and prepared . . . any time from Sept. 1, 1939, onward." If anything more was needed, it was the neutralization of Poland's other big neighbor, Soviet Russia, and Hitler had achieved that just the previous week by suddenly concluding a treaty of cooperation with his supposed archenemy Joseph Stalin. And so, at the appointed hour of 4:45 a.m. (Poland...
...Sept. 17 came the final step in the disaster: the Soviet army invaded eastern Poland and proceeded to grab whatever had not yet been grabbed by the Germans. Actually, this had all been preordained in several secret protocols of the previous month's Nazi-Soviet treaty. Only the date of the Soviet invasion had been left uncertain. Stalin had a little difficulty in thinking up an excuse to attack, but he finally declared that he was acting "to restore peace and order in Poland, which has been destroyed by the disintegration of the Polish State...