Word: silesia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...puts the problem in even starker terms. "All of Germany's neighbors have got to be against reunification," he says. "Once East and West Germany have been unified, what is to stop the Germans from wanting to get back all their old lands in the east, from Pomerania to Silesia and Sudetenland...
...Alsace and Lorraine, as well as a trusteeship over the rich coal mines of the Saar. The Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires would be chopped up into a goulash of new nations like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. A newly independent Poland acquired parts of the German industrial area of Upper Silesia, Posen and West Prussia, providing it with a corridor to the Baltic Sea. Germany alone would be disarmed, forbidden to maintain more than 100,000 troops or have any major warships, submarines, warplanes or tanks. Germany would have to admit formally to being guilty of aggression...
Without the slightest warning, Germany's General Walther von Brauchitsch sent the Fourth Army smashing through the disputed Polish Corridor, isolating the Free City of Danzig; the Eighth and Tenth Armies striking over the Vistula plain toward Warsaw; the Fourteenth Army driving across Silesia toward Cracow -- 1.5 million men in all, led by a fearsome new military force, the 2,700 fast-moving panzers (tanks) of the German armored divisions...
...during a round of nationwide walkouts by 20,000 workers, Walesa led a shutdown at the Lenin shipyard. After a nine-day sit-in, the workers accepted a demoralizing surrender. This time, though, the core of worker protest lay with the nation's 450,000 coal miners in Silesia. They are the prime motor of Poland's tottering economy, firing its aging industrial plant and providing $1 billion in precious hard-currency exports...
...movement spread unevenly across the country, sometimes meeting resistance or apathy among older workers. Although defiant young miners overturned cars in Silesia and strikers in Gdansk chanted, "Come to us, come to us," a traditional labor call for support, the fervor that swept the nation in 1980 was missing. Said a young doctor in Gdansk: "People don't believe these strikes can change much -- in fact, they think they will mainly help make things worse. There will be no coal for winter, no this, no that...