Word: volkssturm
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week the citizens were part of the Army. The Volkssturm men who felled trees, dug trenches and fashioned barricades from bomb rubble were simply civilians with red arm bands. Women rode on the antiaircraft guns pulling out for the Oder front. The "mayor," this time, was clubfooted Paul Joseph Goebbels (Gauleiter of Berlin), who screamed defiance over the radio: "Factories will be blown up and the whole capital scorched...
Press wires to and from neutral capitals thrummed with high-tension drama: rumors, sensations, travelers' tales. Police had fired on food rioters, it was said, and on demonstrators protesting the Volkssturm levies; the 55 and the Volkssturm had clashed; the Volkssturm had shot at refugee columns, mistaking them in the dark of night for Bolshevik invaders. Those long range airplanes which were to carry Nazi bigwigs to Japan had their engines turning over again. Goebbels, however, was carrying a vial of poison for use in case Berlin should be suddenly surrounded by Red paratroops. Officials at Tempelhof airdrome hysterically...
...German people heard that industrial Silesia was lost; that the "Bolsheviks" had pierced Brandenburg, Berlin's home province; that the enemy had cut off East Prussia (see below). The lowly Volkssturm was called out to help stem the tide. The westward flood of refugees hampered the movement of army units to the front, forcing Heinrich Himmler to use his SS men as traffic controllers...
...depth of forts and trench works. It had zigzagged dugouts, trenches, minefields, concrete fire points. Rokossovsky's forces worked for two days on Mlawa, then painfully hacked through. Perhaps Mlawa was a symbol. For all its outer strength, it leaned on slender reeds of reserves - units of the Volkssturm, inhabitants of the town...
...Volksgrenadiere, as distinct from the Volkssturm, are mainly composed of experienced soldiers who would ordinarily be retired for age, disabilities or wounds. Some healthy, hard-fighting sailors and airmen have been impressed into the Volksgrenadiere, while others have been used to replenish regular Wehrmacht divisions...