Word: wehrmacht
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Trade Unionist Theodor Blank, 49, since 1950 head of a shadow defense ministry called "Bureau Blank," which is set up in a dingy brick building in a Bonn back street. In 1933, Union Organizer Blank chose unemployment rather than the Nazi Arbeitsfront. When war came he joined the Wehrmacht as a private, finished up as a first lieutenant in an American P.W. camp. Blank makes frequent speeches about how the new army will be de-Prussianized; the real soldiers who will command the troops are currently being kept out of the headlines...
...real acid test came months later, when Germany sent the whole weight of the powerful, cocky, victorious Wehrmacht charging into Russia. Zhukov fought a battle at Yelnia, near Smolensk, which drove the invaders back 20 miles. It was one of the few successful delaying actions. Stalin's first act of war was to reinstate the army commissars, but commissars were unable to prevent hundreds of Red army commanders, thinking they preferred Nazi to Communist tyranny, from surrendering their arms and their men. Quite a few commissars went over, too. Others, like Old Irregular Budenny, defeated in the Ukraine, beat...
...Every man or woman who could walk was either in the army or in a war factory. Factories in the Urals were pouring out tanks and guns. Vital supplies of ammunition, aircraft, gasoline and trucks were arriving from the Allies. Zhukov began to knock the stuffing out of the Wehrmacht...
...What discipline!" says Charles-Hubert (papa) when he sees a Wehrmacht brass band. "After all, they're human beings too," says Julie (mama). Julie, who met Charles-Hubert at a bargain counter where "their hands clasped over a pair of socks at a reduced price," is a kind of Clausewitz of the cash register. Her axiom: wars are long and rations get short. The Poissonards stock the Bon Beurre fore and aft. Tins of ham as big as ox livers prop up the conjugal bed. Sausages hang thick as stalactites from the ceiling. On the floors stand wheels...
Zhukov was the man in charge of Moscow's defense. He administered the first major defeat the Wehrmacht suffered. Assigned to Stalingrad, he transformed a threatened Russian disaster into a German catastrophe. Then it was Leningrad's turn, and again Zhukov-ruthless and. imperturbable, yet strangely capable of inspiring his peasant soldiers-broke a German siege. From defense he turned to offense, flaming westward across the Ukraine in 1943, into Poland...