Word: wehrmacht
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other candidates. In the final weeks of the campaign, Austrian anger about the international storm over Waldheim's murky military past created a wave of sympathy for him that played a critical role in his victory. Waldheim had long claimed that he had been discharged from the Wehrmacht after being wounded on the Eastern Front in 1941. In March the New York City-based World Jewish Congress disclosed that Waldheim had served in the Balkans from 1942 to 1945 as a first lieutenant on the staff of General Alexander Lohr, who later was executed for war crimes. Waldheim eventually conceded...
...change is especially dramatic because conditions in West Germany were long acknowledged to be abysmal. As recently as 1981, U.S. troops were living and working in facilities that predated World War II. Some were World War I cavalry stables; nearly 3,000 soldiers lived in a former Wehrmacht military prison. Tanks, trucks and other equipment were often older than the soldiers who used them. Drug and alcohol abuse were rife, racial conflict inside units and with local citizens was frequent, and hostility from the vociferous West German peace movement was palpable. Overall, the sad condition of U.S. forces raised serious...
...this new terror weapon failed to achieve Hitler's hope of somehow reversing Germany's military fortunes. On June 23, the Soviets launched a gigantic midsummer offensive across a 300-mile front east of Minsk and demolished 28 German divisions within a month. On July 20, Hitler's own Wehrmacht officers turned against him. Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg planted under Hitler's conference table a bomb that was supposed to kill the Führer. A shaken and partly deafened Hitler survived to wreak vengeance on the conspirators (even Rommel, who was not directly involved, was forced to take poison...
...Germans. "A high-ranking German, accompanied by troops with automatic weapons, suddenly burst into the church. They looked at us, at the bloodstained pews and the German wounded, then turned around and went out without saying anything." Lantagne has befriended some of the German veterans of the campaign. "The Wehrmacht soldiers were ordinary guys," he says, "but the SS troops were something else. They gave no quarter...
...right. Too many days and lives were squandered at Arnhem in 1944, argues Ambrose, when the Allies should have been trying to seize Antwerp. That would have opened up the European port nearest Germany's heartland and, he asserts, ended the war months sooner. Even worse, as the Wehrmacht collapsed, Eisenhower turned his armies toward the Alps instead of racing the Soviets to Berlin, a blunder that left a lasting imprint on the map of Europe...