Word: redoubtable
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Blue Hills of Austria. Everything-backward environment, shabby heredity, dingy ambitions, neurotic sensitivity- prepared Hitler for his future role. But the beginnings of the future scourge of mankind were bucolic, even idyllic. Hitler was born (1889) at Braunau in Austria-Hungary, among the blue foothills of the Tirolean redoubt...
...Germans admitted that such a linking of the Allies could take place any day; they prepared for it by setting up two autonomous defense zones in the two-fifths of Germany they have left. For the southern zone, including the Nazi "redoubt," or Alpine bastion, command was vested in a triumvirate: Field Marshal Albert Kesselring; Gestapo boss Heinrich Himmler; Nazi party boss Martin Bormann. Adolf Hitler was not mentioned. Military operations in the northern zone were handed to Field Marshal Ernst Busch, but he will be kept in line by a trusted Nazi, Helmuth Friedrichs, holding direct command...
...columns stood only 30 miles from Brünn, one of the shrinking Reich's last armaments centers. Other columns had turned westward along the Danube and toward Linz. There the Russians would be in position to seal off the eastern side of the Nazis' Alpine redoubt...
Meanwhile the Nazis began to hole up in their southern redoubt in real earnest. The area around Berchtesgaden, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Starnberg and Miesbach was guarded by a double cordon of Himmler's blackshirts, and no one could pass without proper credentials. If, as seemed likely, the Russians and the western Allies should soon meet south of Berlin, the bastion would be cut off from northern Germany. Then the Allies would see how seriously the Nazis intended to fight in it, and how well they were able...
...Germans themselves fought desperately enough. Vienna was the gateway to the Austrian and Bavarian Alps. It would have to hold if the Nazi hope of retreat to an Alpine redoubt was to be something more than the last act of a suicide. The Germans had labored mightily to build Vienna's defenses. In the orchard country to the south, cherry and apricot trees spread their blossoms over zigzagged trench works. On the heights at the north of the city the Germans had massed their guns to fire over the parks and palaces into the industrial suburbs...