Word: prussia
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Over the Forts. As Warsaw was merely an incident of the great central drive, so Mlawa was an incident to the sickle thrust into East Prussia from the south, by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky. Mlawa was a key point in what the Germans had called their Mitteleuropa wall, a 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...
...east of Rokossovsky's sickle. Through the snows that covered the wooded Junker estates the Russians met furious resistance, ground it down by sheer weight. In Gumbinnen, every house had to be taken. There was a reason: seven of every ten German defenders were men born in East Prussia. There most of them died...
There were more concrete promises implied in dispatches from the east. During the week Moscow reported stiff patrol clashes in southern Poland, sharp local skirmishes along the Narew river south of East Prussia's border. At week's end the Germans reported a Russian attack of great strength (Berlin said 27 divisions) at the northern end of the quiet front-against the 100-mile-wide, 60-mile-deep pocket in Latvia. Clearing of this flank might be a preliminary to action in East Prussia and north Poland...
...Minister Winston Churchill had a Christmas present for the Poles-partition. To a House of Commons still seething with the Greek crisis, he announced that, with Britain's consent, Russia would extend her western frontier to the Curzon line. Poland would be compensated by about half of East Prussia, including Danzig, so that she would have a Baltic coast of some 200 miles (see map). She would also receive unspecified parts of eastern Germany to which Poland had historical claims. Presumably this meant parts of Silesia...
...representative of the, Lublin Committee, writing in Pravda, claimed frontiers up to the Oder River for the new Poland.) Churchill did not say who was to get the bigger part of East Prussia, including the port and fortress of Königsberg, to which the Russians have staked claims...