Word: wehrmacht
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...exhausted and overextended. Yes, Joseph Stalin "conquered" Eastern Europe -- Exhibit A in the charge of Soviet expansionism -- but he did so in the final battles of World War II, not as a prelude to World War III. The Red Army had filled the vacuum left by the collapsing Wehrmacht. By the early 1950s, any Kremlin warmonger would have to contend with a Western Europe that was already firmly back on its feet and therefore no pushover, and also with an American doctrine warning that Soviet aggression would trigger nuclear retaliation against the U.S.S.R...
...Hitler ordered the start of an all-out drive on Moscow, which the Wehrmacht now surrounded on three sides, only 20 to 30 miles outside the city. One infantry unit got as far as the suburb of Khimki, from which the Germans could actually see the towers of the Kremlin, but that was as far as they could go before Soviet tanks drove them out again. And all along the front, the Soviet defenders held fast. Then, on Dec. 6, the Soviets somehow produced 100 new divisions and launched a counteroffensive that sent the Germans reeling back 50 miles...
...threat to his access to Rumania's rich oil fields, but for the time being he was too preoccupied to counterattack. And then Hitler finally became a victim of his own successes. He could not believe that backward Russia, which had had trouble subduing Finland, could resist the invincible Wehrmacht...
...even then, when the Soviets stopped the Wehrmacht just outside Moscow, Hitler still controlled vast territories in the western U.S.S.R. What if he had negotiated a settlement that let him keep his gains? He had predicted such a possibility in the fall: "The recognition that neither force is capable of annihilating the other will lead to a compromise peace." Stalin actually began sending out peace feelers as early as October 1941, and, according to Liddell Hart, Foreign Ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop finally met secretly in 1943 to seek a settlement. But the Germans wanted a new boundary on the Dnieper...
...satellites have lasted as long as the one created by Stalin after the war? It was partly wartime hysteria that led to the savagery of Nazi rule in the occupied lands, not only against the Jews but also against the Slavs, some of whom had originally welcomed the Wehrmacht for liberating them from Stalin. Once some kind of peace was re-established, in other words, could the Nazis have moderated their rule enough to make it tolerable, or did Hitler's psychotic drives constantly impel him toward new battles, toward the Holocaust, toward his death in the ruins...