Word: wehrmacht
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...resigned and gone into exile after Munich). Hacha was 66 and suffering from heart trouble, so it did not help to have the meeting begin at 1:15 a.m. on March 15, 1939. Hitler told his guest that the Czechs were still guilty of "Bene tendencies," and therefore the Wehrmacht would invade Czechoslovakia at 6 that morning. The only question was whether the Czechs would resist and be "ruthlessly broken" or cooperate and gain a certain "autonomy." Hacha and his Foreign Minister "sat as though turned to stone," said a German witness. "Only their eyes showed that they were alive...
Treachery, lies and murder -- those were the hallmarks of Adolf Hitler's launching of World War II. The German Wehrmacht had its orders to invade Poland at dawn of Sept. 1, 1939, but the first killings actually occurred the night before near a border town called Gleiwitz. There German SS troops took twelve prisoners from the Oranienburg concentration camp outside Berlin, ordered them to dress in Polish army uniforms, then injected them with poison and shot them. The twelve "Polish casualties" were dumped in a forest near the village of Hochlinde to be exhibited later to the foreign press...
...grotesque misstatement of the ugly reality. Five months earlier, the secret plan known as Operation White had declared, "The task of the Wehrmacht is to destroy the Polish armed forces. To this end, a surprise attack is to be aimed at and prepared . . . any time from Sept. 1, 1939, onward." If anything more was needed, it was the neutralization of Poland's other big neighbor, Soviet Russia, and Hitler had achieved that just the previous week by suddenly concluding a treaty of cooperation with his supposed archenemy Joseph Stalin. And so, at the appointed hour of 4:45 a.m. (Poland...
...swept forward all along the front. Blessed by dry weather, the armored spearheads advanced as much as 30 miles a day. As early as Sept. 5, Germany's Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in his journal: "As of today, the enemy is practically beaten." The next day, the Wehrmacht captured Cracow, Poland's second city. Two days later, the first tanks of the 4th Panzer Division reached the suburbs of Warsaw, where they encountered sniper fire from apartment windows and found major streets blocked by overturned buses. While the tanks paused for reinforcements, the Luftwaffe kept up its bombing...
Despite the influence of Hitler's propaganda on German public opinion, there was no enthusiasm for war. Thus the mobilization of the Wehrmacht was conducted as quietly as possible. About Aug. 25, after being hospitalized with appendicitis, I received orders to rejoin my unit at Potsdam immediately. I was told not to talk about...