World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, The Nazis and the West
Laurence Rees
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0307389626
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this revelatory chronicle of World War II, Laurence Rees documents the dramatic and secret deals that helped make the war possible and prompted some of the most crucial decisions made during the conflict.
Drawing on material available only since the opening of archives in Eastern Europe and Russia, as well as amazing new testimony from nearly a hundred separate witnesses from the period—Rees reexamines the key choices made by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt during the war, and presents, in a compelling and fresh way, the reasons why the people of Poland, the Baltic states, and other European countries simply swapped the rule of one tyrant for another. Surprising, incisive, and endlessly intriguing, World War II Behind Closed Doors will change the way we think about the Second World War.
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Was not only Polish officers and intellectuals and their relatives who were to suffer as a result of Beria's directive. The NKVD had come for her brother in the night, six months before: ‘It was terrifying because my mother woke me up. There were strangers in the room in military uniform. Yurik [her brother] was standing there in his school overcoat and said goodbye to me. That was the last time we would see him. That was our goodbye’. Her mother desperately searched for news of her son, but all.
Goodbye to Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, he spotted Colonel Hans Krebs of the German embassy and embraced him, saying, ‘We will be your friends – whatever will come!’ Stalin was visibly under immense strain. Two days later Colonel Krebs wrote to a colleague in Berlin about the incident, remarking that ‘Stalin seemed to me, compared to the earlier encounters, aged. His hair was totally grey; the colour of his face looked very unhealthy. His left eye was, from time to time, closed. It.
Churchill had become Prime Minister, that ‘he [Roosevelt] supposed Churchill was the best man that England had, even if he was drunk half of the time’.32 From the first, the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt was a good deal less simple than the propaganda of the time portrayed. Whilst both of them were members of an elite – Roosevelt a wealthy member of one of the famed ‘Knickerbocker’ families of Dutch descent who were much to the social fore in New York, and Churchill the.
Kind of ruthlessness that was eventually to help save Moscow – a psychological toughness that was even more important than the fresh troops from the East. And as part of this approach to warfare, Stalin ordered special rearguard blocking detachments to be placed behind the Soviet front lines with orders to shoot any Red Army soldier who tried to retreat. Soviet soldiers in front of Moscow knew that they must conquer their fear or risk certain death at the hands of their own countrymen. ‘These.
First cartoon which included an attack on Churchill. The overweight generals remained from the original version, but the two brave colonels were replaced with a caricature of Churchill next to two bottles of whisky, and happy not to open a second front: ‘It was just characteristic of Churchill. Everyone knew that Churchill started every morning by drinking a big portion of whisky…. It wasn't a secret to anyone that he had a weakness for drinking. I didn't see anything humiliating about it for.