After the German victories in Europe, Nazi propagandists
created glowing images of a new European order based on
the equality of all nations in an integrated economic
community. The reality was rather different. Hitler saw
the Europe he had conquered simply as subject to German
domination. Only the Germans, he once said, “can
really organize Europe.”
The Nazi empire, which at its greatest extent stretched
across continental Europe from the English Channel in
the west to the outskirts of Moscow in the east, was organized
in two different ways. Some areas, such as western
Poland, were annexed and transformed into German
provinces. Most of occupied Europe, however, was administered
indirectly by German officials with the assistance
of collaborationist regimes.
Racial considerations played an important role in how
conquered peoples were treated. German civil administrations
were established in Norway, Denmark, and the
Netherlands because the Nazis considered their peoples
to be Aryan, or racially akin to the Germans, and hence
worthy of more lenient treatment. Latin peoples, such as
the occupied French, were given military administrations.
All the occupied territories were ruthlessly exploited
for material goods and manpower for Germany’s
labor needs.
Because the conquered lands in the east contained the
living space for German expansion and were populated in
Nazi eyes by racially inferior Slavic peoples, Nazi administration
there was considerably more ruthless. Heinrich
Himmler, the leader of the SS, was put in charge of German
resettlement plans in the region. His task was to replace
the indigenous population with Germans, a policy
first applied to the new German provinces created in
western Poland. One million Poles were uprooted and
dumped in southern Poland. Hundreds of thousands of
ethnic Germans (descendants of Germans who had migrated
years earlier from Germany to different parts of
southern and eastern Europe) were encouraged to colonize
designated areas in Poland. By 1942, two million
ethnic Germans had been settled in Poland.
The invasion of the Soviet Union inflated Nazi visions
of German colonization in the east. Hitler spoke to his intimate
circle of a colossal project of social engineering after
the war, in which Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians
would become slave labor while German peasants settled
on the abandoned lands and Germanized them. Nazis involved
in this kind of planning were well aware of the human
costs. Himmler told a gathering of SS officers that
the destruction of thirty million Slavs was a prerequisite
for German plans in the east. “Whether nations live in
prosperity or starve to death interests me only insofar as
we need them as slaves for our culture. Otherwise it is of
no interest.” 3
Labor shortages in Germany led to a policy of ruthless
mobilization of foreign labor. After the invasion of the
Soviet Union, the four million Russian prisoners of war
captured by the Germans, along with more than two million
workers conscripted in France, became a major
source of heavy labor. In 1942, a special office was created
to recruit labor for German farms and industries. By the
summer of 1944, seven million foreign workers were laboring
in Germany, constituting 20 percent of Germany’s
labor force. At the same time, another seven million
workers were supplying forced labor in their own countries
on farms, in industries, and even in military camps.
The brutal character of Germany’s recruitment policies
often led more and more people to resist the Nazi occupation
forces.
World History
