Their levels of intelligence, political acumen and personal corruption varied from person to person, but one and all had no scruples about the use of force in pursuit of perceived German interests. Hitler himself imagined that the British ruled their empire by force alone, admired them for it, and believed that he was imitating their example.
In the process of Germanisation, Polish frontiers were redrawn and shrunk and, in a period of a mere three years, hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews were deported and replaced by hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans mostly from further east. But new German settlements in what had been Poland in fact proved centres of discontent and failure.
There were simply not enough Germans to satisfy Greater Reich demands, and their ethnic identity was often as doubtful as their loyalty. Incorporation of territory inevitably but paradoxically brought large numbers of Poles and Jews into the Greater Reich, adulterating the dream of the ethnically pure state. Then as the war progressed and labour became more and more essential, millions of non-Germans had to be conscripted into the Reich — the very opposite of Hitler’s intentions.
The supposed mortal enemy, Judeo-Bolshevism, was the deepest and darkest element of Hitler’s mythomania. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 began what could only be a struggle to the death. The Wehrmacht, Special Commandos and the SS were equally ruthless. The Germans thus alienated whole populations who might have welcomed them as liberators from Communism. For the Russian campaign’s initial stages, for instance, Mazower gives the figures of 3.9 million Soviet prisoners, of whom only 1.1 million were still alive by February 1942 and fewer than half of them capable of work.
