nazi rule in eastern and western europe
Answers
Explanation:
general, German rule in Eastern Europe was much harsher than in Western Europe. Hitler had long wanted to expand east into what he called Lebensraum, as Germany’s Aryanpopulation grew. This expansion would be at the expense of the inferior Poles and Slavs of the East. Therefore, the German conquest of Eastern Europe was undertaken to expand Germany itself and in order to destroy the Nazis’ racial enemies.
In contrast, the conquest of Western Europe, as well as that of Denmark and Norway to the North, was completed for strategic reasons: to gain vital war resources and to pre-empt a French invasion of Germany. Western Europeans were not viewed as racially inferior and there was no long term plan to absorb these territories into Germany, but rather to keep them weak and dependent on an enlarged Germany.
As such, German rule in Western Europe largely focussed on keeping order and on the deportation of European Jews as part of the Final Solution. Southern France was even allowed to govern itself from the town of Vichy under Marshal Petain until 1944, when Italy invaded. However, the government in southern France were no more than Nazi puppets that would do as Hitler wanted. In Paris, artists and intellectuals like Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre were able to go on working virtually unaffected by the Nazi occupation.
However, in Eastern Europe Nazi rule was brutal. In Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States the local populations were forcibly resettled to make way for Germans, used as forced labour or killed. In 1940, Hitler ordered that the Polish intelligentsia – politicians, academics, priests – be wiped out, in order to prevent a resistance movement developing. Poles were forced to survive on starvation rations as Poland’s food was confiscated for German soldiers and civilians. Around 6 million Poles, or 18 per cent of the country’s population, were killed during the war. The Poles were considered below the Aryan