The Nazi Occupation of the Soviet Union 1941–4: exploitation and propaganda

Nowhere was the wartime German Occupation of Europe more brutal and destructive than in the Soviet Union. Under Nazi plans, the country's ‘Jew-Bolshevik’ intelligentsia was to be annihilated, its economic resources plundered, and its ‘racially inferior’ Slavic peoples reduced to a level befitting their envisaged future status as slaves to German overlords. Such radical aims, the Nazi leadership believed, necessitated the most oppressive means in order to force them through.