Quote: (10-20-2014 01:27 AM)Chaos Wrote:
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Thank God for that otherwise everyone in Europe would be speaking German right now.
Kai, I get you point, but think about that sentence again.
What's wrong with that everyone could speak German?
After WW2 people in Eastern Europe people had to learn Russian.
Today most people older than 40 have some Russian skills.
Nobody know what would have happened if Germany had won the war but I can't imagine everything would be so total Germanized as people often picture.
There were a growing displeasure with Hitler and he would probably not had stayed in power forever and somebody with other views would have taken over.
As a history freak, I would be very curious to see how everything would have went down with a German victory.
Those are things we could discuss in all eternity.
Chaos, the point was that this would've meant domination by a régime that believed in a racial ideology that saw peoples from the Eastern world as racially inferior -- in a European context, Slavs were at the bottom of the totem pole. Operation
Barbarossa wasn't just about Communism; the idea of
Lebensraum was a huge motivation behind it.
That's what made the whole Eastern Front so much more savage than the North African or ETO campaigns. The Commissar Order, the treatment of POWs, the much harsher reprisals against partisans and sheltering Jews were instruments of war far more amplified than in the West.
In spite of the fact that the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS recruited from practically every occupied and Axis nation, including entire divisions of Russians, Ukrainians and Croatians, don't think that it was any indicator of racial acceptance. Their time would've been up once they'd served their purpose.
Regardless of how unsavoury the Soviet bloc was, at least their rule wasn't based on racism.
Still, it must've sucked to have been Eastern European from 1939-1990.