Germania-Figuren 72-WW2-510 German civilians Porters with sacks of coal Carrier with charcoal baskets

During World War II, the attitude of the Axis countries, especially Germany, to the civilian population living in the conquered areas of Europe was very different. It can be assumed that the farther west, this policy was less genocidal and less brutal. An example is France, which in 1940 was divided into two parts - occupied by German and Italian troops and the so-called The Vichy state, which retained the appearance of independence and which, moreover, closely collaborated with the Third Reich. In occupied France, the Germans commandeered to power, tried to use the industrial base there in their own war effort, forced the supply of contingents of forced laborers and ruthlessly cracked down on the resistance movement, but they did not pursue the murder and annihilation of the French nation. Other examples include the creation of governments to a greater or lesser extent cooperating with Germany in the Netherlands or Norway. On the other hand, the farther east we went, the more German policy turned out to be more genocidal. An example is the German policy in Poland, where the invader sought to Germanise part of the population, and treated the General Government as a reservoir of free labor. With the introduction of the so-called Generalplan Ost from 1941, the Third Reich assumed that a large part of Polish society would either be murdered or forcibly resettled. The Third Reich carried out a similar genocidal policy in the western territories of the USSR, occupied from 1941. The macabre, common denominator of the German occupation policy in Western and Eastern Europe was the desire to murder the Jewish population living in these areas. The crime went down in history as the Holocaust or Shoah (Hebrew, the Holocaust). Safe and probably underestimated estimates show that during the entire Second World War, about 23.7 million civilians died or were murdered….