Partners in crime: Despite Russia's protests, Stalin was no less villainous than Hitler

The Soviet Union was invaded by a hostile power that planned to seize its land and starve its citizens to death.

There can be no doubt, however, that in its execution, if not in its rationale, Barbarossa did mark a fundamental departure. On 22 June 1941 the Third Reich launched not only the most massive campaign in military history, it also unleashed an equally unprecedented campaign of genocidal violence. The concentrated focus on the destruction of the Jewish population has come to be seen as the truly defining aspect of this campaign. However, in Eastern Europe, the epicentre of the Holocaust, the Judaeocide was not an isolated act of murder. The German invasion of the Soviet Union is far better understood as the last great land-grab in the long and bloody history of European colonialism. Destroying the Jewish population was the first step towards rooting out the Bolshevik state. What was to follow was a gigantic campaign of land clearance and colonization, which also involved the ‘clearance’ of the vast majority of the Slav population and the settlement of millions of hectares of eastern Lebensraum with German colonists. Complementing this long-term programme of demographic engineering was a short-term strategy of exploitation, motivated by the ‘practical’ need to secure the food balance of the German Grossraum. The attainment of this entirely ‘pragmatic’ objective required nothing less than the murder, by organized famine, of the entire urban population of the western Soviet Union. As Hans Frank and Herbert Backe had already demonstrated in the General Government in the spring of 1940, Hitler and his regime were determined that in this world war, it would not be the Germans who were starved into defeat.

Tooze, Adam (2008-02-26). The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Kindle Locations 8426-8433). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It was a total war, and the Reich absolutely started it.

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