Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The German minority population in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union stemmed from several sources and arrived in several waves. Since the second half of the 19th century, as a consequence of the Russification policies and compulsory military service in the Russian Empire, large groups of Germans from Russia emigrated to the Americas (mainly Canada, the United States, Brazil and Argentina ...
Hitler had argued in his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925) for the necessity of Lebensraum ("living space"): acquiring new territory for Germans in Eastern Europe, in particular Russia. [17] He envisaged settling Germans there, as according to Nazi ideology the Germanic people constituted the "master race", while exterminating or deporting most ...
By late 1996, the German Red Cross had received from Russia 199,000 records of deported German civilians who had either been repatriated or died in Soviet captivity. For example, the records of Pauline Gölner reveal that she was born in 1926 in Wolkendorf in Transylvania , was arrested on January 15, 1945, and sent to forced labor in the coal ...
German prisoners-of-war on display during the Parade of the Vanquished in Moscow, July 1944. German officer POWs eating lunch in Krasnogorsk Special Camp No. 27, 1944. The West German government set up a Commission headed by Erich Maschke to investigate the fate of German POWs in the war.
Auschwitz was established in 1940 and located in the suburbs of Oswiecim, a Polish city the Germans annexed. Between 1940 and 1945, it grew to include three main camp centers and a slew of ...
The racial policy of Nazi Germany portrayed the Soviet Union (and all of Eastern Europe) as populated by non-Aryan Untermenschen ('sub-humans'), ruled by Jewish Bolshevik conspirators. [42] Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Germany's destiny was to follow the Drang nach Osten ('turn to the East') as it did "600 years ago" (see Ostsiedlung). [43]
The Germans hoped to weaken the Soviet offensive potential for the summer of 1943, by cutting off and enveloping the forces that they anticipated would be in the Kursk salient. [53] Hitler believed that a victory here would reassert German strength and improve his prestige with his allies, who he thought were considering withdrawing from the ...
German advances through 5 December 1941, with large groups of encircled Red Army soldiers in red. Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. [4] [5] The Nazi leadership believed that war with its ideological enemy was inevitable [6] due to the Nazi dogma that conquering territory to the east—called living space ()—was essential to Germany's long-term survival, [7 ...