Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [144]
These policies did not curry much favor among the populations the Nazis conquered, to put it mildly. Indeed, some high-ranking German officials acknowledged that the Nazis’ hard-line anti-Slavism represented a strategic miscalculation of enormous proportions. For example, the reich minister for the east, Alfred Rosenberg—even though he was a notorious Aryan nationalist— wrote in 1942 that “[a] better gift could not come to Germany” in the war than the support of the disaffected populations of the Soviet Union. Rosenberg and others argued, almost certainly correctly, that many Soviet subjects would willingly fight “on the German side for the prize of national autonomy and independence from the Soviet Union.” The Poles in particular, with their pervasive anti-Semitism, were natural German allies. But Hitler remained committed to “extermination, not assimilation,” viewing the Poles as “an Eastern European species of cockroach” who “had no right to live,” except perhaps as slaves for their German masters.”
The genocidal brutality of the Nazi occupiers, coupled with their publicly declared goal of obtaining more “living space” for Germany, only succeeded in mobilizing the Soviet populations against the Nazis with a determination that Stalinist leaders could never have managed on their own. Even as the Soviet Union suffered more than twenty million wartime deaths, the Red Army fought on. Had Hitler pursued a shrewder strategy of tolerance and assimilation in the east, it is frightful to imagine the success the Nazi empire might have had.
Even in Western Europe, there were prospects for collaboration that the Nazis squandered through their rapacious intolerance and savagery. After the Nazis successfully bypassed the Maginot Line and defeated the French, for example, France's leaders initially proved willing enough to cooperate. In fact, the French resistance was at first very small in scale, confined mostly to left-wing intellectuals, socialists, and later, Communists. But the German policy of forced labor for French adult males and the wanton killing of civilians in towns like Oradour-sur-Glane fueled the resistance and ultimately facilitated the Allied invasion of Normandy that turned the tide of the war.
Hitler was no Cyrus the Great. He could never have prostrated himself before the conquered Babylonians in order to win their loyalty. Nazi ideology viewed conquered peoples as Untermenschen—subhumans—to be swept away to make room for their racial masters. The historian Klaus Fischer captured the essence of the Nazi dilemma, writing, “No matter how much skill and competence was brought” to Hitler's task of “the ruthless subjugation of conquered people, and the physical extermination of racially inferior breeds,” the “bestial mission was bound to arouse the world into determined opposition.”12
IMPERIAL JAPAN: CONQUEST BY THE
MOST “VIRTUOUS” OF PEOPLES
Germany was not the only Axis power with visions of global domination. On August 1, 1940, Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke publicly unveiled Japan's scheme for territorial expansion. The so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—to be conquered by the Imperial Army and united under the benevolent rule of the Japanese emperor—was to grow in four stages.
The core of the sphere was to include Korea, Manchuria, the south of China, and Taiwan—all of which would be under Japanese control within two years. Second, Japan would take over the rest of China, as well as former European colonies such as the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), French Indochina (including modern Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), Burma,