*** Welcome to piglix ***

Consequences of German Nazism


Nazism and the acts of the Nazi German state profoundly affected many countries, communities and people before, during and after World War II. While the attempt of the regime to exterminate several nations viewed as subhuman by Nazi ideology was eventually stopped by the Allies, Nazi aggression nevertheless led to the deaths of millions of Jews and the ruin of several states.

Of the world's 15 million Jews in 1939, more than a third were killed in the Holocaust. Of the three million Jews in Poland, the heartland of European Jewish culture, fewer than 350,000 survived. Most of the remaining Jews in Eastern and Central Europe were destitute refugees who were unable or unwilling to return to countries that became Soviet puppet states, or countries they felt had betrayed them to the Nazis.

The Nazis intended to destroy the Polish nation completely. In 1941, the Nazi leadership decided that Poland was to be fully cleared of ethnic Poles within 10 to 20 years and settled by German colonists. From the beginning of the occupation, Germany's policy was to plunder and exploit Polish territory, turning it into a giant concentration camp for Poles who were to be eventually exterminated as "Untermenschen". The policy of plunder and exploitation inflicted material losses to Polish industry, agriculture, infrastructure and cultural landmarks, with the cost of the destruction by Germans alone estimated at approximately €525 billion or $640 billion. The remaining industry was largely destroyed or transported to Russia by Soviet occupation forces following the war.

The official Polish government report of war losses prepared in 1947 reported 6,028,000 war victims out of a population of 27,007,000 ethnic Poles and Jews alone. For political reasons the report excluded the losses to the Soviet Union and the losses among Polish citizens of Ukrainian and Belarusian origin.


...
Wikipedia

...