Previous occupying armies—the Swedes in seventeenth-century Germany, the Prussians in France after 1815—lived off the land and assaulted and killed local civilians on an occasional and even random basis. But the peoples who fell under German rule after 1939 were either put to the service of the Reich or else were scheduled for destruction. For Europeans this was a new experience. Overseas, in their colonies, European states had habitually indentured or enslaved indigenous populations for their own benefit. They had not been above the use of torture, mutilation or mass murder to coerce their
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