In effect, Poland was to serve the same function for Germany as Australia had for Britain, or the American West for the USA: it was to be a colony of settlement, in which the supposedly racially inferior indigenous inhabitants would be removed by one means or another to make room for the invading master race. The idea of changing the ethnic map of Europe by forcibly shifting ethnic groups from one area to another was not new either: a precedent had already been established immediately after the First World War with a large-scale exchange of minority populations between Turkey and Greece.
