Not only did the USSR do the most to defeat the Nazis, and not only did they lose the most… Hitler’s real focus was on the USSR. The Nazis opened the western front in part for revenge for Versailles, but mainly just to knock them out so Hitler could focus on the eastern front. Hell, Hess tried to make a bargain with Britain to keep them from getting involved.
Not to mention, “conquering” France and Britain was never the goal. Had the Nazis won the war, those nations would probably have to make significant economic concessions and “bend the knee” to Germany’s dominant position on the continent; but I believe their sovereignty and their borders would largely have been intact.
Not so for the USSR. Lebensraum was all about recreating what the US did to the native population of North America: annexing their land, killing the majority and enslaving the rest or driving them out past the Urals, and German settlers moving in. The war was existential for the USSR in a way it was not for France, Britain, or certainly for the USA.
[T]he war to the West remained ‘a political struggle’ (MacKenzie, 1995: 97), while to the East it was all‐out war. From the beginning, Hitler had regarded the war to the East not as ‘a formal battle between two states, to be waged in accordance with the rules of International Law, but as a conflict between two philosophies’ (Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel’s Nuremberg testimony, quoted in MacKenzie, 1994: 505). Accordingly, [Fascist] propaganda described the conflict with the Soviet Union as one between two mutually exclusive worldviews, the Soviet one being branded ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ (Schulte, 1988: 228).
For Hitler (quoted in Streim, 1982: 27), this meant specifically that the army had to distance itself from the traditional point of view that still held fast in the West, according to which enemy soldiers were comrades‐in‐arms united by a shared set of values and a sense of professional solidarity: ‘The communist is before [the war] not a comrade‐in‐arms and after [the war] not a comrade‐in‐arms’. With nothing uniting the actors in this conflict, there was also nothing that called for restraint, as it was not the aim of the war in the East ‘to conserve the enemy’ (Hitler, quoted in Hartmann, 2009: 309, footnote omitted).
Schulte (1988: 150) in this respect writes that ‘documents from the highest level impressed on the [Axis] troops [on the Eastern front] that they were engaged in an ideologically based racial war of extermination […] that was by its very nature qualitatively different from the conventional war […] conducted in the West’. According to Hitler, the point in this war was not to win against the enemy, but to eradicate him once and for all (Streim, 1982: 27).
[The Third Reich] thus approached its relation to its Eastern and Western enemies in two fundamentally different ways: To the East, local populations as separate entities were to disappear through eradication or assimilation, with [the Third Reich] expanding into their territory, while to the West, relations between the enemies as separate entities were expected to outlast the war, hatred being understood merely as a symptom of current hostilities that should not replace mutual respect as the fundamental characteristic of relations.18
Not only did the USSR do the most to defeat the Nazis, and not only did they lose the most… Hitler’s real focus was on the USSR. The Nazis opened the western front in part for revenge for Versailles, but mainly just to knock them out so Hitler could focus on the eastern front. Hell, Hess tried to make a bargain with Britain to keep them from getting involved.
Not to mention, “conquering” France and Britain was never the goal. Had the Nazis won the war, those nations would probably have to make significant economic concessions and “bend the knee” to Germany’s dominant position on the continent; but I believe their sovereignty and their borders would largely have been intact.
Not so for the USSR. Lebensraum was all about recreating what the US did to the native population of North America: annexing their land, killing the majority and enslaving the rest or driving them out past the Urals, and German settlers moving in. The war was existential for the USSR in a way it was not for France, Britain, or certainly for the USA.
(Emphasis added. Source.)