ABSTRACT
The 1941 attack by the Third Reich on the German ally of the Soviet Union accelerated the processes of ethnic cleansing and genocide. They were carried out in the midst of the total war waged by these two totalitarian powers, each aiming at the total destruction and subjugation of the other. With no pretenses to uphold, no outside checks on any policies or projects, German and Soviet plans of demographic engineering were implemented in full, and accelerated to full throttle in the context of the perceived needs of the war effort. In 1941 more than ten million inhabitants of the Soviet western borderlands (incorporated just in 1939–1940) were evacuated eastward before the rapidly advancing German armies. This evacuation was similar in scale and in its forced character to the 1915 evacuation in the western provinces of the Russian Empire that had been overrun by the German and Austro-Hungarian armies.
