The Eastern War Was Many Different Types of War

Perhaps most important is the intersection of impulses—military, ideological, economic, racial, and demographic—that account for the violent, destructive nature of the eastern war. It was a war for hegemony, of conquest of Lebensraum, an ideological war against Jewish-Bolshevism, a war for food and raw materials, a racial-demographic war to reshape the borderlands of East-Central Europe, perhaps even a sort of colonial war in its ultimate goal of creating a vast “Greater Germany.”

--Stephen G. Fritz, preface to Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), xxii.