German invasion of the Soviet Union in the context of "Germanisation"

The Allies, formally referred to as the United Nations from 1942, were an international military coalition formed during World War II (1939–1945) to oppose the Axis powers. Its principal members were the "Big Four" – the United Kingdom, Soviet Union, United States, and China.

Membership in the Allies varied during the course of the war. When the conflict broke out on 1 September 1939, the Allied coalition consisted of the United Kingdom, France, and Poland, as well as their respective dependencies, such as British India. They were joined by the independent dominions of the British Commonwealth: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Consequently, the initial alliance resembled that of the First World War. As Axis forces began invading northern Europe and the Balkans, the Allies added the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Greece, and Yugoslavia. The Soviet Union, which initially had a nonaggression pact with Germany and participated in its invasion of Poland, joined the Allies after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The United States, while providing some material support to European Allies since September 1940, remained formally neutral until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, after which it declared war and officially joined the Allies. China had already been at war with Japan since 1937, and formally joined the Allies in December 1941.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Baltic states were under military occupation by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944. Initially, many Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians considered the Germans liberators from the Soviet Union. The Balts hoped for the restoration of independence, but instead, the Germans established a provisional government. During the occupation, the Germans carried out discrimination, mass deportations, and mass killings, generating Baltic resistance movements.

A crime of aggression or crime against peace is the planning, initiation, or execution of a large-scale and serious act of aggression using state military force. The definition and scope of the crime is controversial. The Rome Statute contains an exhaustive list of acts of aggression that can give rise to individual criminal responsibility, which include invasion, military occupation, annexation by the use of force, bombardment, and military blockade of ports. In general, committing an act of aggression is a leadership crime that can only be committed by those with the power to shape a state's policy of aggression, as opposed to those who discharge it.

The philosophical basis for the wrongness of aggression is found in just war theory, in which waging a war without a just cause for self-defense is unjust. In the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, Soviet jurist Aron Trainin made the first successful proposal to criminalize aggression. The Charter of the International Military Tribunal provided criminal liability for waging aggressive war, which was the main focus of the Nuremberg trial. Other participants in World War II were tried for aggression in Finland, Poland, China, the subsequent Nuremberg trials, and the Tokyo trial. No one has been prosecuted for aggression either before or since the 1940s.

Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an antisemitic and anti-communist conspiracy theory that claims that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a Jewish plot and that Jews controlled the Soviet Union and international communist movements, often in furtherance of a plan to destroy Western civilization. It was one of the main Nazi beliefs that served as an ideological justification for the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.

After the Russian Revolution, the antisemitic canard was the title of the pamphlet The Jewish Bolshevism, which featured in the racist propaganda of the anti-communist White movement forces during the Russian Civil War (1918–1922). During the 1930s, the Nazi Party in Germany and the German American Bund in the United States propagated the antisemitic theory to their followers, sympathisers, and fellow travellers. Nazi Germany used the trope to implement anti-Slavic policies and initiate racial war against the Soviet Union, portraying Slavs as inferior humans controlled by Jews to destroy Aryan people.

The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO; German: Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete), commonly known as the Ostministerium, (pronounced [ˈɔstminɪsˌteːʁiʊm] ; "Eastern Ministry") was a ministry of Nazi Germany responsible for occupied territories in the Baltic states and Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945. Alfred Rosenbergserved as Reichsminister with Alfred Meyer as his deputy during its existence.

The Ostministerium was created by Adolf Hitler shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union to control the vast areas captured and projected for capture by the Wehrmacht in the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Two Reichskommissariats were established: Ostland and Ukraine, while two more were planned, Moskowien and Kaukasien, but the Wehrmacht never established firm possession of the areas designated and German civilian control never developed there. The Ostministerium was involved in the development and implementation of Generalplan Ost, which fell under its jurisdiction, along with the Reich Commission for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, the Reich Security Main Office, and the SS Race and Settlement Main Office. It was one of the main agencies that oversaw the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.