" The Second World War was never merely a conflict over territory. It was also a war of race and ethnicity. Some of the defining events of the war had nothing to do with winning and maintaining physical ground, but with imposing one’s own ethnic stamp on ground already held. The Jewish Holocaust, the ethnic cleansing of western Ukraine, the attempted genocide of Croatian Serbs: these were events that were pursued with a vigour every bit as ardent as the military war. A vast number of people – perhaps 10 million or more – were deliberately exterminated for no other reason than that they happened to belong to the wrong ethnic or racial group. "

― Keith Lowe , Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II