How and why more than one million non-Germans joined Hitler's and "war of annihilation and "Revealing for the first time Heinrich Himmler's master plan for Europe, this book discusses his dream of an SS empire with no place for either the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler. His astonishingly ambitious plan depended on the recruitment of tens of thousands of and "Germanic and " peoples to build an and "SS Europa. and " This book, researched in archives all over Europe and using first-hand testimony, exposes Europe's dirty secret - that nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich - to fight a crusade against and "Jewish-Bolshevism. and " No other historian has examined the connections between these SS and "foreign legions and " (both police and Waffen-SS) and the Holocaust. Even today, some apologists claim that the foreign volunteers were merely soldiers and "like any other and " and fought a decent war against Stalin's Red Army. Christopher Hale demonstrates conclusively that these surprisingly common views are mistaken.