section_path: Impact/Occupation
section_name: Occupation
paragraph_text: Occupation
  
  In Europe, occupation came under two forms. In Western, Northern, and Central Europe (France, Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and the annexed portions of Czechoslovakia) Germany established economic policies through which it collected roughly 69.5 billion reichsmarks (27.8 billion US dollars) by the end of the war; this figure does not include the plunder of industrial products, military equipment, raw materials and other goods. Thus, the income from occupied nations was over 40 percent of the income Germany collected from taxation, a figure which increased to nearly 40 percent of total German income as the war went on.
  
  In the East, the intended gains of Lebensraum were never attained as fluctuating front-lines and Soviet scorched earth policies denied resources to the German invaders. Unlike in the West, the Nazi racial policy encouraged extreme brutality against what it considered to be the " inferior people " of Slavic descent; most German advances were thus followed by mass atrocities and war crimes. The Nazis killed an estimated 2.8 million ethnic Poles in addition to Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Although resistance groups formed in most occupied territories, they did not significantly hamper German operations in either the East or the West until late 1943.
  
  In Asia, Japan termed nations under its occupation as being part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, essentially a Japanese hegemony which it claimed was for purposes of liberating colonised peoples. Although Japanese forces were sometimes welcomed as liberators from European domination, Japanese war crimes frequently turned local public opinion against them. During Japan's initial conquest, it captured 4,000,000 barrels (640,000 m 3) of oil (~550,000 tonnes) left behind by retreating Allied forces; and by 1943, was able to get production in the Dutch East Indies up to 50 million barrels (7,900,000 m 3) of oil (~6.8 million tonnes), 76 percent of its 1940 output rate.