Drang nach Osten
Because the Russian people were Slavic, not Germanic, the Soviet Union was also attacked on racial grounds for "living space" as Nazi ideology believed that "only" the Nordic people (referred to as the Germanic people) represented the "Herrenvolk" (master race) which was to expand to the East (Drang nach Osten). To Hitler, Operation Barbarossa was a "war of annihilation", being both an ideological war between German Nazism and Jewish Bolshevism and a racial war between the Germans and the Bolshevik, Jewish, Gypsies and Slavic "Untermenschen" (Generalplan Ost).