because it would "remove the danger that this subhuman people () of the East through such children might acquire a leader class from such people of good blood, which would be dangerous for us because they would be our equals." According to Himmler, the destruction of the Soviet Union would have led to the exploitation of millions of peoples as slave labor in the occupied territories and the eventual re-population of the areas with Germans. Classification under the laws in the annexed territories The Deutsche Volksliste was split into four categories. Men in the first two categories were required to enlist for compulsory military service. Membership in the (SS) was reserved for men from Category I only: Hitler, who was born in the ethnically diverse Austrian-Hungarian Empire, avowed in (1926) that Germanising Austrian Slavs by language during the Age of Partitions could not have turned them into fully fledged Germans, because no "Negro" nor a "Chinaman" would ever "become German" just because he has learned to speak German. He believed that no visible differences between peoples could be bridged by the use of a common language. Any such attempts would lead to the "bastardization" of the German element, he said. Likewise, Hitler criticized the previous attempts at Germanisation of the Poles in the Prussian Partition as an erroneous idea, based on the same false reasoning. The Polish people could not possibly be Germanised by being compelled to speak German because they belonged to a different race, he said; "the result would have been fatal" for the purity of the German nation because the foreigners would "compromise" by their inferiority "the dignity and nobility" of the German nation. During the war, Hitler remarked in his "Table Talk" that people should only be Germanised if they were to improve the German blood line: Informed by the blood and soil beliefs of ethnic identity—a philosophic basis of —Nazi policy required destroying the USSR for the lands of Russia to become the granary of Germany. The Germanisation of Russia required the destruction of its cities, in an effort to vanquish Russianness, Communism, and Jewish Bolshevism. To that effect, Hitler ordered the Siege of Leningrad (September 1941 – January 1944), to raze the city and destroy the native Russian population. Geopolitically, the establishment of German in the east of Europe would thwart blockades, like those that occurred during the First World War, which starved the