Crimes against the Polish nation committed by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion of Poland, along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II, consisted of the murder of millions of ethnic Poles and the systematic extermination of Jewish Poles. These mass murders were enacted by the Nazis with further plans that were justified by their racial theories, which regarded Poles and other Slavs, and especially Jews, as racially inferior Untermenschen. By 1942, the Nazis were implementing their plan to murder every Jew in German-occupied Europe, and had also developed plans to reduce the Polish people through mass murder, ethnic cleansing, enslavement and extermination through labor, and assimilation into German identity of a small minority of Poles deemed "racially valuable". During World War II, the Germans not only murdered millions of Poles, but ethnically cleansed millions more through forced deportation to make room for German settlers (see and ). These actions claimed the lives of 2.7 to 3 million Polish Jews and 1.8 to 2.77 million ethnic Poles, according to Poland's Institute of National Remembrance. These extremely large death tolls, and the absence of substantial non-Jewish civilian deaths in other occupied European countries such as Denmark and France, have led some, such as Timothy Snyder, to characterize Germany's policies against the Poles as genocidal. The genocidal policies of the German government's colonization plan, Generalplan Ost, were the blueprint for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against the Polish nation from 1939 to 1945. The Nazi master plan entailed the expulsion and mass extermination of some 85 percent (over 20 million) of ethnic Poles in Poland, the remaining 15 percent to be turned into slave labor. In 2000, by an act of the Polish Parliament, dissemination of knowledge on World War II crimes in Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was entrusted to the Institute of National Remembrance. From the start of the war against Poland, Germany intended to realize Adolf Hitler's plan, set out in his book , to acquire "living space" () in the east for massive settlement of German colonists. Hitler's plan combined classic imperialism with Nazi racial theories. In the Obersalzberg Speech delivered on 22 August 1939, just before the invasion of Poland, Hitler gave explicit permission to his commanders to murder "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language."