The article about having 4 million Romanian children, ages 7 to 18, required to leave school and go pick crops because the German Reich needed them is just appalling.
The Romanian government thought this was perfectly fine— to draft their little kids to do farm labor merely to help some other country meet their desired import goal for grain? I never heard about this before. I think I need to learn more about why those vassal states of Hitler did what they did.
I don't know that that attitude was unusual in Europe at the time. Especially eastern Europe. I recall that when I first read "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" it came as a revelation to me that for the Germans it was natural that the individual is subservient to the state. The classical liberalism taken for granted for a rapidly diminishing number of Americans never permeated that part of the world like it did here.