The Reich leadership recruited ethnic Germans from south-east Europe over the course of the war out of a series of sometimes shifting motives. In retrospect, an increasingly total war on the German side led to a shift from ideology to pragmatism, whereby the principle of voluntarism was gradually sacrificed to pure coercion. This repeatedly led to growing tensions between representatives of the German ethnic groups in south-east Europe and the SS-Hauptamt. The countries of south-east Europe with high proportions of German populations spent at least most of the war as sovereign states that disliked being openly patronized by the German Reich. The deployment of the ethnic Germans of south-east Europe in the ranks of the Waffen-SS and their participation in war crimes has not been sufficiently examined when it comes to making reliable statements about the extent of their participation, their personal motives, and their scope of action.