"The [Axis] occupation of Europe could now be reconfigured. Invasion of the Soviet Union was represented as a 'crusade for Europe'; the entire continent could unite in a 'European United Front against Bolshevism'. Just as the invasion of the European empires in Asia would allow the Japanese to recast their own imperialism in terms of East Asian 'Co-Prosperity', so now the Germans could portray the European Grossraumwirtschaft (literally, 'great space economy') as a German-led bulwark against Bolshevism. Collaborators in occupied Europe latched on to this new theme of propaganda with alacrity. On October 30, 1941, Marshal Pétain, the doddering figurehead of the Vichy regime, vowed that France would flourish 'within the framework of the constructive activity of a New European order'. Similar sentiments were expressed in Belgium, Finland and elsewhere. The Nazis' European rhetoric struck a chord with all those conservatives for whom German dominance seemed a lesser evil than Soviet Communism. Only as the war in the East turned from blitzkrieg to attrition, and the need supervened to wring every last penny out of the occupied West, did the emptiness of this rhetoric gradually manifest itself."