I agree with the second one. The "spoils" claimed weren't much compared to the destruction inflicted on their country and people. That has nothing to do with my original comment though.
I see rapid decolonization. Japanese leave rural areas and northern territories. Russians fled Central Asia, pushed off Caucasus, large swaths of land become anthropic deserts. French in no position to colonize Africa anymore, if anything they're getting colonized. Chinese flock to Southern coast and no longer push that hard demographically on Uighurs/Tibetans.
Germans don't even seem to flock to their Northern, Baltic shore. And it has better climate than absolute most of their supposed "sraum".
Arguable, Polish and Balts skip their countries for greener pastures. If anybody in EU will be lacking room they can move there any minute.
The main example of "old school" colonization (other than the Chinese example mentioned below) I can think of in 2016 is the Israeli colonization of the occupied territories.
Colonies provided wealth and a logistical advantage to their owners. UK and France both fought hard to hold onto theirs well past the end of WWII. More recently, Russia considered Crimea important enough to accept the economic punishment annexing it entailed.
> Chinese flock to Southern coast and no longer push that hard demographically on Uighurs/Tibetans.
Do you have a good source or book that I can read about this? I would like to know more.
> Germans don't even seem to flock to their Northern, Baltic shore. And it has better climate than absolute most of their supposed "scram".
The Nazis are not known for paying careful attention to the climate when drawing up their grand plans. Lebensraum was their official policy, and I doubt they would have left the local population alone, considering what they did to other undesirables.
Anyway, there's no reason to think that Germans would easily defeat post-Imperial Russian Republic (given no Bolsheviks and therefore no civil wars, no mass emigration, famines or murders). Soviets basically lost half of pre-WWII years on chaos.
Russia without Soviets would look more like 350M strong Norway than like 140M strong Nigeria how it ended up.