The forms of resistance varied depending on place and time, and so did the Germans' countermeasures.[2] Both the scale of resistance and the severity of German reprisals were much more limited in the West than in the East.[1][2] While Germans were much more likely to treat the entire local populace as enemies in the East, they were much less ideologically driven in the West, where, for example, women and children were only rarely killed by SS troops (while being a much more common target in the East).[1][2] In the East, some scholars noted that the anti-partisan operations gave Germans a pretext for ideologically motivated ethnic cleansing.[3]