Since many war crimes are not ultimately prosecuted (due to lack of political will, lack of effective procedures, or other practical and political reasons), historians and lawyers will often make a serious case that war crimes occurred, even if there was no formal investigations or prosecution of the alleged crimes or an investigation cleared the alleged perpetrators. War crimes under international law were firmly established by the 1945NurembergMajor War Crimes Trials, in which German leaders were prosecuted for war crimes committed during World War II. For purpose of selectivity, only war crimes since the customary laws of war were clarified in the Hague Conventions of 1907 are included, because in the judgement at the Major War Crimes Trial in Nuremberg in 1945, it was stated that "by 1939 these rules laid down in the Hague Convention of 1907 were recognised by all civilised nations, and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war".Jugement: The Law Relating to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
Government of the German Empire and people of GermanyArticle 231 of the Treaty of Versailles (the 'war guilt' clause) held Germany solely responsible for waging a war of aggression, and thus for all 'loss and damage' suffered by the Allies during the war and provided the basis for reparations. It was widely seen as victor's justice and unfair in Germany, and resentment against this judgement helped fuel World War II.
On 15 September2005 an United States Congressional resolution stated that "The Armenian Genocide was conceived and carried out by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923, resulting in the deportation of nearly 2,000,000 Armenians, of whom 1,500,000 men, women, and children were killed, 500,000 survivors were expelled from their homes, and which succeeded in the elimination of the over 2,500-year presence of Armenians in their historic homeland."
This section includes war crimes until 8 December 1941 when China declared war on Japan so entering World War II. For war crimes after this date see the section called World War II: Japan perpetrated crimes.
General Asaka Yasuhiko, commander, Japanese Shanghai Expeditionary Force, Imperial Japanese Army. General Iwane Matsui, Commanding general of Japanese forces in China, Imperial Japanese Army. Minister of War Hideki Tojo. Debate still is ongoing as to the culpability of Emperor Hirohito in the events.After the Battle of Nanking, on 13 December, 1937, Japanese entered the city virtually resistance free. From then for a period of about 6 weeks after, until early February 1938, widespread war crimes were committed including mass rape, looting, arson, the killing of civilians and prisoners of war.
* War crimes in the Balkans, in France, Italy and on the Eastern Front * No one has been brought to trial for war crimes, although in 1950 the former Italian defense minister was convicted for collaboration with Nazi Germany. * See Italian war crimes.
German perpetrated crimes
According to the Nuremburg Trials, there were four major war crimes that were alleged against German military (and Waffen-SS and NSDAP) men and officers, each with individual events that made up the major charges.
2. Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace *Planning and executing a campaign of invasion of its European neighbors, as well as the conspiracy to violate the Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Saint-Germain through the remilitarization of the Rhineland, and the annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
4. Crimes against Humanity These were crimes that were committed well away from the lines of battle and were unconnected in any way to military activity. *The major crime was the Holocaust, including: ** The construction and use of Vernichtungslagern, most prominently at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibór, and Chełmno *** The employment of other camps across Europe, including Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen which served unofficially as death camps to a degree ** Death marches of prisoners, particularly in the last months of the war when the aforementioned camps were being overrun by the Allies ** The widespread use of slave and unfree labor by the Nazi regime, including the use of concentration camp and extermination camp prisoners as slaves ** The establishment of Jewish Ghettos in Eastern Europe ** The use of SSEinsatzgruppen, mobile extermination squads **Babi Yar **Rumbula **Dnepropetrovsk **Ninth Fort **Simferopol **The massacre of 100,000 Jews and Poles at Paneriai **The suppression of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which erupted when the SS came to clear the ghetto and send all of the occupants to extermination camps **Izieu MassacreOther crimes against humanity included: *The Porajmos, the Nazi pogrom against the Romany peoples of Europe *The Łapanka or "Catching Game," -- Nazi roundups of Poles in the major cities for slave labor and other purposes *Nikolaev Massacre *Operation Tannenberg, the AB Action and the Massacre of Lwów professors, all Nazi actions in Poland meant to mass murder the Polish intelligentsia and other potential leaders of resistance. *The Nazi T-4 Euthanasia Program, an aborted eugenics program meant to kill German children who were mentally or physically handicapped. 200,000 people were gassed to death due to this program.
Well over 10 million people were systematically killed by the Nazi regime (Some accountings place the figure at over 20 million) from crimes against humanity, in particular the Holocaust. Of this figure, the largest amount of deaths happened among the Jews. The common estimate is that 5 to 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, although a complete count may never be known. After the war, the Nazi regime was put on trial in two tribunals in Nuremberg, Germany by the victorious Allied powers from 1945 to 1949. The first tribunalindicted 24 major Nazi war criminals, and resulted in 19 convictions (of which 12 led to death sentences) and 3 acquittals. The second tribunal indicted 185 members of the military, economic, and political leadership of Nazi Germany, of which 142 were convicted and 35 were acquitted. In subsequent decades, approximately 20 additional war criminals who escaped capture in the immediate aftermath of World War II were tried in West Germany and Israel. In Germany and many other European nations, the Nazi Party is outlawed.
This section includes war crimes from 8 December 1941 when China declared war on Japan so entering World War II. For war crimes before this date which took place during the Second Sino-Japanese War please see the section above called 1937-1945: Second Sino-Japanese War.
The merchant ship Vyner Brooke was sunk by Japanese aircraft. The survivors who made it to Banka Island were all were shot or bayonetted. One nurse Vivian Bullwinkel survived the massacre.
General Masaharu Homma was convicted by an Allied commission of war crimes, including the atrocities of the death march out of Bataan, and the atrocities at Camp O'Donnell and Cabanatuan that followed. He was executed on April 3, 1946 outside Manila.|Approximately 75,000 Filipino and US soldiers, commanded by Major General Edward P. King, Jr. formally surrendered to the Japanese, under General Masaharu Homma, on April 9, 1942, which forced Japan to accept emaciated captives outnumbering them. Captives were forced to march, beginning the next day, about 100 kilometers north to Nueva Ecija to Camp O'Donnell, a prison camp. Prisoners of war were beaten randomly and denied food and water for several days. Those who fell behind were executed through various means: shot, beheaded or bayoneted.
Lieutenant GeneralTakuma Nishimura, was convicted for this crime by an Australian Military Court and hanged on June 11, 1951.http://www.thisisfolkestone.co.uk/ms/info/massacresinthepacific.htm|Recently captured Australian and Indian POWs, who had been too badly wounded to escape through the jungle, were murdered by Japanese soldiers. Accounts differ on how they were killed. Two wounded Australians managed to escape the massacre and provide eyewitness accounts of the Japanese treatment of wounded prisoners of war, as did locals who witnessed the massacre. Official records indicate that 150 wounded men were killed.
In 1946, the Laha massacre and other incidents which followed the fall of Ambon became the subject of the largest ever war crimes trial, when 93 Japanese personnel were tried by an Australian tribunal, at Ambon. Among other convictions, four men were executed as a result. An SNLF Captain, Kunito Hatakeyama, who was in direct command of the four massacres, was hanged; Rear AdmiralKoichiro Hatakeyama, who was found to have ordered the killings, died before he could be tried.Fall of Ambon Massacred at Laha|After the battle Battle of Ambon, more than 300 Australian, Dutch (and probably US) prisoners of war were chosen at random and summarily executed, at or near Laha airfield in four separate massacres. "The Laha massacre was the largest of the atrocities committed against captured Allied troops in 1942." Dr Peter Stanley The defence of the 'Malay barrier': Rabaul and Ambon, January 1942'' principal historian to Australian War Memorial.
General Tomoyuki Yamashita who commanded the Japanese army, had the officer responsible for the massacre executed.|At about 1pm on February 14, Japanese soldiers approached Alexandra Barracks Hospital. Although no resistance was offered, some of them shot or bayoneted staff members and patients. More staff and patients were murdered over the next two days.
Unit 1644 conducted tests to determine human susceptibility to a varietyof harmful stimuli ranging from infectious diseases to poison gas. It was the largest germ experimentation center in China. Unit 1644 regularly carried out human vivisections as well as infecting humans with cholera, typhus, and bubonic plague.
Nemmersdorf (today Mayakovskoye in Kaliningrad) was one of the first German settlements to fall to the advancing Red Army on October 22, 1944. It was recaptured by the Germans soon afterwards and the German authorities reported that the Red Army killed civilians there. Nazipropaganda widely disseminated the description of the event with horrible details, supposedly to boost the determination of German soldiers to resist the general Soviet advance. Because the incident was investigated by the Nazis and reports were disseminated as Nazi propaganda, discerning the facts from the fiction of the incident is difficult.
Alleged war crimes in contravention of Hague Conventions of 1907"IV - The Laws and Customs of War on Land"|
War crimes committed by Soviet troops in the areas of Germany occupied by the Red ArmyExcerpt, Chapter one The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945-2002 - William I. Hitchcock - 2003 - ISBN 0385497989 (No pages cited)A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950 - Alfred-Maurice de Zayas - 1994 - ISBN 0312121598 (No pages cited)Barefoot in the Rubble - Elizabeth B. Walter - 1997 - ISBN 0965779300 (No pages cited)
During the post war Nuremberg Trials, in evidence presented at the trial of Karl Dönitz on his orders to the U-boat fleet to breach the London Rules, Admiral Chester Nimitz stated that unrestricted submarine warfare was carried on in the Pacific Ocean by the United States from the first day that nation entered the war.
During the Allied invasion of Sicily, at least a dozen unarmed Italian civilians, including six children, were killed by U.S. military policemen. The incident was covered up fearing that it would lead to reprisals from the civilian population. See the article for citations
Sergeant Horace T. West: court-martialed and was found guilty, stripped of rank and sentenced to life in prison, though he was later released as a private. Captain John T. Compton was court-martialed for killing 40 POWs in his charge. He claimed to be following orders. The investigating officer and the Judge Advocate declared that Compton's actions were unlawful, but he was acquitted.
Following the capture of Biscari Airfield in Sicily on July 14, 1943, seventy-six German and Italian POWs were shot by American troops of the 180th Regimental Combat Team, 45th Division during the Allied invasion of Sicily. These killings occurred in two separate incidents between July and August 1943.
Private Clarence V. Bertucci determined to be insane and confined to a mental institution
Private Clarence V. Bertucci fired a machine gun from one of the guard towers into the tents that were being used to accommodate the German prisoners of war. Nine were killed and 20 were injured.
The Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps) were transit camps for millions of German POWs after World War II. There were at least thousands of deaths, with a few sources estimating upwards of 1.1 million German POWs,dying mostly from starvation and exposure.Because of resistance of the victors to release needed documents the estimates of the number of German POWs that were murdered can only be estimated from a fragmentary public record.These range from as few as 8,500 to as many as the incredible claim of 71,000.
Following Italy's 1943 armistice with the Allied powers, Yugoslavian resistance forces executed an estimated 1,300-1,600 Italian troops and ethnic Italians living in Slovenian/Yugoslav territories adjacent to Italy.see the article Foibe massacres, (lots of references but no citations)
The victims were Croatian soldiers and civilians, executed without trial as an act of vengeance for the crimes committed by the Ustaše regime in Croatian-controlled territories during World War IIWords from the article Bleiburg massacre, (lots of references no citations)
Lt. William Calley convicted in 1971 of premeditated murder of 22 civilians for his role in the massacre and sentenced to life in prison. After serving 3½ years under house arrest he was pardoned by President Richard Nixon
In March, 1968, a US army platoon led by Lt. William Calley killed hundreds of civilians – primarily women, children, and old men – in the village of My Lai. 26 US soldiers, including 14 officers, were charged with crimes related to the My Lai massacre and its coverup. Most of the charges were eventually dropped, and only Lt. Calley was convicted.
North Vietnam
North Vietnam: * Murder of civilians. Mistreatment of prisoners of war. * North Vietnamese troops executed 2500 civilians while occupying the city of Hue in 1968. An additional 3500 people are suspected to have been executed, but never found. See: Massacre at Huế. * U.S. Prisoners of war held at the so-called "Hanoi Hilton" were subject to torture and other mistreatment by their North Vietnamese captors. * Hundreds of Thousands of South Vietnamese perished in the concentration or "re-education" camps shortly after the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City)
Alledegedly the Pakistan Government, and the Pakistan Army and its local collaborators, however there have been no war crime trials to extablish their guilt
During the Bangladesh War of 1971, widespread atrocities were committed against the Bengali population of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), at a level that within Bangladesh, ‘genocide' is the term that is still used to describe the event in almost every major publication and newspaperEditorial The Jamaat Talks Backin The Bangladesh Observer December 30, 2005Dr. N. Rabbee Remembering a Martyr Star weekend Magazine, The December 16, 2005. Although and the word ‘genocide' was and is still used frequently amongst observers and scholars of the events that transpired during the 1971 war, the allegations that a genocide took place during the Bangladesh War of 1971 were never investigated by an international tribunal set up under the auspices of the United Nations, so the alleged genocide is not recognised as a genocide under international law.
The number of civilians that died in the liberation war of Bangladesh is not known in any reliable accuracy. There has been a great disparity in the casualty figures put forth by Pakistan on one hand (26,000, as reported in the Hamoodur Rahman CommissionHamoodur Rahman Commission, Chapter 2, Paragraph 33) and India and Bangladesh on the other hand (From 1972 to 1975 the first post-war prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, mentioned that 3 million died on a dozen occasionsF. Hossain Genocide 1971 Correspondence with the Guinness Book of Records on the number of dead).
The minorities of Bangladesh, especially the Hindus, were specific targets of the Pakistan army U.S. Consulate (Dacca) Cable, Sitrep: Army Terror Campaign Continues in Dacca; Evidence Military Faces Some Difficulties Elsewhere, March 31, 1971, Confidential, 3 pp. Numerous East Pakistani women were tortured, raped and killed during the war. The exact numbers are not known and are a subject of debate. Bangladeshi sources cite a figure of 200,000 women raped, giving birth to thousands of war-babies. Some other sources, for example Susan Brownmiller, refer to an even higher number of over 400,000. Pakistani sources claim the number is much lower, though having not completely denied rape incidents.Debasish Roy Chowdhury 'Indians are bastards anyway' in Asia TimesJune 23, 2005"In Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Susan Brownmiller likens it to the Japanese rapes in Nanjing and German rapes in Russia during World War II. "... 200,000, 300,000 or possibly 400,000 women (three sets of statistics have been variously quoted) were raped.""Brownmiller, Susan, "Against Our Will : Men, Women, and Rape" ISBN 0449908208, page 81Hamoodur Rahman Commission, Chapter 2, Paragraphs 32,34
During the war, the Pakistan Army and its local collaborators carried out a systematic execution of the leading Bengali intellectuals. A number of university professors from Dhaka University were killed during the first few days of the war Blood, Archer, Transcript of Selective Genocide Telex, Department of State, United StatesAjoy Roy, "Homage to my martyr colleagues", 2002. However, the most extreme cases of targeted killing of intellectuals took place during the last few days of the war. On December 14, 1971, only two days before surrendering to the Indian military and the Mukhti Bahini forces, the Pakistani army – with the assistance of the Al Badr and Al Shams – systematicly executed well over 200 of East Pakistan's intellectuals and scholars.Shahiduzzaman No count of the nation's intellectual loss The New Age, December 15, 2005Killing of Intellectuals Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.
Iraq made extensive use of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and nerve agents such as tabun. Iraqi chemical weapons were responsible for over 100,000 Iranian casualties (including 20,000 deaths).
Attacks against parties not involved in the war|
Iraq attacked oil tankers from neutral nations in an attempt to disrupt enemy trade
Dutch court has ruled that the incident involved War Crimes and Genocide.
To date no prosecutions of Iraqi nationals. Frans van Anraat war crime.
Iraq also used chemical weapons against their own Kurdish population causing casualties estimated between several hundred up to 5,000 deaths. On December 232005 a Dutch court ruled in a case brought against Frans van Anraat for supplying chemicals to Iraq, that "[it] thinks and considers legally and convincingly proven that the Kurdish population meets the requirement under the genocide conventions as an ethnic group. The court has no other conclusion that these attacks were committed with the intent to destroy the Kurdish population of Iraq." and because he supplied the chemicals before 16 March 1988, the date of the Halabja attack, he is guilty of a war crime but not guilty of complicity in genocide.Dutch court says gassing of Iraqi Kurds was 'genocide' by Anne Penketh and Robert Verkaik in The IndependentDecember 242005Dutch man sentenced for role in gassing death of KurdsCBCDecember 232005
* 20 years warfare * The Times reports (Nov 26 2005 p.27)::Almost 20 years of fighting... has killed half a million people. Many of the dead are children... The LRA [a cannibalism cult]The LRA is described by sources such as The Times as a "cannibalistic cult that has slaughtered whole villages and left its victims without hands, feet or faces".[2] kidnaps children and forces them to join its ranks. And so, incredibly, children are not only the main victims of this war, but also its unwilling perpetrators... The girls told me they had been given to rebel commanders as "wives" and forced to bear them children. The boys said they had been forced to walk for days knowing they would be killed if they showed any weakness, and in some cases forced even to murder their family members... every night up to 10,000 children walk into the centre of Kitgum... because they are not safe in their own beds... more than 25,000 children have been kidnapped ...this year an average of 20 children have been abducted every week. * The International Criminal Court has launched an investigation and has issued indictments against LRA leaders.
Following the fall of the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica the men were separated from the women and executed over a period of several days in July 1995. see the article Srebrenica massacre
The victims were civilians who were shopping in an open air market in Sarajevo when Serb forces shelled the market. Two separate incidents. Feb 1994; 68 killed and 144 wounded and August 1995; 37 killed and 90 wounded. See the article Markale massacres
From The Times March 28 2006 p.43:"Charles Taylor, the former Liberian President who is one of Africas most wanted men, has gone into hiding in Nigeria to avoid extradition to a UN war crimes trimbunal... The UN war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone holds Mr taylor responsible for about 250,000 deaths. Throughout the 1990s, his armies and supporters, made up of child soldiers orphaned by the conflict wreaked havoc through a swath of West Africa. In Sierra Leone he supported the revolutionary United Front whose rebel fighters were notorious for hacking off the limbs of civilians. * Current action - Indicted on 17 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the UN, which has issues an international warrant for his arrest. As of April 2006 located and facing trial.
See also: Cases before the International Criminal Court#Democratic Republic of Congo * Civil war 1998-2002, est. 4 million deaths; war "sucked in" Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia, as well as 17,000 United Nations peacekeepers, its "largest and most costly" peace mission and "the bloodiest conflict since the end of the Second World War." * Fighting involves Mai-Mai militia and Congolese government soldiers. The Government originally armed the Mai-Mai as civil defence against external invaders, who then turned to banditry. * 100,000 refugees living in remote disease ridden areas to avoid both sides * Estimated 1000 deaths a day according to Oxfam: "The army attacks the local population as it passes through, often raping and pillaging like the militias. Those who resist are branded Mai-mai supporters and face detention or death. The Mai-mai accuse the villagers of collaborating with the army, they return to the villages at night and extract revenge. Sometimes they march the villagers into the bush to work as human mules."
(Source: The Times World News, April 3 2006, p.29)
