German war crimes

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The government of Germany ordered, organized and condoned several war crimes in both World War I and World War II. The most notable of these is the Holocaust in which millions of people were murdered or died from abuse and neglect, 60% of them (approximately 6 million out of 10 million[citation needed]) Jews. However, millions also died as a result of other German actions in those two conflicts.

Contents

[edit] Pre-World War I

Main article: Herero and Namaqua Genocide

The Herero and Namaqua Genocide is considered to have been the first genocide of the 20th century.[1][2][3][4][5] It took place between 1904 and 1907 in German South-West Africa (modern day Namibia), during the scramble for Africa.

On January 12, 1904, the Herero people, led by Samuel Maharero, rebelled against German colonial rule. In August, German general Lothar von Trotha defeated the Herero in the Battle of Waterberg and drove them into the desert of Omaheke, where most of them died of thirst. In October, the Nama people also rebelled against the Germans only to suffer a similar fate.

In total, from 24,000 up to 100,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama died.[6][7][8][9][10] The genocide was characterized by widespread death by starvation and thirst because the Herero who fled the violence were prevented from returning from the Namib Desert. Some sources also claim that the German colonial army systematically poisoned desert wells.[11][12]


[edit] World War I

[edit] Rape of Belgium

[edit] Bombardment of English coastal towns

Main article: Raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby

The raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, which took place on December 16, 1914, was an attack by the German navy on the British seaport towns of Scarborough, Hartlepool, West Hartlepool, and Whitby. The attack resulted in 137 fatalities and 592 casualties. The raid was as a violation of the 1907 Hague Convention provisions that prohibited naval bombardments of undefended towns without warning,[original research?] because only Hartlepool was protected by shore batteries.[13] Germany was a signatory of the Hague Convention.[14] Another attack followed on 26 April 1916 on the coastal towns of Yarmouth and Lowestoft but both were important naval bases and defended by shore batteries.[citation needed].

[edit] Unrestricted submarine warfare

Main article: U-boat Campaign (World War I)

Unrestricted submarine warfare was instituted in 1915 in response to the British blockade of Germany in the North Sea. Prize rules, which were codified under the 1907 Hague Convention—such as those that required commerce raiders to warn their targets and allow time for the crew to board lifeboats—were disregarded and commercial vessels were sunk regardless of nationality, cargo, or destination. Following the sinking of the RMS Lusitania on 7 May 1915 and subsequent public outcry in various neutral countries, including the United States, the practice was withdrawn.

[edit] Attempts to destroy evidence of German crimes

During World War II, after occupying France, Nazis seized Allied documentation regarding German war crimes in World War I and destroyed monuments commemorating them[15]

[edit] World War II

The Holocaust: ghettos per region and state. Color burgundy stands for 8 or more, color blue for none.
Man showing corpse of a starved infant in the Warsaw ghetto, 1941
During World War II, 85% of buildings in Warsaw were destroyed by German troops, and 800,000 civilians died.
Polish farmers killed by German forces, German-occupied Poland, 1943
Polish hostages preparing for mass execution 1940
Main articles: War crimes of the Wehrmacht and Consequences of German Nazism
it should be noted that, as far as wartime actions against enemy nationals are concerned, the [1948] Genocide Convention added virtually nothing to what was already covered (and had been since the Hague Convention of 1899) by the internationally accepted laws of land warfare, which require an occupying power to respect "family honors and rights, individual lives and private property, as well as religious convictions and liberty" of the enemy nationals. But the laws of war do not cover, in time of either war or peace, a government's actions against its own nationals (such as Nazi Germany's persecution of German Jews). And at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the tribunals rebuffed several efforts by the prosecution to bring such "domestic" atrocities within the scope of international law as "crimes against humanity."
—Telford Taylor[16]

[edit] Nazi concentration camps

After 1939, with the beginning of the Second World War, concentration camps increasingly became places where the enemies of the Nazis were enslaved, starved, tortured and killed.[17] During the War concentration camps for “undesirables” spread throughout Europe. New camps were created near centers of dense “undesirable” populations, often focusing on areas with large communities of Jews, Poles, Communists or Roma. Since millions of Jews lived in pre-war Poland, most camps were located in the area of General Government in occupied Poland for logistical reasons. It also allowed the Nazis to transport the German Jews outside of the German main territory.

[edit] Notorious war criminals

[edit] Notorious massacres & war crimes of WWII (sorted by location)

[edit] Austria

[edit] Belarus

[edit] 1941

[edit] 1942

[edit] 1943

[edit] 1944

[edit] Belgium

[edit] Estonia

[edit] 1941

[edit] 1942

[edit] France

[edit] 1944

[edit] Germany

[edit] 1945

[edit] Greece

[edit] 1943

[edit] 1944

[edit] Italy

[edit] 1944

[edit] Latvia

[edit] 1941

[edit] Lithuania

[edit] 1941

[edit] Netherlands

[edit] 1944

[edit] Norway

[edit] Poland

Main articles: World War II crimes in Poland and Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles

[edit] 1942

[edit] 1943

[edit] 1944

[edit] Russia

[edit] Serbia

[edit] 1941

[edit] Ukraine

[edit] 1941

[edit] 1943

[edit] 1944

[edit] Sources

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Child Holocaust victims

[edit] Notes

This article incorporates text from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and has been released under the GFDL.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Olusoga, David and Erichsen, Casper W (2010). The Kaiser's Holocaust. Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-23141-6
  2. ^ Levi, Neil; Rothberg, Michael (2003). The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. Rutgers University Press. pp. 465. ISBN 0813533538. 
  3. ^ Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001, p. 12
  4. ^ Allan D. Cooper (2006-08-31). "Reparations for the Herero Genocide: Defining the limits of international litigation". Oxford Journals African Affairs. http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/106/422/113. 
  5. ^ "Remembering the Herero Rebellion". Deutsche Welle. 2004-11-01. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1084266,00.html. 
  6. ^ Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the 21st Century: The Socio-Legal Context of Claims under International Law by the Herero against Germany for Genocide in Namibia, 1904-1908 (PSI Reports) by Jeremy Sarkin-Hughes
  7. ^ Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (War and Genocide) (War and Genocide) (War and Genocide) A. Dirk Moses -page 296(From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa. 296, (29). Dominik J. Schaller)
  8. ^ The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany) by Sara L. Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne M. Zantop page 87 University of Michigan Press 1999
  9. ^ Walter Nuhn: Sturm über Südwest. Der Hereroaufstand von 1904. Bernhard & Graefe-Verlag, Koblenz 1989. ISBN 3-7637-5852-6.
  10. ^ Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser, Yolande Jansen, "Diaspora and memory: figures of displacement in contemporary literature, arts and politics", pg. 33 Rodopi, 2007,
  11. ^ Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, Israel W. Charny, "Century of genocide: critical essays and eyewitness accounts" pg. 51, Routledge, 2004,
  12. ^ Dan Kroll, "Securing our water supply: protecting a vulnerable resource", PennWell Corp/University of Michigan Press, pg. 22
  13. ^ Chuter, David (2003). War Crimes: Confronting Atrocity in the Modern World. London: Lynne Rienner Pub. pp. 300. ISBN 158826209X. 
  14. ^ Willmore, John (1918). The great crime and its moral. New York: Doran. pp. 340. 
  15. ^ France: the dark years, 1940-1944 page 273 Julian Jackson Oxford University Press 2003
  16. ^ Telford Taylor "When people kill a people" in The New York Times, March 28, 1982
  17. ^ CNN - Army to honor soldiers enslaved by Nazis
  18. ^ Complete tabulation of executions carried out in the Einsatzkommando 3 zone up to 1 December 1941
  19. ^ Gesamtaufstellung der im Bereich des EK. 3 bis zum 1. Dez. 1941 durchgeführten Exekutionen
  20. ^ Muzeum Powstania otwarte, BBC Polish edition, 2 October 2004, Children accessed on 13 April 2007
  21. ^ O Powstaniu Warszawskim opowiada prof. Jerzy Kłoczowski, Gazeta Wyborcza – local Warsaw edition, 1998-08-01. Children accessed on 13 April 2007

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

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