World War II
After World War II it was claimed by German SS general Gottlob Berger that there was a plan, proposed by the Luftwaffe and approved by Adolf Hitler, to set up special POW camps for captured airmen of the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force in large German cities, to act as human shields against their bombing raids. Berger realised that this would contravene the Geneva Convention and argued that there was not enough barbed wire—as a result this plan was not implemented.
Wehrmacht and later SS forces extensively used Polish civilians as human shield during Warsaw Uprising when attacking the insurgents' positions.
Read more about this topic: Human Shield
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough wonder if our lives, or some events and times in our lives, may not be analogues or metaphors or echoes of evolvements and happenings going on in other people?—or animals?—even forests or oceans or rocks?—in this world of ours or, even, in worlds or dimensions elsewhere.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“At last, after innumerable glamorous and frightful years, mankind approaches a war which is totally predictable from beginning to end.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)