German War Crimes - World War II

World War II

• The Holocaust of the Jews, the Action T-4 killing of the disabled and the Porajomas of the Gypsies. Not all the crimes committed during the Holocaust and similar mass atrocities were war crimes. Telford Taylor (The U.S. prosecutor in the German High Command case at the Nuremberg Trials and Chief Counsel for the twelve trials before the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals) explained in 1982:

it should be noted that, as far as wartime actions against enemy nationals are concerned, the 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

• Le Paradis massacre, May 1940, British soldiers of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, captured by the SS and subsequently murdered. Fritz Knoechlein tried, found guilty and hanged.
• Wormhoudt massacre, May 1940, British and French soldiers captured by the SS and subsequently murdered. No one found guilty of the crime.
• d'Ardene Massacres, June 1944 Canadian soldiers captured by the SS and Murdered by 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. SS General Kurt Meyer (Panzermeyer) sentenced to be shot 1946; sentence commuted; released 1954
• Malmedy massacre, December 1944, United States POWs captured by Kampfgruppe Peiper were murdered outside of Malmedy, Belgium.
• Gardelegen (war crime)
• Oradour-sur-Glane
• Massacre of Kalavryta
• The treatment of Soviet POWs throughout the war, who were not given the protections and guarantees of the Geneva Convention
• Unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping.
• The intentional destruction of major medieval churches of Novgorod, of monasteries in the Moscow region (e.g., of New Jerusalem Monastery) and of the imperial palaces around St. Petersburg (many of them were left by the post-war authorities in ruins or simply demolished).
• The campaign of extermination of Slavic population in the occupied territories. Several thousand villages were burned with their entire population (e.g., Khatyn massacre in Belarus). Every fourth inhabitant of Belarus did not survive the German occupation.
• Commando Order, the secret order issued by Hitler in 1942 stating that Allied combatants encountered during commando operations should be killed to the last man ("bis auf den letzen Mann niederzumachen"), even if they were unarmed or intending to surrender.