Atrocities/war crimes during WW2

[dannybou]

OK let's have a discussion about atrocities and war crimes perpetrated during WW2. Not necessarily the worst, but any war crime, from the mistreatement of POWs to the raping and looting of artifacts to the execution of civilian hostages etc...

[dannybou]

The first 3,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp during September 1941. After months of marching hundreds of miles they finally entered the camp completely exhausted and emaciated into mere skeletons. They had received almost nothing to eat during the march. Some weeks later another 4,000 arrived and during the ten kilometre march from the station in Weimar to the camp, 417 collapsed and died. In the camp, one of the most vile cold-blooded war crimes took place in a facility hastily constructed inside the camp's horse stables. When no longer able to work in the stone quarry the prisoners were taken to the stable and ordered into the shower-room eight at a time. The door was then closed and through a slit in the door the unsuspecting victims were simply shot down by an automatic pistol. To cover the cries of the dying loud music was played over loudspeakers. After the killings the showers were turned on but only to wash away the blood. Another method used was for the prisoner to stand against a measuring device to measure his height. Concealed behind the device was a small cubicle in which stood the SS murderer who then fired a shot into the neck of the prisoner through a slot in the partition. Around 500 killings a day was achieved through these methods. In all, about 7,200 Russian POWs were murdered in Buchenwald.

[dannybou]

In 1939, during the Russian invasion of Poland, some 14,500 Polish officers were captured and interned in three POW camps in the Soviet Union. The next time the world heard of these prisoners was a news broadcast on April 13, 1943, from Radio Berlin. It stated that the German Army had discovered mass graves at Katyn, 18 kilometres north-west of Smolensk, near the village of Gneizdovo and containing the bodies of Polish officers. Eight graves were opened and 4,253 bodies exhumed. All were dressed in Polish uniforms, with badges of rank and medals intact. No watches or rings were found on the corpses. It was established that the bodies were of Polish officers from the camp at Kozielsk, situated in the grounds of a former Monastery, near Orel. Two other camps, at Starobielsk (3,910 men) and at Ostashkov (6,500 men) were wound up and closed in the first days of April, 1940. Whatever happened to these 10,000 odd officers has never been established. They were never seen alive again. From evidence obtained after the war, all prisoners of Kozielsk camp were shot by Stalin's NKVD.

On April 13, 1990, fifty years after the massacre, the USSR for the first time admitted its responsibility for the murders. The whole controversy was finally laid to rest when Boris Yeltsin, handed over the secret files on Katyn to the Polish president, Lech Walesa, on October 14, 1992. In May 1992, in a wood near Kharkov, a Russian private investigation team discovered a mass grave containing 3,891 bodies of Polish officers from the camp at Starobielsk in the Ukraine. In June of that year, Soviet authorities discovered 30 mass graves at Miednoje, one hundred miles north-west of Moscow. They contained the remains of 6,287 Polish prisoners from the Ostashkov island camp on Lake Seliguer. Before the massacre, 245 officers from Kozielsk, 79 from Starobielsk and 124 from the camp at Ostashkor , were transferred, for no apparent reason, to a camp at Pavlishchev Bor, a hundred miles north-west of the Kozielsk camp. These 448 officers proved to be the only survivors of the Katyn massacre. In other parts of the Katyn Forest, other graves were discovered containing the bodies of Russian political prisoners who were executed in pre-war days by the NKVD. It seems that the Katyn Forest was the main execution site for Stalin’s secret police. (Not to be confused with the Khatyn murder site near Minsk).

[tigersqn]

This is a pic of 45th Inf Div soldiers executing German guards shortly after the capture of Dachau. The location is the SS T-verbande guard barracks at Dachau.

[Freightshaker]

The Russian sack of Berlin would have to be in there and IMO the bombing of Dresden. The Japanese sacking of Nanking was terrible also.

[Leatherneck]

Hmmm. I found this website while I'm searching about Germany POW and something i found about One Million Germany Killed After WWII By US and France. It kinda Odd, I don't remember that US and France killed One Million Germans?

http://www.rense.com/general19/gmk.htm

Is that true or not? :quest:

[Ryan101st]

On March 24th, 1944, 250 POWs from Stalag Luft III prepared to enter the tunnel, known as Harry, and mount the greatest escape of the war. These POWs had been working for months digging the tunnels, forging documents, and making civilian clothes. It was the goal of Roger Bushell, the escape committee leader, to get 250 men out. If not for a miscalculation, all 250 may have made it out rather then just 76. When the POWs reached the end of Harry, they realized they were short of the tree line. This meant they would have to cross the open ground in order to get to the woods. They quickly made up a signal system, which allowed those waiting in the tunnel to know when it was safe to go. This worked until one POW came out too early and was caught.
Of the 76 that made it out, three made it back to England, and only 23 were returned to the POW camp. The other 50 were executed by the Gestapo after they had been captured. Hitler personally requested that all of the recaptured POWs be executed, but was convinced by his staff to bring it down to 50. According to reports, the 50 were shot "while trying to escape".

[tigersqn]

Originally posted by Army
Hmmm. I found this website while I'm searching about Germany POW and something i found about One Million Germany Killed After WWII By US and France. It kinda Odd, I don't remember that US and France killed One Million Germans?

http://www.rense.com/general19/gmk.htm

Is that true or not? :quest:

As I stated in another thread, there was a book that came out about 10-12 years ago detailing just that fact.
Although I'm not sure about the accuracy of the claims in the book, there is no question that many POWs in US hands died in the camps. IIRC, most of the casualties were from camps in Texas.

I'll try to find a reference to the book. Damn, I wish I could remember the title.

[Leatherneck]

Originally posted by Tigersqn
As I stated in another thread, there was a book that came out about 10-12 years ago detailing just that fact.
Although I'm not sure about the accuracy of the claims in the book, there is no question that many POWs in US hands died in the camps. IIRC, most of the casualties were from camps in Texas.

I'll try to find a reference to the book. Damn, I wish I could remember the title.

I really didn't know that until I found about German POWs Killed by US and France and I really don't that is true or not, but still searching about POWs aftermath of WWII. I do know that Russian killed alot German POWs before and after WWII, but most of them were release in Early and Late 1950s.

[Lance Williams]

Originally posted by Tigersqn
As I stated in another thread, there was a book that came out about 10-12 years ago detailing just that fact.
Although I'm not sure about the accuracy of the claims in the book, there is no question that many POWs in US hands died in the camps. IIRC, most of the casualties were from camps in Texas.

I'll try to find a reference to the book. Damn, I wish I could remember the title.

I don't doubt that many POW Germans died in camps, but I find it hard to put their number anywhere near 1 million............Is there any serious documentation to support this?

[RetPara]

I know the book you are refering to about the German PW deaths after the war ended. The impression I got is that its a examination of a LOT of number crunching, more than a serious work. The book relys heavily on death rate information, unit size at surrender. It just goes on ad nausium. The gist was that the Allied commanders planned to keep the German troops in their custody in awful conditions and kill them by starvation and disease. While the Russians did do this by keeping many for years in Siberia... I have doubts about this.

I could see the French doing this, as they can be viscious in revenge. The winter of 45/46 was really bad. Germany was almost deforested from the cutting of wood for heat.

[Lance Williams]

Originally posted by RetPara
I know the book you are refering to about the German PW deaths after the war ended. The impression I got is that its a examination of a LOT of number crunching, more than a serious work. The book relys heavily on death rate information, unit size at surrender. It just goes on ad nausium. The gist was that the Allied commanders planned to keep the German troops in their custody in awful conditions and kill them by starvation and disease. While the Russians did do this by keeping many for years in Siberia... I have doubts about this.

I could see the French doing this, as they can be viscious in revenge. The winter of 45/46 was really bad. Germany was almost deforested from the cutting of wood for heat.

I'm glad to hear the bulk of the deaths were those Germans held by the French. Everything I have read about German POW's confined in the US made it sound like in many cases they were better clothed and fed than they had been when they were under arms for Nazi Germany. While many worked as manual laborers (many on farms in the South), they were not not overworked or malnurished. In fact many of these POW's either stayed in the US or returned to the US following the end of the war because they LIKED the US so much.

[JD Morelock]

The book is called "Other Losses" by an author named Bakke (sp?) and bases the premise that thousands upon thousands of German POWs held by the Allies in the huge POW 'cages' (enclosures) within Germany at the end of WWII on Allied (mostly American) records that had a category called "Other Losses." The author lays all of the blame on Eisenhower and claims the final total of 'dead' German POWs may have been a million or more. This is simply outrageous.

Stephen Ambrose was so outraged by the claims in the book that he wrote a rebuttal that destroys Bakke's claims point by point. Most of the 'dead' German POWs were simply released prisoners who went home. The confusion of the unprecedented situation in the spring and early summer of 1945 in which millions of German soldiers were surrendering to the Allies (before the Russians could get hold of them) caused the record-keeping to be, at times, slipshod and inaccurate. The Allies may have lost track of how many German POWs they were holding in the huge enclosures, but they certainly didn't kill them or let them starve to death.

The main reason Ambrose bothered to write the rebuttal to the ridiculous Bakke book is exactly shown in this thread. Somebody, somewhere read something and then they pass it along. If I can find my copy of Ambrose's rebuttal, I will post the citation. But since I read it, I've had, I think, 8 permanent changes of station, and it's in a bookbox...somewhere...someplace...

Bottom line: the claim is untrue.

By the way, Lance is exactly correct in his characterization of German (and Italian) POW experience in the US. Many did choose to stay and some that returned home have since come back to renew 'friendships' with Americans they met here.

[JD Morelock]

I have no figures on deaths of German POWs in French captivity and only have an anecdote. My battalion barber while stationed in Germany for five years, Rudi, was captured by Americans at the very end of the war and turned over to the French (reason not completely clear). He was kept in the fortress in the city of Brest, a port city in Brittainy, and since he had at one time been in the Hitler Youth (according to Rudi) the French didn't release him until late in 1948, long after most German POWs in US hands were released (except for suspected war criminals who had not yet been tried and those war criminals who had been tried, found guilty and were serving their sentences).

In fact, Rudi learned all his barbering 'skills' while a POW...which accounts, I suppose, for his penchant for administering the 'high and tight' style...actually it was the only style haircut Rudi gave.

[Lance Williams]

So basically these "other loses" can just be attributed to bad bookkeeping.............