Until the beginning of the 20th century, acts of war mainly impacted the military combatants; the limited mobility of the armies – apart from a few exceptional cases – meant that only a fraction of the warring country’s civilian population was affected. All this changed during the First World War of 1914 to 1918, during which some seven million civilians died of deprivation, hunger, and disease. During the Second World War, the number of civilian casualties actually exceeded the number of military fatalities, since the ideological, social, economic, and political aspects of the war took on unimaginable dimensions for the civilian population.
Ever since early modern times, nations have endeavored to contain military violence by claiming a monopoly on the use of force. During the 19th century, advances in technology and the increasing barbarity of war gave rise to efforts to establish generally recognized rules of warfare. Along with a number of treaties under international law, these included the introduction of the Red Cross as a symbol guaranteeing protection for the wounded. The Hague Convention respecting the laws and customs of war on land, which was ratified in 1907, prohibited the use of certain weapons, regulated the military occupation of conquered territories, and adjured military adversaries to protect civilians and POWs. The Geneva Convention of 1929 also served to protect POWs and was ratified by Germany in 1934. International law on war was based on the recognition that the warring parties had equal rights. However, this idea of human equality was anathema to Nazism, with its nationalist and racist ideology and its hierarchization of people based on their origins.
The term ‘war crime’ is conceptually vague; in many cases, it is understood to encompass all Nazi crimes, including those that took place before the war or were far removed from the events of the war. To some degree, it also encompasses acts of war by both warring parties that are considered contentious under international law. Nowadays, the term is applied to a large number of criminal acts, both past and present, that were committed in the context of war. The question of which military measures are authorized or prohibited under international law is also a matter of debate. The foremost war crime is the mass slaughter of non-participating civilians by military adversaries; the killing of POWs is also proscribed.
The most well-known example of a controversial assessment of acts of war was the bombardment of major cities,launched by the German forces in Poland in 1939, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Other cities largely destroyed by German bombs included Belgrade, Coventry, and Rotterdam. From 1943, various cities in the Reich fell victim to Allied air raids, most notably Hamburg and Dresden. The shooting of hostages in retaliation was equally contentious, as was the torpedoing of ships – declared to be refugee ships by one warring party and seen as military transport vessels by the other – which claimed thousands of lives at sea. The besieging of cities was a lesser-known problem under international law. From the fall of 1941 until the spring of 1944, Leningrad was besieged by German troops who deliberately starved out the population; more than one million inhabitants were killed by shells or died of hunger and cold during this time.
The following section takes a closer look at this complex topic with regard to the unlawful treatment of POWs in German captivity. German crimes against Polish POWs began as early as the blitzkrieg on Poland. During this period, there were isolated cases in which Polish soldiers were immediately shot instead of being captured. The treatment meted out to Serbian POWs in 1941 also contravened international law, while Jews were immediately singled out and murdered. In terms of numbers, Soviet POWs accounted for the largest proportion of victims of German war crimes. The death by starvation of large parts of the population was already part of the planning for the war on the Soviet Union, while numerous groups were denied any right to life at all. The so-called Commissar Order issued by the High Command of the Wehrmacht on June 6, 1941 announced that political commissioners were to be singled out as Bolshevists and were not to be considered POWs. As a result, they were denied the protected status accorded to POWs under international law. In the eyes of the Wehrmacht, these ‘commissioners’ were political officers of the Red Army who were responsible for the political education of soldiers. This fiat was also directed against Jewish people, since Bolshevism and Judaism were invariably inextricably linked in Nazi ideology. It was neither possible nor desirable to identify the commissioners beyond doubt: the Wehrmacht focused on badges (star, hammer and sickle), although these could easily be removed, and on appearances and assumptions.
The Commissar Order issued by the High Command of the Wehrmacht probably reached most German units; however, not all troops obeyed it in full. It is estimated that 50 to 60% of all units singled out so-called ‘commissioners’ and Jews as ‘intolerable’ and shot them immediately after they had been captured. Some units probably interpreted the command to mean that all enemy officers should be murdered; there were isolated cases in which special attention was paid to killing female members of the Red Army. At least 150,000 Jewish and Communist POWs were shot in all.
Most Soviet POWs were sent to main concentration camps or officers’ camps via POW assembly points and transit camps. These main camps and officers’ camps were used for the long-term detention of POWs and were primarily located in the occupied territories (‘Reich Commission for the Eastern Territories‘, Ukraine, Poland), Germany, and Austria. Thousands of exhausted POWs lost their lives on the march to the camps, while the guards acting as escorts shot those who were too weak to go on. The camps themselves were completely inadequately equipped; some of the prisoners were kept outdoors and exposed to all weathers, while others were housed in dugouts or tents that offered little protection. The medical care available was extremely poor. The situation worsened from September 1941, when the Wehrmacht drastically cut POW rations in the expectation that the war would continue for a long time. The army’s Quartermaster-General, Eduard Wagner, issued an order that POWs who were unable to work should be starved. As a result, people who were already weakened starved to death on an unprecedented scale: by the spring of 1942, more than half of the 3.7 million Soviet POWs in German captivity had died, and vast numbers continued to perish until the spring of 1943. This led to the deaths of at least 2.5 million Soviet POWS in German camps. The Wehrmacht was responsible for their treatment. Even POWs who had been deemed fit for work and transported to the Reich were still in imminent danger of death. Thousands of Red Army troops in Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps, particularly those of Jewish origin, were murdered in execution facilities where shots were delivered to the back of the neck, some of which had been specially constructed for this purpose. The victims were deceived until the very end: they were each instructed to step up to a measuring stick on the pretext that their height was to be measured, but were then shot from behind. Others were executed or succumbed to the wretched conditions in the camps. In all, three million Soviet POWs captured by the Germans perished.
After the fall of Benito Mussolini and Italy’s capitulation to the Western Allies, the German Wehrmacht also took its former ally’s troops into captivity. They too were excluded from the protection of international law and were not treated as POWs. Some Italian POWs were shot as soon as they had been disarmed. Others were sent to the Reich or the occupied Eastern territories to carry out forced labor. The poor treatment resulted in a high mortality rate: by 1945, some 50,000 of the approximately 725,000 ‘Italian military internees’ had died. POWs captured from the Western Allies generally received better treatment, since the Germans feared that German POWs in British or American captivity would otherwise fall victim to retaliatory measures. However, this did not apply to ‘colored’ POWs, who were often treated abominably or massacred. Other Western Allied troops also met with violence, particularly during the Allied landing in Normandy and the German Ardennes offensive in Malmedy in December 1944, when SS members murdered American POWs. In many cases, POWs who had been captured from the Western Allies and subsequently broke out of the camps were also shot; this was the fate of the escapees from the Sagan camp. Towards the end of the war, there were isolated cases in which Jewish American POWs were singled out and sent to satellite concentration camps. Racist criteria dominated the treatment of POWs until the very end.
