WAR CRIMES.

Strictly speaking, the term war crimes means breaches of the laws of war committed in war; it was first used in this sense by the British jurist Lassa Oppenheim in 1906. In a broader sense it includes "crimes against peace" and "crimes against humanity." Genocide and the Holocaust are treated here mainly in their relationship to war crimes.

EUROPE IN 1914

Europe was at the zenith of its power in 1914, dominant in world trade, industrial production, and foreign investment. European power derived not only from its early industrialization but also from its global reach. As the twentieth century began, European powers were already engaged in unprecedented wars of total subjugation for the exploitation of undeveloped countries. In the Congo, Belgian rule meant ruthless exploitation in which millions were killed by flogging, shooting, burning, forced labor until exhaustion, and diseases spread by the disruption of the violent incursion. Belgian methods of colonial rule were emulated in the German Cameroons and French Equatorial Africa. (Death rates are impossible to calculate in the absence of reliable census statistics, but Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost [1998], estimates a population loss of 50 percent in the Congo during the period 1884–1920, and a similar rate in French Equatorial Africa; other historians are more cautious and do not give figures.) The suppression of the Maji Maji rebellion in German East Africa (1905–1907) led to the death of at least 250,000 people. There may not have been genocidal intent in these cases, but for the peoples involved the effects were catastrophic. What could happen when a European power decided on a "war of annihilation" was shown in German Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1907 when German troops wiped out the majority of the Herero people; the 17,000 survivors were interned in concentration camps where half of them died. In total almost 80 percent of the Herero perished.

Despite Hannah Arendt's suggestive remarks in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) on the precursor role of European colonialism and its legacy of racist exterminism, no convincing argument has emerged to show that there was a direct, causal connection between colonial warfare and war crimes or genocide in World War II. The greatest perpetrators, the Belgians in the employ of King Leopold II's Congo company, were not responsible for war crimes in either of the world wars. Yet at a deeper level, imperialist ideology, rooted in real or vicarious experience of empire, could fuse with militarist nationalism, which grew from different roots, to produce the idea of enemy people as inferior, even as "vermin." In Absolute Destruction Isabel Hull locates the connection in the miltary culture of Germany as it developed from 1870 to 1914, rather than identifying colonial warfare as the cause or precursor of later war crimes in Europe. This approach provides a powerful explanation of German war crimes in World War I but is less persuasive in explaining national differences.

Just as colonial war crimes were reaching their catastrophic peak in the two decades before 1914, the world's most advanced nations were meeting to codify the laws of war in international agreements to prevent unnecessary suffering and protect noncombatants in the 1906 Geneva Convention and the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions. This historic paradox was not entirely the piece of hypocrisy it appears at first sight. The years 1900 to 1914 marked a period in which criticism of imperialism grew increasingly vocal, the international scandal around the Belgian atrocities in the Congo and the sustained domestic political criticism in Germany of colonial warfare being prominent examples, resulting in both cases in the belated reform of colonial rule. In the South African war (1899–1902) almost 28,000 Boer civilians and, it is often forgotten, at least 16,000 Africans had died in "concentration camps" established by the British. But the intervention of scandalized liberal opinion in Britain, notably a report by Emily Hobhouse, came in time to enforce the improvement of camp conditions, reducing the death rate. The increasing importance of the discourse of human rights in the international public sphere helps to explain the sense of outrage at the war crimes committed during World War I.

WORLD WAR I AND AFTER

War crimes accompanied World War I from beginning to end. The German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg freely admitted that the invasion of neutral Belgium broke international law (Hague Convention V). This focused attention on the legal-moral question, but the British response was not, as some historians have argued, merely a cynical smokescreen for traditional great power politics: the prospect of German hegemony over the Continent posed a fundamental threat to British security. That the German invasion was followed within days by news that German troops had committed widespread atrocities against Belgian and French civilians not only confirmed the moral justification of the Allied cause but also lent the Allies a propaganda weapon to mobilize home and neutral opinion that was all the more powerful for being based on reality: from August to October 1914 the German army intentionally killed 5,521 civilians in Belgium and 906 in France. Atrocity propaganda notoriously exaggerated and invented some stories (e.g., children's hands severed, nuns raped), but the truth was bad enough: the victims were virtually all unarmed civilians; many were women and children; civilians were used as human shields before enemy fire; there were instances of torture and arson; and, most damaging for the reputation of Germany as a cultured nation, the university library of Louvain was deliberately burned.

After the initial invasions, everywhere in occupied Europe civilians were subject to exploitation and arbitrary rule; to prevent escape, a lethal electrified fence was erected on the border between Belgium and the Netherlands. Civilians were deported as forced labor, including 120,000 Belgians and several thousand women and girls from Lille. In eastern Europe there was a brutal occupation regime with extensive forced labor; the exploitation of natural resources and disruption of war led to impoverishment, famine, and epidemics in which thousands died in the winter of 1917–1918. In pioneering work at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920), the European nations that were the victims of German aggression drew up thirty-two categories of war crimes (starting with massacre of civilians and the killing of hostages and including gender-specific crimes of rape and forced prostitution), which helped frame the terms of the prosecution of war crimes following World War II. Against U.S. objections, the European nations thus created a historic precedent in demanding the extradition of German suspects for international war crimes trials. The attempt failed, mainly owing to Allied disunity, and German war crimes trials, staged in 1921 with obvious reluctance, proved unsatisfactory.

Yet Germany was not the only perpetrator. The Russian army was accused of widespread acts of violence during the invasion of East Prussia in August–September 1914. Internal German investigations show the Russian troops generally behaved correctly toward civilians, and the total number killed amounted to only 101. Nevertheless, 13,600 German civilians, including 6,500 women and children, were deported to Russia; only 8,300 of them survived the harsh conditions. The tsarist army also embarked on a policy of scorched earth in its retreat in 1915, destroying supplies and buildings, and deporting civilians. At least 300,000 Lithuanians, 250,000 Latvians, around 400,000 ethnic Germans, 500,000 Jews, and 743,000 Poles were driven east into Russia for fear they would assist the enemy. How many died in consequence will probably never be known. The Austro-Hungarian invasions of Serbia in 1914 and 1915 were accompanied by allegations of atrocities against the population; although this is still underresearched, it appears that at least 1,000 civilians were killed.

The most significant case of the killing of noncombatants was the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish state. Successive Turkish governments, into the early twenty-first century, have denied that this crime occurred, but there is consensus among non-Turkish scholars that at least 800,000 Armenian Christians, and probably more than one million, were killed immediately or died during deportation marches from their homes in eastern Anatolia or in camps in Syria in the period from April 1915 to mid-1916. Because this crime was carried out by a state against its own subjects and was not a "war crime" on a narrow definition of international law, the European Allies at the Paris Peace Conference attempted to prosecute the perpetrators before an international tribunal under the new term of "crimes against humanity." This was rejected, however, by the U.S. delegation, which thought the concept lacked precision and was morally arbitrary. Trials carried out under British pressure in Istanbul in 1919 resulted in the prosecution of a few minor officials, but most of the accused were released without trial. The European Allies nevertheless attempted in 1920 to extradite nine leading Turkish officials for the massacre of the Armenians, which they declared "an act clearly contrary to the laws and customs of war."

The genocide of the Armenians represented the culmination of an explicit policy of "Turkification," which had begun with the persecution of Armenians in the 1890s and resumed in early 1914 when Turkish terror bands expelled 130,000 people (Greeks and Armenians) from the ?zmir (Smyrna) region, Thrace, and the Aegean coastline into Greece. By 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed, 1,250,000 Greeks had been expelled or fled from their historic homes in Anatolia. Many were killed during the process, including at least 10,000 during the burning of Smyrna in 1922. Similar cruelties were involved in the expulsions of Muslims from Greece during and after the war.

The old consensus that enemy soldiers captured during World War I were generally treated in conformity with international law has recently come under closer scrutiny. By and large, enemy soldiers captured during World War I were treated in conformity with international law by France, Britain, Italy, and Germany. There were nevertheless notable exceptions in which many prisoners were the victims of a downward spiral of neglect and deliberate maltreatment, with varying degrees of violence. The most dangerous time was the moment of capture. Article 23(c) of the Hague Convention IV (Laws and Customs of War on Land) prohibits the killing of a soldier who is surrendering or defenseless. Every army committed such killings, although it was not in their self-interest to do so. Most cases probably went unrecorded, being perpetrated in the heat of the battle, but in one instance there was sufficient evidence for the French to attempt a prosecution. On 21 and 26 August 1914 German Major General Karl Stenger gave an order to kill captured French soldiers, including the wounded, on the battlefield at Thiaville. Despite protests from several Germans, about twenty French soldiers were killed. In a war crimes trial in Germany in 1921, Stenger was acquitted. During the Battle of the Somme (1 July–15 November 1916), some British officers also issued such illegal orders, and there were several instances of German soldiers who were killed while trying to surrender. Joanna Bourke argues that the killing of German captives was routine, an "important part of military expediency" (p. 182). In the absence of any systematic investigation, however, it remains an open question how widespread the practice was. Needless to say, no Allied perpetrators of war crimes were put on trial after World War I.

Once captured, the great majority of prisoners in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy survived, although sometimes both sides illegally forced prisoners to work near the front, endangered by gunfire, often in retaliation for similar measures of the other side. The vast extent of exhausting prisoner labor under dangerous conditions, especially but not exclusively on the German side of the western front, indicates that the concept of the prisoner of war as a noncombatant had collapsed by 1916. The eastern and southern fronts presented an even worse picture: German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners were often housed in Russian camps under harsh conditions with insufficient food and inadequate sanitation and medical care. Of the 2,330,000 Austro-Hungarian, German, and Turkish prisoners, 411,000 died in Russian camps (17.6 percent), and the mortality rate of the prisoners taken by Serbia may have been as high as 25 percent. Some 118,000 Russian prisoners died out of the 2.7 million in the hands of Germany and Austria-Hungary (4.4 percent on Austrian figures, but these statistics, cited by Alon Rachamimov, are incomplete and understate the mortality rate). Italian prisoners in Austro-Hungarian captivity fared particularly badly: out of 468,000 men at least 92,451 (19.8 percent on Italian figures) died. By contrast, of the 477,024 mainly Austro-Hungarian soldiers taken captive by the Italians, 18,049 died, or 3.8 percent, a mortality rate similar to the western European norm (3 to 3.5 percent for British and French prisoners in Germany).

Poison gas warfare was explicitly forbidden under Article 23(a) of the Hague Convention IV. The first use of lethal gas in the war—in April 1915 by the German army—was condemned by the Allies as cruel and illegal, but the British and French immediately began preparations to respond in kind (and were able to by September 1915). Both sides developed ever more poisonous chemicals, and by the end of the war a total of 112,000 tons of gas had been used, of which the Allies deployed 60,000 tons. The dubious Allied justification for their use of gas was that of "legitimate reprisal," a dangerous concept that was not contained in the Hague Conventions, although it was familiar in customary laws of war.

Another controversial aspect of the laws of war was naval blockade. Did the Allied naval blockade of Germany and Austria constitute a war crime? On the face of it, the answer is straightforward: blockade and the confiscation of enemy goods or ships on the high seas were allowed under the Declaration of Paris of 1856; the Declaration of London of 1909 extended the rights of neutral shipping and restricted the type of goods liable to seizure as contraband, but Britain had not ratified it when war began in 1914. Although the majority in the British Admiralty was skeptical of the efficacy of economic warfare, a strategy of blockade was implemented immediately after the war began. The dominant scholarly (and popular) view is that the blockade was illegal and led to serious food shortages causing great suffering among German civilians. In the last two years of the war, average rations for civilians often dropped below 1,000 calories per day (half of minimum requirements), and on average adults lost 20 percent of their body weight during the war. According to postwar German estimates, 700,000 civilians died as a result. There was no question in the minds of German politicians and lawyers in the 1920s that the "British hunger blockade" was a war crime. Historians of the British Navy (Arthur Marder, A.C. Bell), while upholding its legality, avidly supported the thesis that the blockade caused hunger and demoralization. Avner Offer, by contrast, has argued that while the blockade caused a reduction in food supplies, Germany did not starve.

A balanced judgment would recognize that the blockade was intended to target the civilian population, and thus represented a step on the road to total warfare. It was not against the letter of the law (the only violations of law being the interference with the rights of neutral shipping), but it was contrary to the spirit of international law, which sought to protect civilians from war. But it was also not the cause of mass death; given that Germany imported only about 10 percent of its food before the war—unlike Britain, which imported two-thirds—there had to be many other factors that contributed to the widespread hunger in the German civilian population during the war.

German U-boat warfare against Allied warships and merchant ships was also not as such illegal. The manner in which it was conducted, however, flouted the laws of war, because these laws held that the crew and passengers of a sinking merchant ship had to be rescued. U-boats did not have the space to do so. Allowing the passengers and crew the time to get into the lifeboats increased the risk that the U-boats, vulnerable on the surface, could be attacked by warships. By February 1915 the pressure of radical nationalists and frustration at the lack of progress in the land war impelled the German government to declare the waters around the British Isles to be a "war zone," in which all ships would be sunk without warning. Dramatic confirmation of the new policy came on 7 May, when the Lusitania, a large British luxury liner, was sunk off the coast of Ireland en route from New York to Liverpool; 1,198 lives were lost, including 127 Americans. Germany suspended unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic soon after American protests in August 1915, but the army and the navy clamored for its return. They had their way by February 1917, when Germany resumed all-out submarine warfare. The government believed the navy's calculation that so many ships would be sunk that Britain would starve and be forced to sue for peace by 1 August 1917 but was conscious that it was a last, desperate resort, because it broke international law and would provoke the United States to enter the war. Germany's attempt to starve Britain cost the lives of 14,722 merchant (i.e., civilian) seamen. American intervention, which duly came, was thus prompted by what was seen as a war crime. President Woodrow Wilson, in his address to Congress declaring war on Germany, denounced the submarines as "pirates" and "outlaws." Differentiating between the British blockade and German submarine warfare, he said: "England's violation of neutral rights is different from Germany's violation of the rights of humanity."

Although there was self-evidently a difference between the democratic and the authoritarian states in their respect for the laws of war, democracies could also descend to the level of their enemies in ruthless behavior. In Britain's war against the Irish Republican movement (1919–1921), hostage taking, "human shields," and lethal reprisals against unarmed and uninvolved civilians were all used before a truce was called and British forces withdrawn. In the attempt to retain control of oil-rich Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in the 1920s, the British air force attacked the towns and villages of rebellious tribes, dropping bombs and mustard gas indiscriminately. France continued to use forced labor in its colonies throughout and after the war, and it suppressed colonial independence movements with overwhelming force: the bombardment of Damascus (1925) killed several hundred people, and 700 Vietnamese liberation fighters were executed in 1930 alone. Before the United States took over the latter conflict with its own methods, the French probably managed to kill at least half a million Vietnamese. In its struggle to combat the Algerian national liberation movement in the war from 1954 to 1962, the French army routinely used torture, population deportations, and summary executions of prisoners. British decolonization after 1945 was by comparison a relatively benign process in which war crimes were largely conspicuous by their absence.

WORLD WAR II AND AFTER

Between the world wars there was a historic shift in the nature of warfare in general and war crimes in particular. The result was what some historians have called a "degeneration" of warfare, with a terrible increase in combatant and noncombatant loss of life. Whereas civilians accounted for 5 percent of the war dead in World War I, the proportion in World War II was 50 percent. There were two main causes for this dramatic jump: the revolution in the technology of war, primarily aerial warfare, and the revolution in ideology, primarily racial warfare and the response to it.

The fact that civilians had not suffered mass casualties from aerial bombardment during World War I was due less to observance of the laws of war than the state of development of the technology of aerial warfare. By the end of World War I, however, the potential for mass destruction from aerial bombardment was clearly visible, and it was realized in almost every war since then.

During World War II, first German and then British air strategy targeted enemy civilians to kill them; reducing their morale and destroying the economy were equally important objectives but could be achieved only by killing people. This made it very different from Allied economic warfare during World War I, which could achieve its objectives practically without bloodshed. The Germans, having practiced on the Spanish town Guernica in 1937, bombed Warsaw in 1939 and Rotterdam in 1940, causing thousands of casualties. This deliberate flouting of international law was intended to terrorize the population and provoke quick surrender. The same strategy when applied to British cities provoked instead a crescendo of bombing of German cities starting in 1941 and culminating in the obliteration of half of Hamburg in August 1943 and of Dresden in February 1945. While German bombs killed some 60,000 British civilians, British (and American) bombing killed ten times as many: 593,000 German civilians. The Allied war on Nazi Germany was understood at the time as a "just war," a judgment that has stood the test of time; yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion that aerial warfare on civilians was neither effective nor lawful.

Only after Nazi warfare had demonstrated its murderous nature had Britain turned to aerial war as a strategic last resort. The Nazi regime and German military had no such compunctions. They were agreed that the manner of their warfare was to be criminal from the start. Germany launched a series of wars of aggression, breaching the letter and spirit of existing international law (the Hague Convention and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 renouncing aggressive war); their essence was a war of racial-biological annihilation to allow the German "race" to take its place at the top by exploiting the inferior races and exterminating those deemed vermin. On 22 August 1939 Adolf Hitler explained to Wehrmacht (armed forces) commanders how the forthcoming war against Poland was to be waged: "Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right. The greatest harshness" (Documents on German Foreign Policy, ser. D, vol. 7, doc. 193). The elimination of the Polish intelligentsia, nobility, Catholic priests, and Jews was conceived as part of the policy of "ethnic redistribution" (völkische Flurbereinigung), an idea that went back to a proposal of General Erich Ludendorff in the occupation of eastern Europe in World War I; it was associated with Lebensraum, the creation of "living space" for German colonists in the east. The chief of the armed forces high command, General Wilhelm Keitel, was fully informed of the intention to carry out the mass killings in September 1939, and although these were carried out by the SS and police units, the army was closely involved in the deportations of Jews; soldiers witnessed and in some cases carried out executions of Jewish men, women, and children, and of Polish prisoners of war. The army was thus the instrument of racial war, which "broke through the international legal boundaries of war as a military conflict" (Wildt, p. 479). These war crimes opened the road to policies of genocide.

The Nazis were not the only perpetrators of war crimes in Poland. At the same time as the German invasion, Soviet forces entered from the east in line with the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939. Of the 240,000 Polish soldiers taken prisoner by the Red Army, some 4,000 officers were shot in the back of the head in the spring of 1940 and buried in mass graves at Katy? Forest near Smolensk, which German forces discovered and publicized in 1943. Despite Soviet accusations that this was a Nazi massacre, independent forensic and Polish witness evidence corroborated the German claim that the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, was responsible. The official denial was maintained until the end of the existence of the Soviet state; only in 1992 did the temporary phase of glasnost (openness) under Mikhail Gorbachev permit an admission of Soviet responsibility. Documents were published showing that in March 1940 Lavrenty Beria, director of the NKVD, had recommended the execution of over 25,000 Polish officers, landowners, civil servants, and others. Altogether the NKVD killed 15,000 Polish officers and policemen (22,000 in another estimate). Evidently, the intention was not to wipe out a people but to deprive Poland of independent leadership by eliminating its military and political elite. Soviet repression, with 100,000 Polish civilians arrested and 18,000 shot, and tens of thousands of deaths during deportation to Siberia, can nevertheless only be termed a crime against humanity.

Of the systematic brutality of the Soviet regime in the era of Joseph Stalin (1924–1953) there cannot be any doubt. The policy of incarceration and execution of real and imagined opponents had consumed millions of lives in the 1930s. When the war came, political prisoners and the many suspected of espionage were liquidated by the NKVD to stop them from falling into German hands: 80,000 to 100,000 in Ukraine alone, according to an American estimate. Entire ethnic minorities suspected of potential sympathy for the invader were deported east: among them the Kalmyks, Ingush, and Crimean Tartars, and 400,000 Volga Germans and 140,000 other Germans. In the effort to impose draconian discipline in the Red Army in the face of the Nazi invasion, thousands of Soviet soldiers were executed for alleged cowardice, disobedience, or desertion. Soviet treatment of German prisoners of war was in flagrant breach of international law, regardless of the Soviet nonratification of the 1929 Geneva Convention. Countless German soldiers who were captured were shot on the spot, despite repeated orders from senior commanders to stop the practice. In total, 1.1 million out of 3.2 million German prisoners (34 percent) died in Soviet captivity, but because this figure includes the many men captured at the end of the war, it conceals the much higher death rate for Germans captured during the war, of whom perhaps as many as 90 percent died. As the war ended, millions of Germans were forced to leave their homes in territories that were allocated to Poland and Russia and were expelled to the west in circumstances of great cruelty; according to the official West German documentation 75,000 to 100,000 civilians were killed in the first few weeks of the Soviet occupation. This amounts to a Soviet policy of "ethnic redistribution."

While the Soviet system under Stalin was ultimately responsible for more deaths than the Nazi regime, only a small proportion of them were in fact war crimes; Soviet warfare did not entail a state policy of mass elimination of enemy populations. The ferocity and cruelty resulted from the extreme emotions of hatred, anger, and the desire for vengeance. Germany, by contrast, entered the war against the Soviet Union with a systematic plan to annihilate entire populations, decided on during the preparations for Operation Barbarossa (the code name for the invasion of the Soviet Union). Leading Nazi officials and the army leadership reached consensus by February 1941 that the territory to be invaded would be forced to provide a food surplus to feed Germany; in the process thirty million inhabitants would be killed or starve to death. This amounted to the planning of a vast war crime, a starvation strategy perpetrated for economic reasons, underpinned with the ideology of racism. Hermann Goering (plenipotentiary for the four-year plan) explained that occupied eastern Europe was to be economically exploited using colonial methods. The policies of genocide were thus inseparable from Nazi warfare.

On 30 March 1941, well before the attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler told his armed forces commanders: "We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A communist is no comrade before or after battle. This is a war of extermination" (cited in Förster, 1998a, p. 497). The army was a willing accomplice. Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the army commander in chief, told top commanders on 27 March: "The troops have to realize that this struggle is being waged by one race against another, and proceed with the necessary harshness" (cited in Förster, 1998a, p. 485). German treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, a story that has long been left untold in the shadow of the Holocaust, was especially brutal, as well as illegal. The prisoners were the victims of the ruthless starvation policy: quartermaster-general Eduard Wagner told army commanders on 13 November 1941, "non-working prisoners of war in the camps will have to starve" (cited in Messerschmidt, pp. 558–559). Of the 5.7 million prisoners, some 3.3 million (58 percent) died from hunger, disease, and maltreatment.

Some of the worst violence was visited upon the people of eastern Europe in connection with partisan (or guerrilla) warfare. The German commanders preparing the invasion of the Soviet Union decided that the population's right to defend itself and take up arms spontaneously, enshrined in Article 2 of the Hague Convention IV, was void. Not only the "freeshooters" (Freischärler), but also "the civilian who calls for obstruction (e.g. propagandists, leaflet distributors, disobeying German orders, arsonists … etc.)" was to be "liquidated" (Horne and Kramer, p. 407). While this was clearly unlawful, German practice regarding resistance to occupation appeared to be on better legal grounds, because Article 2 of the Hague Convention IV made provision only for popular resistance to invasion, not occupation. Article 42 stated, however, that a territory was "considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised."

In this context, war crimes were of three main types. First, guerrillas were to be "ruthlessly finished off by the troops in combat or while trying to escape," according to a decree of Keitel, chief of armed forces high command, on "the exercise of war jurisdiction … and on special measures" (Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlaß) issued on Hitler's behalf on 13 May 1941 (cited in Förster, 1998a, p. 501). This breached the law on giving no quarter to surrendering combatants.

Second, the Germans devoted great resources to tracking down partisans and their supporters. To this day, it is self-evident to many writers on military affairs, both German and non-German, that guerrilla fighters are illegal combatants who lose the right to be treated as prisoners of war. The German army, however, never fully established its authority, for behind the German lines large areas of forests and many villages were in the hands of the partisans. Partisan resistance in the USSR started with relatively small, dispersed units of Soviet soldiers who found themselves behind the lines because of the rapid advance of the German troops following the narrow invasion paths driven by the tank units; but by 1942 there were at least 100,000 or 150,000 partisans, and that number increased year by year. Captured partisans or suspects were tortured to squeeze information from them and then executed. The military police alone murdered 12,000 suspected partisans in occupied Soviet territory in the first half of 1942, and 21,000 in the following nine months. The regular army in the central area killed 63,257 partisans or partisan suspects by 1 March 1942. Many, probably most, of the victims were not even active partisans—they were Soviet soldiers who had been stranded behind the lines, had thrown away their weapons, and were peacefully working on farms.

Third, partisan attacks on the Germans were punished with reprisals on the nearby civilian population. Keitel's decree instructed that if the army had been "insidiously or treacherously" attacked, wherever the assailants could not be immediately identified, "collective forcible measures" against suspect localities could be ordered by battalion commanders. In language and doctrine this directly recalled the army's conduct in 1914. On 23 July 1941, after Stalin's call for all-out partisan war, the German armed forces command issued a directive stating that the army would break resistance "not by the legal punishment of the guilty, but by striking such terror into the population that it loses all will to resist" (Förster, 1998b, p. 1197). In Belarus (White Russia), for example, the Germans attempted to eliminate the entire population of 628 villages in reprisal for partisan activity, killing about 83,000 people in the process. Altogether, German forces killed about 345,000 people in Belarus in suppressing "partisans," although not more than one in ten of the victims were actually partisans. In the great majority of cases there was no armed resistance. Most victims were women and children, and the killing was carried out with extreme brutality: torturing, shooting, burning, exploding grenades and shells, gassing, stabbing, hanging, and drowning. In addition, 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 or 550,000 Jews, and 100,000 others were killed or deliberately starved (Gerlach, p. 1158). In total, of the 9 million remaining in Belarus when the Germans invaded, 1.6 million or 1.7 million, or 18 to 19 percent, perished.

Keitel's decree of 13 May, and the "commissar order" of 6 June 1941, which laid down that political commissars in the Red Army and in civilian administration were to be liquidated, were intimately connected with the Nazi view that the coming war was to eliminate the "Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia." General Franz Halder, chief of the army general staff, justified the Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlaß by saying that every civilian was a potential "bearer of the Jewish-Bolshevik worldview." These criminal orders demonstrate that the Nazi policies of genocide of the Jews were not isolated from the course of the war. By September 1941, tens of thousands of Jewish men were executed alongside alleged Bolshevik commissars, while hundreds of thousands were deported into ghettos; starting in August 1941 Jewish women and children were also executed. The notorious massacre of over 33,000 Jewish people from Kiev at Babi Yar in September 1941 is one of several examples of close cooperation between the army and SS. At least 140,000—but possibly up to 600,000—Soviet prisoners of war alleged to be Bolshevik commissars were shot under the commissar order.

The perpetrators of mass murder in eastern Europe were not, as was long assumed, mainly fanatical Nazis and SS men. Just over half the civilian victims and prisoners of war in Belarus were killed by regular army units, and about 45 percent by the SS and police and their local auxiliaries. These figures can probably be extrapolated for the rest of occupied Soviet territory.

Warfare in western Europe had at first appeared to have a more humane face. Every German soldier had in his pay book a copy of the Hague Convention IV, and the Geneva Convention was also respected. During the invasion of western Europe in 1940 the French were astounded to see the Germans conduct a chivalrous war. There was one ominous exception: the Wehrmacht killed upon capture up to 4,000 black Africans serving in the French army. All of France was occupied (or was ruled until 1942 by the collaborationist government of Vichy), and resistance until 1944 could thus be regarded as illegal; naturally, this did not make reprisals against the civilian population or the execution of hostages permissible. Starting in June 1944 the French Resistance had a firm legal basis in the Allied invasion, as did that in Italy starting in September 1943. In Yugoslavia, Tito's communist partisan movement captured a town as early as August 1941 and managed to hold it until November. Yet in contravention of the laws of war the Germans carried out terrible reprisals everywhere, summarily executing captured combatants and killing uninvolved civilians such as at Oradour-sur-Glane in south-central France. There, on 10 June 1944, a Waffen-SS division, in "reprisal" for a Resistance attack, followed orders to "burn down the village and exterminate everyone from babies to old persons"; 642 inhabitants were killed. When Italy capitulated to the Allies in September 1943, the German army reacted by immediately occupying the zones not yet liberated by the Allies and ordering the disarming of the Italian armed forces. Resistance was punishable by death, and in flagrant contravention of Article 23(c) of the Hague Convention IV at least 6,794 captured Italian officers and soldiers were executed, more than 5,000 of them in the notorious killings on the island of Cephalonia. In hundreds of villages and towns across Italy civilians were killed in the antipartisan campaign, in which unarmed and uninvolved men, women, and children were declared guilty by association with the Resistance (580 Italian children under age fourteen were killed; in total, 9,200 civilians were killed). In Civitella, near Arezzo in Tuscany, 251 were killed; 335 were killed at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome; and 770 were killed in Marzabotto, near Bologna. These were war crimes and publicly denounced as such by the Allies in 1944, yet prosecution of the criminals was shamefully delayed by the politics of the Cold War until the 1990s.

Finally, sexual violence also constituted a war crime. Although rape was a punishable offense in the German army (and perpetrators were sentenced in some cases in western Europe to ten years in jail), it was often tolerated in eastern Europe, and sexual violence in the form of forced prostitution was widespread, with the establishment of brothels for the army and SS, even in the concentration camps. Internal German reports consistently estimated that about 50 percent of men had been involved in sexual relations with women in eastern Europe, the majority of which must have been de facto rapes. Yet there was no Nazi policy of rape as a war strategy, unlike the hundreds of thousands of rapes that the victorious Red Army soldiers committed on German women in 1945. Stalin and his army commanders knew about this and condoned it, indicating that it was a policy to humiliate the Germans in defeat and wreak vengeance for their war crimes. The absence of prosecution of these German crimes at Nuremberg and in subsequent trials was probably due to the awareness of the guilt of Allied armies in this regard.

CONCLUSION

The chronicle of war crimes suggests that Europe was a peculiarly bloody place during the twentieth century. Yet for the great majority of people alive in the early twenty-first century, war crimes have been no more than a secondhand memory, passed down by school history lessons, countless films and television documentaries about World War II and the Holocaust, and possibly through the narratives of older family members. This collective memory in contemporary culture means that war crimes are an ever-present latent trauma, stronger in European societies that experienced wartime occupation, repression, and genocide, but by no means absent in countries without such direct experience, such as Britain.

There were so many varied categories of war crimes it appears difficult to deduce a single explanatory theory. Certain characteristics, however, do emerge. Two kinds of states tried to take shortcuts to "victory": conservative authoritarian states seeking to preserve the internal status quo, and revolutionary states (on their self-definition) seeking to overturn the established internal or external order. War crimes could take military form in ruthless conduct toward perceived and actual enemies, or they could result from the invention of the notion of a pure national ethnicity and the geographic exclusion or even physical elimination of the "other," whether as internal or external population. Not only Nazi Germany but also the Soviet state under Stalin treated entire population groups as potential enemies, the former with explicitly genocidal goals. Democracies tended to forswear racial, social, or ideological definitions of citizenship and neither in internal nor in external policy in war did they attempt to attain their aims through the commission of war crimes. The major exceptions were in colonial warfare and aerial warfare against civilian populations as a response to fascist war.

The nationalist chimera of the ethnically pure nation-state, the impulse for so many war crimes, was in practice laid to rest in western Europe after 1945. It was deliberately resurrected in the 1990s, however, by ex-communist politicians seeking to retain their power in Yugoslavia, where it provided the impetus for the commission of war crimes. The response of Western European nations and the United States to these war crimes, however hesitant, however imperfect, shows that the latent trauma in collective memory was strong enough to impel their governments to act to protect the populations of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, ultimately forcing a process of democratization on Serbia itself and putting major perpetrators on trial for war crimes.

See alsoGenocide; Hague Convention; Holocaust; Katyn Forest Massacre; Leipzig Trials; Nuremberg War Crimes Trials; World War I; World War II.

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Alan Kramer