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Americans, Germans, and War Crimes: Converging Narratives from "the Good War"
James J. Weingartner
| All nations participating in World War II were guilty of war crimes, although that recognition is subject to important qualification. German genocide as the supreme wartime offense, Japanese mass murders of Chinese, the slaughter of Polish officers by the Soviet Union—the list is hardly complete, and some would argue for the inclusion of indiscriminate bombing of cities—are distinct from the smaller-scale and more spontaneous atrocities that were commonplace on all sides. The latter were often the products of combat stresses that were universal and independent of either official programs of extermination or of ideologies and perspectives that dehumanized the enemy and encouraged the annihilation of enemy civilians as well as combatants, programs and perspectives especially characteristic of the German war against the Soviet Union. As the historian John W. Dower has shown, the antagonists' mutual perceptions of inhuman "otherness" lent the Pacific war its characteristic savagery. Max Hastings, in discussing the murder of prisoners of war (POWS) in Normandy by combatants who generally recognized each other's common humanity, notes that "in the heat of battle, in the wake of seeing comrades die, many men found it intolerable to send prisoners to the rear knowing that they would thus survive the war, while they themselves seemed to have little prospect of doing so.... it is difficult with hindsight to draw a meaningful moral distinction between the behavior of one side and the other on the battlefield." The Canadian general Chris Vokes, considering a plea for clemency from Kurt Meyer, commander of the Twelfth SS Panzer Division, who had been condemned to death in a postwar trial for the murders of Canadian pows, conceded "there isn't a general or colonel on the Allied side that I know of who hasn't said, 'Well, this time we don't want any prisoners.'"1 |
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Prisoners were killed in reprisal for real or imagined atrocities, for the utilitarian reason that keeping them was impractical or inconvenient, or out of frustration with a war that was going badly or was being unnecessarily prolonged by the enemy. Civilians often fell victim to the fury of ground combatants, particularly in situations where occupying forces were real or imagined objects of guerrilla warfare. Due to their brutal occupation policies and Allied encouragement and material support of armed resistance to them, Germans troops were frequent targets and reacted with indiscriminate savagery. A particularly horrific example is the slaughter on June 10, 1944, of over 600 civilians in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane by troops of the Second SS Panzer Division, which had recently been transferred from Russia and was on its way to the Normandy front. For some combatants, the perverse joy young men may derive from killing an overpowered adversary was motivation enough. The late Stephen E. Ambrose recalled that he had interviewed over one thousand American combat veterans, of whom approximately one-third reported witnessing the killing of German prisoners by American troops. The notorious "Malmédy massacre" of December 17, 1944, in which approximately 80 surrendered G.I.s were gunned down by troops of a Waffen SS battle group commanded by SS Lt. Col. Joachim Peiper, is roughly matched by the killing of some 75 Axis pows by troops of the U.S. Forty-fifth Infantry Division at Biscari, Sicily, on July 14, 1943. Both atrocities occurred in the context of intense combat, and in both commanders had, for largely pragmatic reasons, discouraged the taking of prisoners.2 |
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