Massacres and Atrocities of WW2

I read on the website for the Oradour sur Glane, that from a German perspective that atrocities were committed by the Maquis and it was this that led to the response from the SS. Also that a Maquis bomb was detonated in the church leading to the deaths of those inside and not by the actions of the SS. Although it is from a German perspective it shows a disconcerting light on how things were treated after the event. The reason for so many escaping justice is down to evidence that the Maquis atrocities would be exposed and the disinformation would be exposed shaming the French government. It is from a German slant, but it would explain the loose ends which one would not expect from a thorough investigation.

I read recently that General MacArthur himself was party to having the actions of war criminals not acted on. Where did this response come from, and what justification could have warranted it.

 

One thinks at first some government departments etc should have been bought to book for the inaction in dealing with the war criminals. Then one thinks that with the war over and ogre of Communism from the east and the atomic bomb in their midst, the world was still politically and economical not only militarily an unstable place. Personal disgust and morals could be put on a back burner if knowledge purloined/acquired kept a peace of sorts keeping the ogre from the door so to speak. I don't for one condone it but I can see perhaps some of the reasoning if one looks at the big picture and not how it would affect one nation in particular.

Why more Japanese were not hauled up on war crimes I don't know, but then maybe the position in the Korean peninsula in the early fifties and keeping the Japanese sweet so as to have a base to face a Communist enemy,blocked any determined investigations and the keeping of relations with Japan in light of Korea, meant it wouldn't be prudent to stir up animosity with a new fledged ally.

 

The Laha Airfield Executions

(February 9, 1942) Two graves, about five metres apart, were dug in a wooded area near the Laha airstrip on Ambon Island. They were circular in shape, six metres in diameter and three metres deep. Soon after 6pm, a group of Australian and Dutch prisoners of war, their arms tied securely behind them, were brought to the site. The first prisoner was made to kneel at the edge of the grave and the execution, by samurai beheading, was carried out by a Warrant Officer Kakutaro Sasaki. The next four beheadings were the privilage of eager crew-members of a Japanese mine-sweeper sunk a few days previously by an enemy mine in Ambon Bay. This could only be considered as an act of reprisal for the loss of their ship. As dusk decended, and the beheadings continued, battery torches were used to light up the back of the necks of each successive victim. The same macabre drama was being enacted at the other round grave where men of a Dutch mortar unit were being systematically decapitated. On this unforgettable evening, 55 Australian and 30 Dutch soldiers were murdered. Details of this atrocity came to light during the interrogation of civilian interpreter, Suburo Yoshizaki, who was attached to the Kure No.1 Special Navy Landing Party, at that time stationed on Ambon.
A few days later, on February 24, in the same wooded area, another bizare execution ceremony took place. Around the graves stood about 30 naval personnel who had volunteered for this grisly task, many of them carrying swords which they had borrowed. When some of the young prisoners were dragged to the edge of the grave, shouting desperately and begging for their lives, shouts of jubilation came from those marines witnessing the executions. In this mass murder, which ended at 1.30am the following morning, the headless bodies of 227 Allied prisoners filled the two large graves. Witness to this second massacre was Warrant Officier Keigo Kanamoto, Commanding Officier of the Kure No.1 Repair and Construction Unit.

 

Banka Massacre


( St. Valentine's Day, Feb.14, 1942) On board the SS Vyner Brooke were 65 Australian Army nurses who, together with other civilian women and children, made up the 300 odd persons being evacuated from Singapore. In the Banka Strait, a narrow strip of water between the islands of Banka and Sumatra, the Vyner Brooke was bombed and sunk by Japanese planes. Twelve nurses had drowned and 32 ended up in prison. A few lifeboats containing 22 nurses managed to reach Radji beach on the mangrove lined shore of Banka Island. On advice from some islanders they were advised to give themselves up to the Japanese as there was no hope of escaping. That night another lifeboat arrived on the shore containing between 30 and 40 British servicemen from another ship sunk earlier. The civilian women, some nurses and children, then set out to walk to the nearest Japanese compound to give themselves up. Once in the compound the nurses were subjected to an endless night of revolting rape by officers and NCOs of the guard platoon. ( After the war it was learned that the same platoon was later posted to Rangoon, Burma, but on the voyage their ship was sunk with great loss of life.) When the Japanese arrived at the beach the men and women were separated, the men were marched into the jungle, never to be heard of again. The soldiers returned and forced the remaining 22 nurses to wade out into the sea. There, they were machined-gunned to death, leaving only one survivor, Sister Vivian Bulwinkle, who later managed to reach the island's Japanese Naval Headquarters where she was put to work in the hospital. For over three years she kept the secret of the massacre to herself and a few friends. To speak openly about it would have been a certain recipe for execution. When the war ended only 24 of the original 65 nurses were still alive.

 

Philippines Massacre

A full account of all massacres of Philippinos by Japanese troops would fill several books. In Manila, 800 men women and children were machine-gunned in the grounds of St.Paul's College. In the town of Calamba, 2,500 were shot or bayoneted. One hundred were bayoneted and shot inside a church at Ponson and 169 villagers of Matina Pangi were rounded up and shot in cold blood. On Palawan Island, 150 American prisoners of war were murdered. At the War Crimes Trial in Tokyo, document No 2726 consisted of 14,618 pages of sworn affidavits, each describing separate atrocities committed by the invading Japanese troops. The Tribunal listed 72 large scale massacres and 131,028 murders as a bare minimum.

 

The Parit Sulong Massacre

One murderer that did not get away.


In January,1942, a company of Australian and Indian soldiers were captured by the Japanese and interned in a large wooden building at Parit Sulong in Malayasia. Late in the afternoon of January 22, 1942, they were ordered to assemble at the rear of a row of damaged shops nearby.The wounded were carried by those able to walk, the pretext being the promise of medical treatment and food. While waiting at the assembly point, either sitting or lying prone, three machine guns, concealed in the back rooms of the wrecked shops, started their deadly chatter, their concentrated fire chopping flesh and limbs to pieces. A number of prisoners whose bodies showed signs of life, had to be bayoneted. In order to dispose of the bodies, which totaled 161, the row of shops was blown up and the debris bulldozed into a heap on top of which the corpses were placed. Sixty gallons of gasoline was splashed on the bodies and then a flaming torch was thrown on the pile. Just before midnight, the debris of the nine shops had burned into a pile of grey ash two feet high, the 161 bodies totally incinerated. The perpetrator of this foul crime was Lt-Gen.Takuma Nishimura who later faced trial before an Australian Military Court. Nishimura was previously convicted of massacres in Singapore and sentenced to life imprisonment by a British Military Tribunal on April 2, 1947. After serving four years of his sentence, he was being transferred to Tokyo to serve out the rest of his sentence and while the ship stopped temporarily at Hong Kong he was siezed by the Australian military police and taken to Manus Island where his second trial was held. He was found guilty and hanged on June 11, 1951.

 

Aerial slaughter in Europe reached a climax on 13-14 February 1945 at Dresden. The briefing for air crews misrepresented Dresden as "an industrial city of first-class importance." Dresden had always been a center of art and artists, one of Europe's most magnificent cities, itself a work of art; Dresden's "heavy" industry was the manufacture of porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses. Other industries, according to Kurt Vonnegut, held as a POW near Dresden, consisted largely of hospitals and cigarette and clarinet factories. Harris gave the city and its civilians an all-out scourging with 1,400 bombers carrying high explosives and incendiaries. The following day, 1,350 USAAF heavy bombers attacked the marshaling yards with high explosives. USAAF tactical fighters flew over in daylight and strafed survivors who had sought refuge along the river banks. Estimates of the dead vary from 35,000 to 135,000.

 

Katyn Forest Massacre

 

The 12th SS murdered not only Canadians but British troops as well. I recall very clearly that it became known around Normandy. That coupled with the odd occurence of a white flag being flown, as a "want to give up sign"...Only for another to pop up and cut down our troops with a burst of spandua fire.

It worked against them..........Let us put it this way....perhaps there was a hesitation by our troops in taking prisoners after that attrocity.
Sapper

 

i am not saying that its right or wrong. but in times of war, these things happen some soldiers seem to have a blood lust, look at the attrocities carried out by the russians, as they chased the retreating germans, any russian villiage that had been occupied was seen as having collaborated with the enemy, and the whole village was wiped out, and this the russian army did to its own people.

 

Here's a site devoted to this topic.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html

 

was#nt that a common practice, giving the german scientists immunity from the war crime prossecutions, if it was'nt for the german rocket scientists america would never have put a man on the moon, and manyu members of the gestapo were spirited away to form the stazi in east germany
You say many members of the Gestapo were spirited away to form the Stazi in East Germany. I for one wouldn't have fancied their chances being hard line fascist, in what was to become one of the icons of the Warsaw Pact. Saying that Stalin might have drawn a compromise - can't see it myself. Saying that their extremist attitudes would explain stories of the harshness of the Stasi if they either were, or were copying the Gestapo. Perhaps they could be more extreme than anything the KGB or NKVD could turn out.

 

Sometimes a massacre seems entirely justifiable in response to an atrocity:
Dachau Concentration Camp - Liberation April 29,1945 Timeline Dachau
I couldn't blame these young Allied soldiers for an instant.
Cheers,
Adam.
The Allies noted that some of the guards and staff of the concentration camps varied from nonchalance to blatant arrogance. If on seeing the state of the inmates, to be greeted by smug arrogance or smiling, I think those concerned, could be given some understanding in the action they took. It may have serve as a safety release so to speak. I think most people, humanitarian or not across the spectrum, could on looking at the situation understand their actions, if not perhaps justify them.

Ilsa Koch in one of the camps wouldn't let a British major - Artillery I think, see inside a building and was laughing when one of the guard dogs was savaging one of the inmates. When facing gross arrogance like that I for one could be sympathetic to any action the troops took.

If anything they showed great restraint in the circumstances. Here they were witness to killing like a conveyor belt, no battlefield, no kill or be killed. Killing to order against innocents to satisfy a doctrine, not to survive.

 

Oradour-sur-Glane 10 June 1944

Terrific site, Von Poop.
Marina

 

You say many members of the Gestapo were spirited away to form the Stazi in East Germany. I for one wouldn't have fancied their chances being hard line fascist, in what was to become one of the icons of the Warsaw Pact. Saying that Stalin might have drawn a compromise - can't see it myself. Saying that their extremist attitudes would explain stories of the harshness of the Stasi if they either were, or were copying the Gestapo. Perhaps they could be more extreme than anything the KGB or NKVD could turn out.

[FONT=&quot]"In the Soviet zone, the purging of Nazism was undertaken differently, though the final effect was much the same as the western half of the country. Instead of the elaborate legal process of denazification, the Soviets went in for extermination or elavation. SS men who had been denounced were summarily executed and their bodies dumped in the streets with an X stitched across their backs by machine-gun bullets.Members of the German armed forces, whether Party members or not, were deported to the Soviet Union as forced labour, or dragooned into work-gangs in the ruined cities of Germany. But Nazis who could be of use to their new masters and were prepared to serve under them were able to make an easy passage from one totalitarian system to another. When Molotov jeered at the ineffective denazification programme of the Western Allies at the Foreign Ministers' Conference in Moscow in 1947, the British Foreign Minister, Bevin, riposted with a list of top-ranking Nazis now serving the Russian cause in the Eastern zone - men like Markgraf, former SS commander on the Eastern Front, now Chief of Police in Berlin, and Lundwehr, former Nazi Trade Commissioner in the Balkans, now head of the Economics Department of the Berlin city government. Even the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Muller, last seen in the Berlin Bunker shortly after Hitler's suicide, was reportedly working as an advisor on state security in the [/FONT][FONT=&quot]USSR[/FONT][FONT=&quot]. 'As we are unlikely to be affected politically', a Soviet officer was recorded as saying, 'we use the brains of the Nazis as much as possible'" (From "In the Ruins of the Reich" by Douglas Botting pg325-26)

Another book that analyses the rise of Europe's far right by analysing the direct link with Nazi collaboration with both the US & USSR intelligence communities is "The Beast Re-Awakens" by Martin Lee[/FONT]

 

STARVATION AT REMAGEN
After the capture of the Remagen Bridge, the US Army hastily erected dozens of Prisoner of War cages around the bridge-head. The camps were simply open fields surrounded by concertina wire. Those at the Rhine Meadows were situated at Remagen, Bad Kreuznach, Andernach, Buderich, Rheinbach and Sinzig. The German prisoners were hopeful of good treatment from the GIs but in this they were sadly disappointed. Herded into the open spaces like cattle, some were beaten and mistreated. No tents or toilets were supplied. The camps became huge latrines, a sea of urine from one end to the other. They had to sleep in holes in the ground which they dug with their bare hands. In the Bad Kreuznach cage, 560,000 men were interned in an area that could only comfortably hold 45,000. Denied enough food and water, they were forced to eat the grass under their feet and the camps soon became a sea of mud. After the concentration camps were discovered, their treatment became worse as the GIs vented their rage on the hapless prisoners.
In the five camps around Bretzenheim, prisoners had to survive on 600-850 calories per day. With bloated bellies and teeth falling out, they died by the thousands. During the two and a half months (April-May, 1945) when the camps were under American control, a total of 18,100 prisoners died from malnutrition, disease and exposure. This extremely harsh treatment at the hands of the Americans resulted in the deaths of over 50,000 German prisoners of war in the Rhine Meadows camps alone in the months just before and after the war ended. It must however be borne in mind that with the best will in the world it proved almost impossible to care for such a huge number of prisoners under the strict terms of the Geneva Convention. The task of guarding these prisoners, numbering around 920,000, fell to the men of the US 106th. Infantry Division. The Remagen cage was set up to accommodate 100,000 men but ended up with twice that number. On the first afternoon 35,000 prisoners were counted through the gate. About 10,000 of these required urgent medical attention which in most cases was completely absent. All roads leading to the camps were clogged with hundreds of trucks bringing in even more prisoners, sent to the rear by the advancing 9th US Army. By April 15, 1945, 1.3 million prisoners were in American hands. At war's end, 1,056,482 German prisoners were held in US camps in Europe, 692,895 were classified as prisoners of War and 365,587 classified as DEF's (Disarmed Enemy Forces)
Tourists, cruising down the Rhine today can pick out a small memorial and plaque built on the site of the former POW cage. In the Remagen cemetery there are 1,200 graves and at Bad Kreuznach, 1,000 graves.
HOW MANY?
Just how many German POWs died in Allied camps? For over forty years we have been told that many hundreds of thousands of German soldiers had died in Soviet prison camps while at the same time keeping quiet about the number of prisoners who had died in American, French and British camps. In 1997, around 1.1 million German soldiers were still officially listed as missing. According to the recently opened Soviet archives, which have been proved to be extremely precise and detailed, the Red Army captured 2,389,560 German soldiers. Of these, 423,168 died in captivity. In October, 1951, the West German government stated in the United Nations that 1.1 million soldiers had not returned home. In other words, we were led to believe they had died in Soviet camps. If we subtract the proven number of deaths in Soviet camps from the missing in Germany we arrive at the figure of around 677,000. Where are these men?. They must have been interned by the western Allies, the greatest majority being held in American and French camps where they died in their thousands through deliberate starvation, disease and hard work.
The standards set by the Geneva Convention were, in most cases, totally ignored by the Americans and French in relation to their treatment of German prisoners-of-war. The French deliberately starved many of their POWs in order to force them to join the French Foreign Legion. Thousands of Legionaires who fought in the Vietnam conflict were Germans, handed over by the Americans to the French in 1945/46 to work as slave labourers in the rebuilding of France's war damaged cities. Conditions in the French camps were just as bad if not worse than in the American camps. It is estimated that at least 167,000 German soldiers died in French captivity between 1945 and 1948.
ARCHIVE RECORDS
In a large building in the former French Sector of Berlin is housed the military records of every German soldier who served in World War 11. There are kilometres of shelves holding about eighteen million files on every man and woman in the German armed forces. Run by a Director and 364 staff members, they receive around 18,000 requests each year inquiring about family members of whom they have heard nothing since 1945. In a Russian archive at Podolsk, south of Moscow there are names of 700,000 German POWs once held in Soviet prisons, yet the whereabouts of 480,000 of these men remain unresolved today.

 

OUTRAGE AT VELPKE RUHEN (May 1944)
In May, 1944, a home for infant children was established in the village of Velpke, near Helmstedt, Germany. The home was for the offspring of Polish female slave labourers working on farms and food factories in the area. Food being scarce in Germany in 1944, more work was required from these Polish women whom the Nazi Bürgermeister of Velpke thought were spending too much time attending to their children. Forcibly removed from their mothers, the children were incarcerated in an old building without running water, electric light or telephone. Ordered by the Reich Labour Office to take charge of the home and assume care of the infants, an ex teacher, Frau Billien, and four Polish and Russian girls were installed in the building. Neither had any experience in running a clinic for infant children. When the Volkswagen factory at nearby Wolfsburg (where many of the women worked) required possession of the premises some months later it was discovered that eighty four Polish infants had died through sheer neglect, lack of mother's milk and a general disregard for their well being. According to the village register the most common causes of death was general weakness, dysentery and intestinal catarrh. After the war, a British Military Court sentenced two of the the perpetrators to death and three to long terms of imprisonment. Within the confines of the Wolkswagen factory a similar clinic was established under the care of the factory doctor, Dr Korbel, and a nurse, Ella Schmidt. The clinic was later moved to Rühen some twelve kilometres away. Between April, 1943 and April, 1945, it was established that around 400 infants had died there. In 1944, 254 out of 310 admissions ended in death for these infants who lay in cots, weak with diarrhoea and infested with lice. Dr. Korbel was later tried and convicted by a British War Crimes Court and sentenced to death.
(The Volkswagen factory has in recent years traced many of its surviving former slave workers and paid each one of them the sum of DM 10,000).

 

[FONT=&quot]"In the Soviet zone, the purging of Nazism was undertaken differently, though the final effect was much the same as the western half of the country. Instead of the elaborate legal process of denazification, the Soviets went in for extermination or elavation. SS men who had been denounced were summarily executed and their bodies dumped in the streets with an X stitched across their backs by machine-gun bullets.Members of the German armed forces, whether Party members or not, were deported to the Soviet Union as forced labour, or dragooned into work-gangs in the ruined cities of Germany. But Nazis who could be of use to their new masters and were prepared to serve under them were able to make an easy passage from one totalitarian system to another. When Molotov jeered at the ineffective denazification programme of the Western Allies at the Foreign Ministers' Conference in Moscow in 1947, the British Foreign Minister, Bevin, riposted with a list of top-ranking Nazis now serving the Russian cause in the Eastern zone - men like Markgraf, former SS commander on the Eastern Front, now Chief of Police in Berlin, and Lundwehr, former Nazi Trade Commissioner in the Balkans, now head of the Economics Department of the Berlin city government. Even the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Muller, last seen in the Berlin Bunker shortly after Hitler's suicide, was reportedly working as an advisor on state security in the [/FONT][FONT=&quot]USSR[/FONT][FONT=&quot]. 'As we are unlikely to be affected politically', a Soviet officer was recorded as saying, 'we use the brains of the Nazis as much as possible'" (From "In the Ruins of the Reich" by Douglas Botting pg325-26)[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Another book that analyses the rise of Europe's far right by analysing the direct link with Nazi collaboration with both the US & USSR intelligence communities is "The Beast Re-Awakens" by Martin Lee[/FONT]
Thanks for that Kyt. When one looks at the atrocities committed by the Germans, one would expect that they would be given short thrift - perhaps it was just assumption on my behalf. Then again if those captured can be of use to the Russian cause, like the rocket scientists to the Americans, I can see the logic. The ethics can be put to one side.