Allied war crimes during World War II
During World War II, the Allies committed legally proven war crimes and violations of the laws of war against either civilians or military personnel of the Axis powers. At the end of World War II, many trials of Axis war criminals took place, most famously the Nuremberg Trials and Tokyo Trials. In Europe, these tribunals were set up under the authority of the London Charter, which only considered allegations of war crimes committed by people who acted in the interests of the Axis powers. Some war crimes involving Allied personnel were investigated by the Allied powers and led in some instances to courts-martial. Some incidents alleged by historians to have been crimes under the law of war in operation at the time were, for a variety of reasons, not investigated by the Allied powers during the war, or were investigated but not prosecuted.
Further information: War crimes in World War IIAccording to an article in Der Spiegel by Klaus Wiegrefe, many personal memoirs of Allied soldiers have been willfully ignored by historians because they were at odds with the "greatest generation" mythology surrounding World War II. This has started to change, with books such as The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson, in which he describes Allied war crimes in Italy, and D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, by Antony Beevor.[1] Beevor's latest work suggests that Allied war crimes in Normandy were much more extensive "than was previously realized".[2]
Policy[edit]
The Allies claim that their militaries were directed to observe the Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions and believed to be conducting a just war fought for defensive reasons. Violations of the conventions did occur, however, including the forcible return of Soviet citizens who had been collaborating with Axis forces to the USSR at the end of the war. The military of the Soviet Union also frequently committed war crimes, which are today known to have been at the direction of its government. These crimes included waging wars of aggression and mass killings of prisoners of war, and repressing the population of conquered countries.[3]
Antony Beevor describes the Soviet rape of German women during the occupation of Germany as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history", and has estimated that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia alone. He asserts that Soviet women and girls liberated from slave labor in Germany were also violated.[4]
Individual commentators such as the German historian and left-wing antiwar activist Jörg Friedrich have argued that Allied aerial bombardment of civilian areas and cultural targets in enemy territory, including the German cities of Cologne, Hamburg, and Dresden, the Abbey in Monte Cassino in Italy during the Battle of Monte Cassino,[5] the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and especially the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the total destruction of cities and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, should be considered war crimes;[6][7][8][9] however, other observers point out that no positive or specific international law with respect to aerial warfare existed prior to and during World War II[10] and that no Japanese and German officers were prosecuted at the post-World War II Allied war crime trials for the aerial raids on Shanghai, Chongqing, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and British cities during the Blitz.[11]
Portrayal[edit]
Holocaust denial literature[edit]
The focus on Allied atrocities during the war has been a theme of Holocaust denial literature, particularly in countries where outright denial of the Holocaust is illegal.[177] According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, the concept of "comparable Allied wrongs", such as the post-war expulsions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and Allied war crimes, is at the center of, and a continuously repeated theme of, contemporary Holocaust denial; phenomenon she calls "immoral equivalencies".[178]
Japanese neo-nationalists[edit]
Japanese neo-nationalists argue that Allied war crimes and the shortcomings of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal were equivalent to the war crimes committed by Japanese forces during the war. American historian John W. Dower has written that this position is "a kind of historiographic cancellation of immorality—as if the transgressions of others exonerate one's own crimes".[179] While right-wing forces in Japan have tried to push for their perspective on war-time history, they have been unsuccessful due to opposition both within and outside Japan.[180]