German war crimes
The governments of the German Empire and Nazi Germany (under Adolf Hitler) ordered, organized, and condoned a substantial number of war crimes, first in the Herero and Namaqua genocide and then in the First and Second World Wars. The most notable of these is the Holocaust, in which millions of European Jewish, Polish, and Romani people were systematically abused, deported, and murdered. Millions of civilians and prisoners of war also died as a result of German abuses, mistreatment, and deliberate starvation policies in those two conflicts. Much of the evidence was deliberately destroyed by the perpetrators, such as in Sonderaktion 1005, in an attempt to conceal their crimes.
– at least 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in German custody, out of 5.7 million captured; this figure represents 57% POW casualty rate.
German mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war
May 1940, British soldiers of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, were captured by the SS and subsequently murdered. Fritz Knoechlein was tried, found guilty and hanged.
Le Paradis massacre
May 1940, British and French soldiers captured by the SS and subsequently murdered. No one was found guilty of the crime.
Wormhoudt massacre
after assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, when the Czech village was utterly destroyed, and inhabitants murdered.
Lidice massacre
Normandy Massacres
Ardenne Abbey massacre
11 June 1944, United States POWs that had surrendered were executed by 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen by shooting and stabbing.
Graignes massacre
December 1944, United States POWs captured by Kampfgruppe Peiper were murdered outside of Malmedy, Belgium.
Malmedy massacre
Wereth massacre. 17 December 1944, soldiers from 3./SS-PzAA1 LSSAH captured eleven African-American soldiers from in the hamlet of Wereth, Belgium. Subsequently, the prisoners were tortured, shot, and had their fingers cut off, legs broken, eyes gouged out, jaw broken and at least one was shot while trying to bandage a comrade's wounds.
333rd Artillery Battalion
Wahlhausen massacre, January 1945, United States POWs from the 28th Infantry Division captured by German troops were summarily executed.
[26]
of April 1945 when Nazi concentration camp prisoners were herded into a barn, which was then set alight, killing all inside
Gardelegen massacre
Oradour-sur-Glane massacre
Massacre of Kalavryta
against merchant shipping.
Unrestricted submarine warfare
The intentional destruction of major medieval churches of , of monasteries in the Moscow region (e.g., of New Jerusalem Monastery) and of the imperial palaces around St. Petersburg.
Novgorod
The campaign of extermination of Slavic population in the occupied territories. Several thousand villages were burned with their entire population (e.g., in Belarus). A quarter of the inhabitants of Belarus did not survive the German occupation.
Khatyn massacre
the secret order issued by Hitler in October 1942 stating that Allied combatants encountered during commando operations were to be executed immediately without trial, even if they were properly uniformed, unarmed, or intending to surrender.
Commando Order
the order from Hitler to Wehrmacht troops before the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 to shoot Commissars immediately on capture.
Commissar Order
decree of 1941 for disappearance of prisoners.
Nacht und Nebel
Chronologically, the first German World War II crime, and also the very first act of the war, was the bombing of Wieluń, a town where no targets of military value were present.[22][23]
More significantly, the Holocaust of the European Jews, the extermination of millions of Poles, the Action T4 killing of the disabled, and the Porajmos of the Romani are the most notable war crimes committed by Nazi Germany during World War II. Not all of the crimes committed during the Holocaust and similar mass atrocities were war crimes. Telford Taylor (The U.S. prosecutor in the German High Command case at the Nuremberg Trials and Chief Counsel for the twelve trials before the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals) explained in 1982:
List of Axis personnel indicted for war crimes
List of
Nazi doctors
Adolf Eichmann
Heinrich Gross
Hans Heinze
Rudolf Hoess
Karl Linnas
Josef Mengele
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
Alfred Trzebinski
Murders of disabled children by
Heinrich Gross
Racial policy of Nazi Germany
War crimes of the Wehrmacht
Nazi crime
Nazism
Bombing of Guernica
Chronicles of Terror
Command responsibility
Consequences of Nazism
Einsatzgruppen
Generalplan Ost
Nazi concentration camps
Italian war crimes
Japanese war crimes
Internment of German Americans
List of Axis personnel indicted for war crimes
List of war crimes
Nazi crimes against the Polish nation
Pacification actions in German-occupied Poland
Soviet war crimes
Nuremberg trials
War crimes in occupied Poland during World War II
Allied war crimes during World War II
T-4 euthanasia program
United States war crimes
Josef Mengele
Commissar Order
Nuremberg Laws
Barbarossa Decree
German atrocities committed against Polish prisoners of war
Irma Greese
Oignies and Courrières massacre
Massacre of the Acqui Division
Kraljevo massacre
Kragujevac massacre
Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs
Nazi concentration camps
Heinrich Himmler
Joseph Goebbles
This article incorporates text from the , and has been released under the GFDL.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – Article ; and online exhibitions Life in the Shadows; and Give Me Your Children
Children during the Holocaust
from Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project: "Forget You Not"
Holocaust Memorial Album Honoring more than 1.5 Million Souls Under 12 years of age that never returned ...
Children and the Holocaust
Nazis kidnap Polish children
The War Crimes of Dr Josef Mengele
German War Crimes of World War I
The Reich's forgotten atrocity
Bartniczak, Mieczysław (1974). "Eksterminacja ludności w powiecie Ostrów Mazowiecka w latach okupacji hitlerowskiej (1939–1944)". Rocznik Mazowiecki (in Polish). No. 5.
Datner, Szymon (1968). Las sprawiedliwych (in Polish). Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza.
Sudoł, Tomasz (2011). "Zbrodnie Wehrmachtu na jeńcach polskich we wrześniu 1939 roku". Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (in Polish). No. 8-9 (129-130). IPN. 1641-9561.
ISSN
Wardzyńska, Maria (2009). Był rok 1939. Operacja niemieckiej policji bezpieczeństwa w Polsce. Intelligenzaktion (in Polish). Warszawa: IPN.