World War II

Civilian impact & atrocities

The Second World War saw large-scale atrocities aimed against the civilian populations of many of the nations involved. Germany killed between 11 million and 24 million civilians in deliberate acts of genocide and mass murder which often took priority over pressing military needs, while the Soviet Union and Japan used labour camps and often conducted massacres of their own, with Japan killing around 6 million civilians in areas they occupied, and the Soviets approximately 4 million civilians, half of these were from among the Soviet Union's own citizenshttp://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm#Massacres. The British carpet-bombed several German cities (in part as a retaliation to the bombing of London), and continued even after the strategic value of such bombings became highly questionable (e.g., the bombing of Dresden in 1945). Such bombings resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German civilians. Moreover, the British and the Americans carried out strategic and atomic bombings against Japanese cities where the industrial facilities were intermixed with the civilian populations, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. The scale of the atrocities of the Second World War are a key part of the wars legacy, and they have had a lasting impact on world civilization.

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Genocide

Main Article: Holocaust

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With the outbreak of war in 1939, Germany began the first stages of what would become the Holocaust, the premeditated and industrialised massacre of between 9 and 11 million people (figures are uncertain). The groups deemed as "undesirable" included especially Jews, Poles, Russian war prisoners and other Slavs, Roma and Sinti, the mentally or physically disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists and political dissidents.

Related Topics:
Holocaust - Jews - Poles - Russian war prisoners - Slavs - Roma - Sinti - Disabled - Homosexuals - Jehovah's Witnesses - Communist - Dissident

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Though these groups were all targets of Nazi Germany's mass killings, it was the Jews that were the primary target of the Holocaust; between 5 and 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis or their collaborators.

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Originally, the Nazis used killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen to conduct massive open-air killings, in some cases shooting as many as 33,000 people or more in a single day, as in the case of Babi Yar. By 1942, the Nazi leadership decided to implement the Final Solution, the genocide of all Jews in Europe, and increase the pace of the Holocaust. While concentration camps and labour camps to contain political enemies had existed since soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Nazi leadership built six extermination camps, including Treblinka and Auschwitz, specifically to kill Jews. Millions of Jews who had been confined to diseased and massively overcrowded Ghettos were transported to these "Death-camps" where they were either gassed or shot, usually immediately after they disembarked from trains.

Related Topics:
Einsatzgruppen - Babi Yar - Final Solution - Concentration camps - Labour camps - Extermination camps - Treblinka - Auschwitz - Ghettos

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Concentration camps, labor camps and internment

Main articles: Concentration camp, Gulag, Japanese American internment

Related Topics:
Concentration camp - Gulag - Japanese American internment

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In addition to the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet Gulags, or labor camps, led to the death of many citizens of occupied countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German POWs and even Soviet citizens themselves: opponents of Stalin's regime and large proportions of some ethnic groups (particularly Chechens). Japanese POW camps also had high death rates; many were used as labour camps, and starvation conditions among the mainly U.S. and Commonwealth prisoners were little better than many German concentration camps.

Related Topics:
Concentration camps - Gulags - Labor camp - Chechen - POW camps

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Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of Japanese North Americans were interned by the U.S. and Canadian governments, although these camps did not involve forced labour or other physical hardships.

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War crimes and attacks on civilians

Main articles: Japanese war crimes, Strategic bombing, Nuremburg Trials

Related Topics:
Japanese war crimes - Strategic bombing - Nuremburg Trials

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Few forms of atrocity were excluded from the Eastern European theatre, as millions of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians were systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, as well as over million Yugoslavs in disproportionate reprisal killings for Partisan activity. The Nazis also killed approximately 3 million Soviet prisoners of war. The Soviet occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1941 was also brutal, resulting in the death or deportation of least 1.8 million former Polish citizens. In 1940, the Soviet authorities ordered the execution of more than 22,000 Polish citizens, mainly Polish officers, but also scientists, politicians, doctors, lawyers, priests and others in the Katyn Massacre. Civilian populations suffered tremendously, the population of Kiev dropped by 90% between the early 1930s and 1945, partly from starvation under Stalin, but mostly under the Nazis.

Related Topics:
Eastern European - Soviet occupation - 1940 - Katyn Massacre

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The Japanese also engaged in mass killings; millions of Asian civilians and Allied POWs were killed by its military and/or used as forced labour. The most notorious atrocities occurred in China, including the slaughter of almost half a million Chinese during the Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, and Unit 731's experiments with biological warfare in Manchuria, with a view to killing a large part of the Chinese population. Japanese war crimes also included rape, pillage, murder, cannibalism and forcing female civilians to become sex slaves, known as "comfort women". Many of these occurred in Korea, which Japan occupied from 1910 to 1945.

Related Topics:
Forced labour - Nanjing Massacre - Unit 731 - Biological warfare - Manchuria - Japanese war crimes - Sex slave - Comfort women - Korea - 1910 - 1945

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World War II also saw the first large-scale use of bombing against civilian areas. Germany had been bombing civilian targets from the first days of the war. In the first months of the war the British Government ordered the RAF to adhere strictly to draft international rules prohibiting attacking civilians, but this restriction was progressively relaxed and abandoned altogether in 1942. By 1945 the strategic bombing of cities had been employed extensively by all sides. German bombing of Poland, Britain Yugoslavia, and the USSR was responsible for over 600,000 civilian deaths. Allied strategic bombing, including the firestorm bombing of Japanese and German cities including Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden by Anglo-American forces and the American atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, likely killed over 400,000 German civilians and between 350,000 and 500,000 Japanese. Compounding the issue, however, is the fact that the Japanese industrial production relied heavily on manufacturing facilities which were located in close proximity to, and in many cases intermixed with, residential property, which eliminated or greatly hampered the ability to attack the Japanese war machine without affecting the Japanese near that industrial infrastructure (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Second).

Related Topics:
Firestorm bombing - Tokyo - Hamburg - Dresden - Hiroshima - Nagasaki

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From 1945 to 1951 German and Japanese officials and personnel were prosecuted for the war crimes they committed. Accused of genocide and atrocities, top German officials were tried at the Nuremburg Trials and other trials, and many Japanese officials at the Tokyo War Crime Trial and other war crimes trials in the Asia-Pacific region, the first international criminal tribunals, and the last until the 1993 war crimes trials in Yugoslavia.

Related Topics:
Nuremburg Trials - Tokyo War Crime Trial - Other war crimes trials in the Asia-Pacific region - 1993 war crimes trials in Yugoslavia

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