Humanities 102

Lecture 7: Wartime atrocities

 Wartime atrocities

• Wartime atrocities were committed by belligerents on both sides of conflict

in all theatres of WWII, many of which were on an unprecedented scale.
• They included: genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, rape, forced labour,
human experimentation, bombing of civilian centers, child soldiering, and
the killing of prisoners of war.
Genocide

[Genos, Greek prefix for race or tribe cide, Latin suffix for killing]

- Coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

- Emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews
in WWII Europe.

- Defined as the deliberate killing or slaughter of a group of people along ethnic, racial,
national and/or religious lines.
 Crimes Against Humanity

Crimes against humanity are fundamentally inhumane acts against civilians under international law including genocide, mass murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, religious and political
persecution and imprisonment.
 War Crimes

An inhumane act perpetrated against a

protected person or object (civilians,
wounded combatants, POWS) as well as
the use of illegal means or modes
(weapons) of warfare during an armed
conflict.
 International Humanitarian Law

International humanitarian law regulates

wartime conduct by seeking to limit the
effects of conflict on non-combatants (those
who are not fighter or are no longer fighting)
by controlling the means and resources that
are at a belligerent’s disposal.

In other words, international humanitarian

law is a set of protocols or principles that are
designed to protect people trapped in
conflict zones. It is also called ‘the rules of
armed conflict’ or, simply, ‘the rules of war’.
International humanitarian law is enforced through a series of
international agreements (treaties and protocols) that
determine how war should be conducted.

These are known as conventions.

The rules of armed conflict explained
 • Protect individuals who are not fighting (i.e. civilians, humanitarian aid
workers and medical personnel). This includes making targeted attacks
on civilians illegal.

• Protect the human rights of non-combatants in war zones by ensuring

that housing, infrastructure, food, water and medical supplies are not
damaged.

• Protect wounded and sick combatants by ensuring that they have access
In a nutshell, international to treatment. This also applies to POWs.
humanitarian law protects and
prohibits the following: • Prohibit attacks on hospitals, medical personnel and medical vehicles.

• Prohibit rape, human trafficking, sex slaves and all other forms of cruel
and degrading sexual violence.

• Protect the rights of prisoners of war by ensuring humane treatment

through acceptable food, water, medical treatment, housing, clothing
and the ability to communicate with family.

• Prohibit torture and other forms of inhumane and cruel punishment for
civilians and POWs.
Banned weapons in armed conflict

• Chemical weapons in liquid, solid or gas form.

This especially includes any type of gas that is
poisonous or asphyxiating, such as nerve
gases like sarin or blistering agents like
mustard gas.
• Biological weapons, such as bacteria, viruses,
fungi or any other toxic microorganisms.
• Land mines, which are banned in most
countries under the 1997 Convention on the
Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production
and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on
their Destruction (“The Ottawa Treaty”). This
treaty has not been signed by Russia, China or
the United States.
• Incendiary weapons, such as firebombs used
on civilian centres in WWII and napalm used
during the Vietnam War.
 WW2 Atrocities
Nanking, Lidice and Oradour-sur-Glane
 Massacres
• Among the many atrocities committed during WW2, including genocide, crimes against
humanity, war crimes and crimes against peace, there were many massacres that
targeted civilians.
• A massacre is defined as a deliberate and brutal slaughter of many people.
• In all theatres of conflict, massacres were carried out in retaliation against the enemy
(‘reprisals’), to crush resistance movements, to instill fear, and out of pure cruelty and
hatred.
• We will now look at three particularly gruesome massacres: The Rape of Nanking
(1937), the Lidice Massacre (1942), and the Oradour-sur-Glane Massacre (1944).
 The Rape of Nanking
• A mass atrocity perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army
against Chinese civilians in the then-Chinese capital of
Nanjing.
• Took place during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-
1945), a bloody war between Imperial Japan and the
Republic of China that began before the outbreak of WW2 in
Europe and spanned until the surrender of Japan in 1945.
• Led to the massacre and rape of between 200,000 – 300,000
Chinese civilians over a brutal six-week period from
December 1937 to January 1938. In addition to extreme
violence toward civilians, the Japanese army also pillaged,
torched and razed the city.
• Chinese girls and women were brutalized in horrific ways.
Over the course of six weeks, thousands of women were
gang raped, tortured and murdered in wave upon wave of
sexual violence.
 The Lidice Massacre
• On May 27, 1942, Czech resistors Jozef Gabcik and
Jan Kubis assassinated leading Nazi SS official
Reinhard Heydrich in Prague under Operation
Anthropoid, a special operation carried out from the
Czechoslovakian government-in-exile in London with
the help of British operatives.
• Second only to Hitler and Himmler, Heydrich is known
as the architect of the Holocaust. He chaired the
Wannsee Conference (1942) that laid out the ‘Final
Solution to the Jewish Question’. As Commander of
the Reich Main Security Office and as acting governor
of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, he is
responsible for some of the most heinous crimes in
Nazi-occupied Europe.
• Several days later, Hitler ordered the total destruction
of the Czech village of Lidice in reprisal for the
assassination of Heydrich. Lidice was chosen due to
suspected ties with the Czech resistance, however
this was proven to be false.
• On June 10, 1942, Nazi police and soldiers
surrounded the sleepy village and blocked
any avenues of escape.
• They rounded up and shot 173 boys and men
over the age of fifteen.
• 205 women and 105 children were then
forced into a local school before being moved
to a nearby village. Women and children were
separated, and the women were deported to
Ravensbrück concentration camp where they
were killed or subject to forced labour.
• The children were lined up and ‘racially
inspected’ by SS agents. Seven of these
children were deemed ‘racially desirable’ and
were transferred to Germanisation centres
and became ‘stolen and hidden children’,
while the other 88 children were deported to
Chelmno concentration camp, where they
were gassed. The city was razed to the
ground.
• A similar fate awaited the inhabitants of the
nearby village of Lesaky, where 33 adults
were killed.
Lidice: The Aftermath
• The Lidice Massacre was an act of reprisal following the
assassination of one of Hitler’s closest confidants. It has come
to symbolize the callous brutality of Nazi war crimes and fits
into a larger narrative about Nazi racial plans in the East.
• The Nazis had successfully wiped Lidice off the map. The
murder of 88 children in Chelmno death camp meant the near-
total destruction of the village. Although there were few
survivors, the seven children who were kidnapped and
Germanized have often spoke out about their experiences.
• After the war, Lidice’s twin mining city of Stoke-on-Trent in the
UK began a campaign to help rebuild the city. The first bricks
were laid in 1947.
 The Oradour-sur-Glane Massacre

• On June 10, 1944, exactly two years after the Lidice

Massacre, the German Waffen-SS surrounded the
French village of Oradour-sur-Glane and massacred
all 642 of its inhabitants.
• The small village of Oradour-sur-Glane is located in
the Limousin region of south-central France, near
the French city of Limoges. It was chosen by the
Germans as an act of reprisal for the supposed
kidnapping of German SS soldier by French resistors
several days before who was being held somewhere
nearby.
• After surrounding the village, the Germans rounded
up 190 men, shot them, poured gasoline on them
and set them on fire. Women and children were
locked in the local church, which was then set on
fire. As people tried to escape, they were gunned
down. 247 women and 205 children were ruthlessly
massacred.
• After the war, Charles De Gaulle ordered that the
village would be left as is to serve as a monument to
the victims of Nazi atrocities. Instead a new village
was built nearby, which currently houses around
2,000 people. The destroyed village is a living
monument and a widely visited site in France today.
 Remembering the massacres

Each of these massacres, and the sites in which they were

committed, has been memorialized. There are monuments in
place in Lidice, Nanking and Oradour-sur-Glane:

• Memorial to the Children Victims of War, Lidice is a

bronze sculpture commemorating the 82 children who
were deported and killed in Chelmno.
• The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nankjing Massacre by
Japanese Invaders museum, built to commemorate the
300,000 victims of the Nanking Massacre.
• The Village Martyr (‘martyred village’), a living memorial
to the victims of Nazi atrocities in occupied France.
 In sum: WWII Atrocities

• None of these massacres went unpunished. After

the war, the architects of these massacres were put
on trial at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal (1946),
the Nuremberg Trials (1945-46) and the Bordeaux
Military Tribunal (1953), where justice was sought
for their crimes.
• These three massacres are but several of the many
that came to characterize the unprecedented scale
of death and destruction during WWII. Such
atrocities led to new interpretations of the term ‘war
crime’ as well as the introduction of new terms into
the lexicon of international humanitarian law.
• Terms such as ‘genocide’, ‘crimes against
humanity’ and ‘crimes against peace’ were first
introduced at the Nuremberg Trials and have
remained in use ever since.
• The sheer number of wartime atrocities reveal that
WW2 was a war waged against civilians, as it was
everyday men, women and children who brutally
paid the price.