*The photo above was taken in an air-raid shelter in Dresden, after the firebombing. The massive firestorm sucked oxygen out of the room and replaced it with carbon monoxide and other lethal gases.
In my two previous posts we considered our species’ fantastic technological progress in what the current United States Secretary of Defense calls “lethality,” and our rather pathetic stabs at creating a more peaceful world.
Along with these attempts at preventing war we came up with the notion of regulating it—that is, limiting the damage by defining certain acts as “war crimes.”
Early Rules of War
Kings, religious leaders, and in recent times, international councils have laid down rules of conduct for the military. Though as we have seen in our own time, people engaged in mass murder aren’t likely to be constrained by such rules.
The earliest documented efforts to regulate behavior toward one’s opponents—at least, the earliest I could find—are in the biblical Book of Deuteronomy, which scholars believe was written in the 7th to 5th Centuries BCE. Among the rules: If you approach a distant city and they surrender before combat, don’t kill them but take them all as slaves. If they fight, kill all the men and take the women and children as slaves.
But if you take a beautiful woman from one of those cities captive and marry her, but later cease to desire her, you must let her go free and not treat her as a slave or sell her.
However, if the city you besiege is in the land that “God is giving you for an inheritance,” kill everything that breathes so they don’t infect you with their detestable religious practices. In other words, under certain circumstances, God not only allows but demands genocide. I’m sure Bezalel Smotrich, leader of Israel’s Religious Zionist party, would agree.
A thousand years later, in the 7th Century CE, Caliph Abu Bakr, the successor to Muhammad, instructed Muslims not to kill a woman, a child, or an infirm elder. Per contemporary Islamic scholars Zuhur and About-Enein, most enemy soldiers were to be killed, but some should be spared for ransom or enslavement.
We don’t know whether anyone in any of those societies was ever penalized for violating the rules.
Skip forward another 800 years, to 1474 CE, when the first war crimes trial we know of took place. The knight Peter von Hagenbach was charged with failing to prevent the murder, rape, and perjury committed by his troops. He pleaded that he was only following the orders of his superior, the Duke of Burgundy. (Haven’t we heard that excuse all too recently!). He even offered to show the court the written orders, but the judges refused to look at them. He was tortured, convicted, and beheaded.
There are no records of the troops being punished, or of the Duke being brought up on charges. It is probably not a coincidence that Hagenbach was extremely unpopular, as he had alienated his subjects and antagonized allies.
The Lieber Code
The first modern codification of war crimes was written by Francis Lieber in 1863, at the behest of Abraham Lincoln. The Lieber Code prescribed the death penalty for many crimes. However, while thousands of men were tried for Lieber Code crimes committed during the Civil War, only three were executed. Five others were hanged not for these Lieber Code crimes but for spying or being guerillas. All of the condemned men fought for the Confederacy.
During General Sherman’s march and under his orders, Northern troops looted Southern homes and burned them to the ground, which was prohibited under the Code, and starved the population, yet none of them were brought to trial, let alone punished. The articles I’ve read say Sherman’s troops “may” have committed sexual assaults against Black women but spared white women. The Lieber Code prohibits rape, but no one was prosecuted.
The Lieber Code influenced the adoption of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. It also influenced the Geneva Conventions adopted after World War II.
World War II—the International Tribunals
Who was prosecuted at the trials in Nuremberg and in Tokyo after World War II? Certainly not the victors. In Europe, Nazi leaders, concentration camp commanders, doctors conducting human experiments and euthanasia, and Einsatzgruppen (death squad) members were tried. In Asia, Japanese military and political leaders.
Who was not prosecuted?
In Japan, members of the royal family were granted immunity. Also, General MacArthur offered full political immunity to high-ranking officials—even those who conducted inhumane medical experiments including vivisection and open-air pathogen and chemical tests, as well as mass attacks using plague, anthrax, and cholera that killed thousands of Chinese—in exchange for the data about their experiments. The U.S. government also paid money for that data.
In Europe, “historians estimate that fewer than one percent of those involved in criminal actions against civilians were punished in any meaningful way. Germany had millions of men…in occupations that enabled genocide and mass repression. The Cold War began almost immediately after the German surrender. Western intelligence services considered many…to be useful assets in the emerging confrontation with the Soviet Union. Former SS officers and Gestapo personnel were recruited into the West German police, the intelligence services, and even NATO advisory circles.”
And let us not forget the scientists, engineers, and spies, many with Nazi pasts. Per Edward Reid, “Between 1945 and the 1960s, the United States government brought more than 1,500 German scientists and engineers into the country through Project Paperclip to work on guided missiles, jet and rocket engines, aerodynamics, aerospace medicine, and submarine technology.”
Per Eric Lichtblau, “The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories.” For almost all of them, their histories were hidden from the public.
World War II—Other Prosecutions
What about the winners of that war, the Allies? Each country’s military courts were responsible for trying their own soldiers for crimes such as looting, individual and mass rape, and killing prisoners of war. The number of known incidents is huge and the majority of perpetrators were never even charged.
Looking at rape committed by United States servicemen only, sociologist J. Robert Lilly estimates 4,500 instances in France from D-Day (June 1944) to the end of the war (May 1945). Given that study after study shows that nine out of ten rapes go unreported, Lilly’s estimate was almost certainly a vast undercount.
And guess who did get prosecuted? Documents dated October 1944 show that of 152 United States troops facing charges, 130 were Black.
We do have some figures for war crimes committed by Soviet troops during World War II. Among them is the Katyn massacre, in which 22,000 Polish military, police, and intelligentsia were shot and buried in mass graves. There were also mass rapes, with estimates ranging up to 2 million German women and over 100,000 Polish women, as well as forced labor and torture of prisoners.
Fire Bombs and A-Bombs
Intentionally killing civilians who are not taking part in hostilities is a war crime. This includes military strikes that treat civilian and military targets as a single entity, or using weapons that cannot be aimed properly at a specific target.
On the other hand, consider this list from World War II: Our firebombing of Dresden, with 20,500-25,000 killed. This was an entire populated city, not a military target. The similar firebombing of Tokyo, 100,000 dead. Our atom-bombing of Hiroshima, 140,000 killed, with an unknown but undoubtedly very large number of additional deaths over subsequent decades from long-term radiation poisoning. The A-bombing of Nagasaki, 80,000, also with unknown numbers of long-term fatalities.
Our government has always justified these mass murders as necessary to win the war. Historians have expressed conflicting views.
I don’t believe that any of these atrocities were necessary. Regarding the use of nuclear weapons, after the first A-bomb test in July 1945, American military authorities could have invited their Japanese counterparts to witness such a weapon being dropped on an uninhabited island, and then said, “This is what we will do to you if you don’t surrender.” Or they could have stopped at Hiroshima—why did they have to also destroy Nagasaki?
Maybe they just wanted to prove their “lethality.”
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In the next post we’ll look at the “rules-based international order” established after the Second World War.
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