Americans, Germans, and War Crimes: Converging Narratives from "the Good War"

Abstract

All nations participating World War II were guilty of war crimes, although that rec ognition is subject to important qualification. German genocide as the supreme wartime offense, Japanese mass murders of Chinese, the slaughter of Polish officers by the Soviet Union?the list is hardly complete, and some would argue for the inclusion of indis criminate bombing of cities?are distinct from the smaller-scale and more spontaneous atrocities that were commonplace on all sides. The latter were often the products of combat stresses that were universal and independent of either official programs of exter mination or of ideologies and perspectives that dehumanized the enemy and encouraged the annihilation of enemy civilians as well as combatants, programs and perspectives especially characteristic of the German war against the Soviet Union. As the historian John W. Dower has shown, the antagonists' mutual perceptions of inhuman otherness lent the Pacific war its characteristic savagery. Max Hastings, discussing the murder of prisoners of war (pows) Normandy by combatants who generally recognized each other's common humanity, notes that in the heat of battle, the wake of seeing com rades die, many men found it intolerable to send prisoners to the rear knowing that they would thus survive the war, while they themselves seemed to have little prospect of do ing so. . . . it is difficult with hindsight to draw a meaningful moral distinction between the behavior of one side and the other on the battlefield. The Canadian general Chris Vokes, considering a plea for clemency from Kurt Meyer, commander of the Twelfth SS Panzer Division, who had been condemned to death a postwar trial for the murders of Canadian pows, conceded there isn't a general or colonel on the Allied side that I know of who hasn't said, 'Well, this time we don't want any prisoners.'1 Prisoners were killed reprisal for real or imagined atrocities, for the utilitarian rea son that keeping them was impractical or inconvenient, or out of frustration with a war that was going badly or was being unnecessarily prolonged by the enemy. Civilians often fell victim to the fury of ground combatants, particularly situations where occupying forces were real or imagined objects of guerrilla warfare. Due to their brutal occupation