Well, last time I checked, the Allies didn’t orchestrate the industrialized mass murder of 10 million civilians in the territories they occupied.
Again, the word “rarely” is doing some heavy lifting there.
The Wikipedia entry on Pvt. Eddie Slovik (the only American soldier executed for desertion during WWII) notes that “During World War II, in all theaters of the war, the United States military executed 102 of its own soldiers for rape or unprovoked murder of civilians”.
You would have to 1) arbitrarily decide that rape and murder of civilians are not war crimes 
, or that 2) 102 executions means that punishment was “rare”, disregarding what other penalties were meted out for such crimes (hard figures, as noted are difficult to come by, but it’s very likely that there were many more than 102 non-death penalty sentences meted out).
Does it make more sense to use the phrase “not investigated as often as it should have been” instead of "rarely investigated?
This has been explained to you a few times- a lone soldier, on his own, acting without official or officer approval- is not a “war crime”. It is just a crime. War crimes are when the officers or a nation are behind it. War crimes are a “new” thing with the end of WW2, and the Nuremberg trials.
The Nazi Death camps, Rape of Nanking , etc.
There had been an attempt at war crimes trials after the First World War, but it was the post-war German government fulfilling the requirement to do so from Versailles.
No, it’s just important to note that you are using a UN Security Council Resolution passed 63 years later as your cite, a cite which doesn’t say rape is as war crime but rather that rape can be a war crime, is a UN Security Council Resolution, not a binding treaty signed between nations defining war crimes, and that the United Nations didn’t even yet exist when the vast majority of these crimes were committed. One would need to first establish that rapes committed by soldiers of the Western Allies were conducted as part of an orchestrated campaign or were openly or tacitly allowed by the Allied command structure before even concluding that they were a war crime rather than crimes committed by soldiers of an occupying army. Such evidence is entirely lacking.
And yes, there is a window where you can define actions as being war crimes. That the UN General Assembly didn’t define genocide until 1948 doesn’t make the actions of Nazi Germany during the WWII not rise to the level of the most monstrous war crimes and violations of international treaties that they had signed arguably to ever have occurred. On the other hand, calling the execution of French captives at Agincourt on the orders of Henry V or the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade “war crimes” would be rather odd as both were accepted acts of war during their day and age. Call them monstrous if you want, but calling them war crimes would be strange, to say the least. Germany during WWII on the other hand was a signatory of Hague 1899, amongst a slew of other international conventions defining war crimes.
TRIAL International is not a governmental org, it is not part of The Hague or International courts.
TRIAL International provides legal assistance to victims, litigates cases, develops local capacity and pushes the human rights agenda forward. "TRIAL International is a non-governmental organization fighting impunity for international crimes and supporting victims in their quest for justice.
TRIAL International takes an innovative approach to the law, paving the way to justice for survivors of unspeakable sufferings. The organization provides legal assistance to victims, documents, investigates and litigates cases, develops local capacity and pushes the human rights agenda forward.
Nor does anything I can see say anything about “war crimes”.
Mind you- Rape can be a war crime, but when an individual soldier does it, and is caught and prosecuted under other laws, it is generally not considered so.
Pretty much this. The Axis orchestrated mass murder of civilians and prisoners of war on an industrial scale and left behind records and mountains of evidence of having done so. I should add, however, that while war crimes are much less vigorously investigated and prosecuted by the winning side at the time that they happened, and much less attention of generally paid to them, their existence does often see the light of day and the lack of severity of punishment of those convicted as well as the complete escape from consequences of those not pursed faces the judgement of future generations, for whatever that is worth.
Since you take stock in what “international courts” have to say, you might be interested in this definition of war crimes by the International Criminal Court:
Nothing there about defining war crimes solely as an instrument of state or group policy. The ICC can and does prosecute individuals.
You have quoted me quoting someone else. The point of my post was questioning the logic of @Dissonance post.
They said that many Allied war crimes were ignored or not reported. Then, they said the Axis committed more war crimes.
I was simply saying: how do we know that if so many of the Allies crimes were overlooked.
I didn’t think about how the Holocaust and other industrial-level massacres easily shows that there are so many Nazi war crimes there’s no way the Allies could match it–even if every Allied crime were investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent, it’d still be no contest.
I was only mentioning what, IMO, didnt seem logical.
ETA: basically, I wasnt thinking about war crimes at that level. I was thinking of individual or unit level crimes. But obviously the whole picture of Nazi madness overall was unparalleled in its evil and criminality.
Just to add, and it’s my own fault for not specifically mentioning it earlier, I wasn’t thinking of just the Nazis. The record of Imperial Japan during WWII is as replete with horrors as Nazi Germany’s. The Rape of Nanking is well known, as is the Bataan Death March, but those were the tip of the iceberg, a lot isn’t as well known in popular modern memory. For examples, the Three Alls Policy (Kill All, Burn All, Loot All) in retribution for the Chinese Communist One Hundred Regiments Offensive
In a study published in 1996, historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta claims that the Three Alls policy, sanctioned by Emperor Hirohito himself, was both directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of “more than 2.7 million” Chinese civilians.
Best known from the book and movie “The Bridge over the River Kwai” the Burma Railway was constructed at an enormous cost in human lives,
At least 250,000 Southeast Asian civilians were subjected to forced labour to ensure the construction of the Death Railway and more than 90,000 civilians died building it, as did around 12,000 Allied soldiers. The workers on the Thai side of the railway were Tamils, Malays, and fewer Chinese civilians from Malaya. Possibly over 345,000 died while working, with the death rate per month rivaling that of Auschwitz.
The Sook Ching was a mass killing of “anti-Japanese” elements after the fall of Singapore by the Japanese military, with “anti-Japanese” being openly interpreted to mean of Chinese ancestry, ~40,000-50,000 were murdered. While it pales in scale, when the Imperial Japanese Army took Singapore, they bayonetted the patients, doctors and nurses at the British military hospital
The British Military Hospital (now known as Alexandra Hospital) was caught between the advancing Japanese troops and the retreating British forces. It became the site of a Japanese massacre when between 150 and 200 staff and patients were killed on 14 February 1942.
Possibly one of the most forgotten massacres was the Manila massacre where at least 100,000 Philippine civilians were murdered by the Japanese.
The Americans who have penetrated into Manila have about 1000 troops, and there are several thousand Filipino soldiers under the Commonwealth Army and the organized guerrillas. Even women and children have become guerrillas. All people on the battlefield with the exception of Japanese military personnel, Japanese civilians, and special construction units will be put to death.
— Japanese order justifying the Manila massacre
And on the topic of rape as a war crime vs rape as a crime, during the Manila massacre:
Mass rapes
The Bayview Hotel was used as a designated “rape center”.[6] According to testimony at the Yamashita war crimes trial, 400 women and girls were rounded up from Manila’s wealthy Ermita district, and submitted to a selection board that picked out the 25 women who were considered most beautiful. These women and girls, many of them 12 to 14 years old, were then taken to the hotel, where Japanese enlisted men and officers took turns raping them.[7]
Despite many allied Germans holding refuge in a German club, Japanese soldiers entered in and bayoneted infants and children of mothers pleading for mercy and raped women seeking refuge. At least 20 Japanese soldiers raped a young girl before slicing her breasts off after which a Japanese soldier placed her mutilated breasts on his chest to mimic a woman while the other Japanese soldiers laughed. The Japanese then doused the young girl and two other women who were raped to death in gasoline and set them all on fire.[8]
The Japanese went on setting the entire club on fire killing many of its inhabitants. Women who were escaping out the building from the fire were caught and raped by the Japanese. 28-year-old Julia Lopez had her breasts sliced off, was raped by Japanese soldiers and had her hair set on fire. Another woman was partially decapitated after attempting to defend herself and raped by a Japanese soldier.[9]
It’s not your fault, it’s mine. You wrote ‘Axis’ and I was the one who started talking about the Nazis specifically.
And I think it’s the absolute peak of naivete to believe that you can take millions of men in the height of their physical and sexual prime, in life or death situations and expect them to be celibate.
I quoted your response in its entirety. The point is clear and unmistakeable.
There’s considerable evidence that Allied war crimes on an individual level were under-reported and under-prosecuted, just not “rarely” prosecuted and certainly not with a lone conviction.
The same appears to be true for Axis war crimes, which occurred on a much greater scale.
Argh!! WHAT did he delete?! Every time I see this my curiosity is aroused! LOL
Whack-a-Mole questioned whether it was a war crime. Technically, it was not, as war crimes are those committed against the enemy. My post was about Eddie Slovak, who was executed for desertion.
Right - Ronald Speirs almost certainly committed war crimes by the callous execution of prisoners and that has been immortalized on the screen. But it was early days in an at the time desperate fight and he was a highly competent combat officer that couldn’t easily be replaced. So everyone looked the other way and he was never charged. Such is the reality of warfare, which is simultaneously both disgusting and understandable.
Civil War buffs may know the name Henry Wirz, commandant at Andersonville who was hanged after the war for the mistreatment of Union prisoners, although a defense has always been made that his resources were impossibly thin. Fewer buffs recall the name William Hoffman, the Union’s Commisary-General of Prisoners who’d bragged about the parsimonious food, shelter and medicine he’d pared down to the nub for the Confederate prisoners under him.
Wirz’s fatality rate was 28%, Hoffman’s 25%. Sometimes victor’s justice is a real thing
Sometimes? No - always.
That is true only in that war itself is the ultimate injustice. But if we can agree at a practical that violence is only acceptable when used as the only possible way to stop greater, immediate violence (not getting into which side is right or wrong), we can agree that war can be lawful, and not that law should be warlike.
Ben Ferencz went to Europe to investigate and prosecute Nazi war crimes. He witnessed liberated concentration camp prisoners grab a guard and burn him alive in the oven. He then went on to methodically craft a meaningful prosecution of the top Nazis. What he did was not essentially the same as the prisoners, as is shown by his remark:
“There can be no peace without justice, no justice without law and no meaningful law without a Court to decide what is just and lawful under any given circumstance“
Its simply too cynical to assert that all justice is merely vengeance, as cynical as asserting the reverse, and therefore a guarantee of repeating the cycle of war.