The Dark Reason Captured WWII Soldiers Were Shot JJ

Throughout World War II, there were many active soldiers who found themselves captured by their enemies, and they expected to be sent to prisoner of war camps. However, lots did not get there, as they were dispatched by the Allied enemies by gunshot quickly. The shooting of prisoners of war was actually a war crime, and it was something a soldier could have been punished for.

But in the fighting, there was little chance of justice ever catching up with them one day. The Germans shot female soldiers who they found on the battlefield, and the Western Allies and the Soviets also dispatched SS soldiers with ruthlessness. In this documentary, we look at the different types of World War II soldiers who found themselves captured and subsequently shot by their enemies.

They were some of the most feared soldiers to take to the battlefields of the 20th century, and they were driven by their devotion to their Führer. The SS or Schutzstaffel, led by Heinrich Himmler, originally began life as a personal bodyguard unit tasked with keeping a close eye on Hitler. However, it transitioned to become the elite guard of the Reich, and also the force that carried out many security-related jobs, such as overseeing the concentration camps.

But they had a military wing known as the Waffen SS. But if the SS soldiers fell into captivity on the battlefield and were captured, even by the Allies, they faced immediate execution, and many were shot on the spot. The Allies feared the SS, and they were known for being the most devoted who would fight to their deaths.

But why were SS soldiers more likely to be shot than ordinary Wehrmacht or German Army ones? The Waffen SS were heavily involved in many war crimes throughout World War II. From overseeing mass shootings and atrocities to carrying out anti-partisan warfare against resisters, they became known for for brutal actions.

Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, wanted to involve the group in the war effort, and he wanted his force to be seen with as much prestige as soldiers who fought in the ordinary army. And in late 1939, Hitler, with one eye on a new global conflict, gave Himmler permission to establish an armed SS force known as the Waffen SS.

He was allowed to begin with four divisions, but soon this became more than 20. Half a million SS men fought in these groups, and they had their own command structure. Instead of just military training or weapons training, SS soldiers were given political indoctrination and further brainwashing that focused on ensuring they would give their lives for the Reich.

The Allied soldiers who came up against them found they were some of the best equipment, MG 42s, King Tiger tanks, and much more. And they had been given stronger gear than the army in some cases. But after D-Day, there was a belief inside the Allied ranks by some soldiers that SS soldiers needed to be dealt with instantly after their capture or surrender, and that they should be shot and executed on the spot.

Of course, this would have been a war crime if someone who surrendered was shot. But why did this reputation develop? Firstly, the Allies had heard about the SS’s reputation for atrocities and war crimes. The group had become synonymous with the concentration camps and mass murder. Organizations like the Totenkopf or Das Reich divisions were linked to massacres in which hundreds were shot, and during the Battle of the Bulge, they executed many American soldiers and prisoners in the Malmedy massacre.

The Allies knew that the SS executed prisoners, including British, Canadian, and American commandos. So, when they encountered SS men in their captivity, they believed that if the tables were turned, they would not be given any mercy. One American veteran said that if they wore the SS runes, we didn’t take them prisoner.

We’d seen what they did to our boys. Also, the SS soldiers were known for fighting to the last bullet, and they rarely surrendered willingly. Many fought on when surrounded, wounded, or even hopelessly outnumbered. This made them a dangerous and unpredictable enemy, and some SS even used a false surrender, dropping their weapons to then fire at the Allies again, which led Allied soldiers to treat surrender with suspicion.

One British soldier of the 11th Armoured Division said that we learned quickly, if he was SS, you didn’t trust him to surrender properly. They had a reputation for being deceptive and defiant, which led many to be shot before being captured. But by the final weeks of the war, there were many concentration camps which were discovered and found by the Allies and the Soviets, and they had found the scenes of massacres.

At Dachau, for example, they discovered a train boxcars just outside the main camp with thousands of dead bodies inside. These are victims of the crimes of the SS within the camp. Upon entering Dachau for liberation, the Americans shot many SS guards after seeing this. They were caught up rightly in the emotion and sought instant revenge.

Some SS group members, members of the death squads that rampaged in the East after capture, were publicly executed in front of the Soviet population. Now, the uniforms for the SS made them actually very easy to identify and also spot. The SS often wore their distinctive collar insignia with SS runes, and they also had blood group tattoos, usually under their left arm.

A small mark with a letter. Some at the end of the war to avoid capture or punishment for being a member of the SS actually burned these off and tried to remove the tattoo. The SS were so easily recognizable, and it was difficult for SS men to blend in with regular Wehrmacht troops. So, once identified, they risked immediate execution and could be even spotted in the most ferocious battle situations.

On the Eastern Front, the conflict between specifically the SS and the Red Army was one of annihilation. The SS were given roles to slaughter and execute those who were said to be racially inferior or undesirable in the eyes of the Nazis. SS divisions took part in anti-partisan operations.

This involved massacre of civilians. The Soviets saw them as criminals and not soldiers, and captured SS men were shot frequently on the spot by members of the Red Army in retaliation for the Commissar Order. They saw the SS as those men who had burned down villages and organized massacre, and there would be no mercy. Now, official orders from the Allied High Command did demand that all prisoners of war be treated in accordance to the Geneva Convention, but on the field of conflict, whether this was taken seriously or not was rather debatable.

Following the Malmedy massacre, in which 84 American prisoners of war were murdered by SS troops, the Americans began to take less SS prisoners. This was also reported within the Canadian and British ranks in Normandy and also in the Netherlands. Reports of shot SS soldiers rarely made it back to High Command, and commanders often turned a blind eye, too, understanding the emotions of their men and also the reputation of the SS.

The group had been indoctrinated by the Nazis to believe that if they did fall into enemy hands, that they would be tortured and executed. Many were told that the Allies, especially the Soviets, would execute them, hence why they went down with a fight. But in the final weeks of the Second World War, order broke down across Germany and the front lines.

Allied and Soviet troops saw the end in sight, but were exhausted by the fighting. Civilians were lynching SS men in the streets, too, and field executions began co- and field executions became common, even by Wehrmacht soldiers who blamed the SS for the Nazis and for prolonging the war. But, to sum up, the SS soldiers were more likely to be shot during their capture because their units had committed atrocities, which earned them a reputation for brutality.

Also, they fought fanatically, and sometimes there were cases of fake surrender, meaning it was dangerous to take them a prisoner. Also, the Allied soldiers wanted revenge for the massacre of prisoners of war and fellow countrymen they’d heard about. They were also easy to spot and identify, which meant they did not blend in well to the general German military.

But, while many SS men met a violent end when they were captured, others did manage to hide their identities and actually blend into a post-war world, escaping any punishment and any form of justice. They suffered some of the most brutal fates on the battlefields of the Second World War, and if they were captured often, then they were shot instantly on the spot.

Female Soviet soldiers were seen on the front lines, and they had a huge variety of jobs in the Red Army and also the Soviet Air Force. From dropping payloads of bombs onto German positions to nursing and even crawling through the bombed-out ruins of Stalingrad to wait and then snipe a high-ranking German officer.

The women who fought against the Germans and the Axis often faced terrifying ends if they were captured, though. And for their enemy, they thought that women should be nowhere near the battlefield at all. They regarded female soldiers as a backward policy of the exact beliefs that they wanted to wipe out and destroy.

But why were German soldiers and officers ordered to shoot female soldiers on site and pull the trigger on them as soon as they captured them? Women played a pivotal role in the Soviet Union’s war efforts. Most of them worked inside industry and agriculture, keeping the armaments industries going and keeping the land fed.

But to make up for a shortage of men who were lost on the Eastern Front, repelling the German invasion of the nation, women were allowed to fight on the front line. Around 800,000 women served in the Red Army and most of them worked in medical units. In total, they made up around 5% of the country’s military personnel deployed during World War II.

Stalin, to begin with, turned thousands of women away from serving in the military who had volunteered. But then, as things became troublesome with huge losses and casualties in the fierce fighting of the Eastern Front, Stalin began to accept women who wanted to risk their lives in military operations and actions.

One of the most famous roles they undertook was as aviators and flyers. In particular, there was the 46th Guards Night Bomber Regiment, a collection of women aviators and pilots who flew raids under the cover of darkness, dropping bombs from outdated biplanes, often in silence on enemy positions. These women became known as the Night Witches.

But there were other female aviation regiments, including some who flew fighters against the Luftwaffe. Also, the Soviet Union deployed women as snipers inside towns and cities. Around 2 and 1/2 thousand women served as snipers and they would crawl through bombed-out ruins in cities such as Stalingrad and Leningrad, waiting their time to take out a high-ranking officer.

The combined kill total of female snipers was around 11,000, almost five times their total deployment numbers, and some racked up huge kill counts. Around 500 of these women would survive the war, but women also served in anti-aircraft batteries and in second lines of attack and defense. Most were told to carry weapons and rifles, even those who helped to evacuate men from the front lines if they had become injured.

However, in the eyes of the Germans and the Nazi enemy, the use of female soldiers wasn’t just shocking. They deemed it as subhuman and immoral. Because of this, captured female Soviet soldiers were shot by Germans after their capture rather ruthlessly. There were other reasons, too, but the shooting of women in uniform was rooted in Nazi ideology, military orders, and the combat reality of life on the front lines.

Firstly, the Nazi ideology and policies stated that a woman’s role was linked closely to childbearing and serving the male-dominated state. From a young age, German women were told that their place was in the home, and they were told to have as many children for the Reich as possible so Hitler could build up a huge empire.

Also, they were taught in youth groups how to cook and maintain a household, and they were not expected to have high-status jobs. The idea for the Nazis of a woman holding a rifle and fighting in combat was viewed as a violation of the natural order, and German propaganda depicted Soviet women soldiers as not feminine, and they categorized the actions as a murderous policy of communism and Bolshevism.

The presence of women on the battlefield for the Red Army directly challenged the Nazi worldview. So, when German troops captured armed Soviet women, they believed they were dealing with unnatural enemies rather than legitimate soldiers who did deserve the protection of prisoner of war status. This was all ideological, and it led to many women being shot, especially by SS soldiers.

The German military also did not recognize female combatants as lawful soldiers, even when they were wearing uniform, carrying military ID, and serving as part of larger Red Army units. They were frequently labeled as partisans and resistance fighters, and this was very important as the German Army and the SS had standing orders to shoot partisans immediately.

The Eastern Front was also deliberately exempt from the standards of the Geneva Convention. With this, it meant that a woman in uniform could be just said to have been a partisan and then shot. When this was not the case at all, and it would of course be technically a war crime. The commander of the German Fourth Army, Günther von Kluge, issued an order to his men that, I quote, “All women who are found in Soviet Army uniform are to be shot straight away.

” As mentioned, a large number of female Soviet soldiers served in highly skilled combat roles, in particular those as snipers. Some were trained in sniper training schools, and women like Lyudmila Pavlichenko racked up dozens of kills. Now, snipers of any army were usually shot upon their capture because they inflicted casualties and death without being seen, and they were viewed as silent assassins rather than ordinary infantry soldiers.

The Germans reported encountering women in sniper roles unfairly, and the shootings of women soldiers became even more common. Female medics also faced this fate, too, as the Germans believed that the medics were actually trained fighters and were helping to prolong Soviet resistance, and even unarmed female stretcher-bearers were also shot.

Hitler’s directives for the invasion of the Soviet Union made it very clear that the conflict was ideological, racial, and total. The rules of war in his eyes did not apply with this, and he wanted the enemy to be physically destroyed, not just defeated. With this, he issued a number of illegal orders that would come back to haunt some of his generals later on.

He issued the Commissar Order in June 1941, in which political officers were to be shot immediately. And also the Barbarossa Jurisdiction Order, that German soldiers were not to be prosecuted for crimes committed against Soviet civilians and prisoners of war. In particular with this order, it allowed German soldiers to shoot women or anyone without any fear of reprisal.

And they did this as they found it easier to deal with the female soldiers there and then, rather than send them back to prisoner of war camps for processing. With women soldiers being so strongly linked to the policies of the Soviet Union, too, they were sometimes shot under the Commissar Order and were considered political fighters.

The orders given by Hitler and the German Military High Command also normalized the shooting of women, and they were swept up in the machinery of extermination. Testimony from Soviet survivors and post-war German interrogations showed that following the capture, that women often faced horrific ordeals before they were then shot.

Sometimes they were assaulted by forces who captured them, and then they would be taken to a discreet area and were given a quick neck shot, leading to their instant deaths. It showed the terror that women faced on the battlefields. But to the Soviets, they deployed women as powerful propaganda symbols and showed them in recruitment posters and newsreels as staunch defenders of the nation.

Many women were given the ultimate accolade of the Hero of the Soviet Union award, but to the German soldiers, they believed that this was all But to the German soldiers, they believed that this was all unnatural and shooting them became a psychological weapon. So, to sum up, there were many different reasons why female Soviet soldiers were shot.

Firstly, the women in combat was seen as unnatural and subhuman. Also, they were labeled incorrectly as partisans instead of lawful prisoners of war. Many of them held important and powerful roles such as snipers or scouts and these specific fighters were commonly shot after their capture. Also, the Eastern Front where they served rejected all of the normal wartime protections and there were many incidents which went unpunished.

The German soldiers also believed they would not face reprisal for their actions, too. But still today, there will be Soviet female soldiers who lie in their graves in lands where they fought and their stories may be lost to time, but their stories deserve to be told. After the Second World War came to a conclusion in Europe, there was still a job to do thousands of miles away for the allies and in particular the Americans in the Pacific.

The Japanese enemy they were fighting were incredibly ferocious and they were ruthless in the way that they dealt with their prisoners of war and captives. The Japanese conducted some of the most harrowing executions of the conflict and they were responsible for the deaths of around 14 million civilians in the battles before they officially entered World War II.

Some of the most evil war criminals fought for the Japanese army and two officers even had a competition to see who could slay 100 people the quickest using a sword and the reality was that many of the victims of these men were civilians and even women. But when the American forces found themselves in the heat of the battle against the Japanese.

Often, they did not take prisoners, and they found that doing this would put their own lives in danger. So, why did this happen? And why were captured Japanese soldiers shot? It was not official Allied policy for soldiers to execute and shoot captured Japanese forces. Technically, under the laws and rules of war, it was a war crime and something someone could find themselves in court for doing.

But, it happened frequently enough in the Pacific, especially because of the enemy that the Allies were facing. The Japanese military doctrine was that surrender was dishonorable and would bring shame upon the family of a soldier for generations. It was also considered immense honor to die for your emperor in battle, and the Japanese military culture strongly discouraged surrender.

Surrender was considered worse than death, and many believed that in the hands of their enemies, they would be tortured or killed anyway. As a result of this, Japanese troops almost never surrendered early, and those who appeared to surrender often attacked suddenly through deceitful means, and would do things like detonate grenades in their hands to take the enemy with them, and some even attempted to slaughter their captors.

This created a battlefield reality where Allied soldiers came to distrust all surrender attempts. One of the most direct causes of Allied soldiers shooting captives in the Pacific was the repeated experience with false surrender tactics and the Japanese. They would raise their hands or wave white cloths, initiating a surrender attempt, but once Allied troops approached, they would pull out concealed weapons and open fire, detonate explosives, or signal to hidden and concealed units to attack.

These incidents became very widely reported in after action reports, and soldiers would discuss what they’d seen. The result of this was that Allied soldiers, particularly US Marines, often concluded that taking prisoners was far too dangerous to attempt in active combat zones. The Pacific War was unusually brutal, especially for the American forces when compared to their experiences in Europe.

Of course, they’d fought in the heart of Normandy and in the Ardennes, but the ferocity of the Japanese enemy was terrible for those troops who were drafted from Europe to the Pacific. Japanese soldiers committed widespread atrocities, such as the Bataan Death March, in which thousands of Allied prisoners of war suffered and succumbed to terrible conditions.

They also carried out the mass executions of prisoners of war and also tortured brutally, starved many, and conducted terrible medical experiments upon their captives. There were even accounts of beheadings and accusations of cannibalism. As Allied troops found the bodies of mutilated comrades and fellow soldiers and evidence of massacres in villages and prisoner of war camps, this created a huge amount of fear and also anger, especially amongst the frontline soldiers, and they wanted to take some vengeance for their fallen friends and

fellow soldiers. In many environments in the Pacific, such as in jungles, on the islands, and within caves, taking prisoners was logistically genuinely difficult. Units operated far from supply lines and prisoners required guards, food, water, and medical care. Evacuating them from difficult terrain was often impossible during ongoing combat, and Japanese prisoners frequently tried to escape their captivity and also tried to take their own lives to try and bring some honor to themselves rather than being seen as a surrenderer.

From a purely tactical standpoint, some Allied soldiers viewed prisoners as a danger, a logistical burden, and also a threat to unit survival. This does not justify the killing of captured prisoners of war, but it does explain the mindset that some of the soldiers had in dealing with their enemy.

The war in the Pacific was marked by extreme propaganda on both sides, too, and much of this was based upon portraying the enemy as terrible. Allied propaganda showed the Japanese soldiers as fanatical, subhuman, and incapable of surrender. And on the other hand, Japanese propaganda portrayed Westerners as weak or cruel. This mutual dehumanization made it psychologically easier for soldiers to kill wounded or captured soldiers and ignore the laws and rules of war in moments of stress and in high danger.

This was also one of the major factors in the erosion of restraint as the propaganda told the soldiers that taking the life of a prisoner was no great crime at all. There was also a breakdown of the rules of war in some combat zones, too. Formally, the Allies were signatories of the Geneva Convention, which stated that executing prisoners was illegal.

In practice, conditions on the front line led to a breakdown of discipline, and officers were not always present to keep an eye on things. Also, some commanders in quiet tolerated and also ignored shootings. But such actions were not universal, and many Allied units did take Japanese prisoners. Japanese surrender rates did rise sharply in 1945 as defeat became inevitable.

But the number of soldiers who refused to accept surrender and took their own lives instead also rose dramatically. Psychological exhaustion and combat stress also led to less prisoners being taken when they should have. Extended combat in the jungle, where Allied soldiers didn’t know where the enemy was, led to deprived sleep, the constant threat of ambush, and also high casualty rates, and all this played on the minds of soldiers.

They were in foreign lands, a long way away from home, and under these conditions, fear and reflex often replaced practical thinking, and soldiers reacted instantly to perceived threats. Also, a wounded or surrendering enemy in these environments was seen as particularly lethal and dangerous. This was true when fighting at night in difficult terrain, and also in cave warfare, which was completely harrowing.

So, captured Japanese soldiers were sometimes shot by the Allied soldiers for a number of different reasons. Firstly, Japanese military doctrine discouraged surrender and encouraged last-minute attacks. They wanted to be shot by the enemy rather than become a prisoner of war, and the Allies also had to deal with repeated experiences of fake surrender, which destroyed trust.

Also, extreme Japanese brutality hardened the attitudes of the Allies, and tactical realities and the environment that the soldiers were fighting in made taking prisoners dangerous. Whilst the actions of shooting captured prisoners was technically a war crime and illegal, they emerged from a savage theater of war where normal rules frequently collapsed, and where discipline at times was hard to find.

In April 1945, the Allies came across many concentration camps and prison sites where thousands of people had been locked up in terrible and awful conditions. Places like Bergen-Belsen and Dachau became infamous, and what the liberators of these camps found haunted them for the rest of their lives. They came across thousands of unburied bodies, corpses just dumped inside of train boxcars, and in massive piles.

Upon seeing this, the Americans, British, Canadian, and Soviet soldiers were horrified, and in the aftermath of these discoveries, there were scores of SS guards, former staff at the camps, who were shot in reprisal and in revenge for the crimes. Many of these SS guards had surrendered, but they regardless were still shot.

Some individual liberators sought revenge themselves and carried out attacks upon the former guards, but the allies turned a blind eye to this and few were ever brought to trial for the actions of shooting SS guards of the concentration camps. But why did the Allied soldiers do this? As many Allied units advanced into Germany and German-held territories, they were prepared for battle with a weakened enemy, which was on the retreat, and they were not prepared for finding extermination and concentration camps.

And they were also not prepared to liberate these places. Intelligence reports about the camps were known at high-level command, but ordinary soldiers did not know what they were about to come across and encounter. They found huge sites in which thousands of people had been left to die and succumb to their fate, and they discovered how terrible these places truly were.

They found execution walls and structures. They discovered crematoria with bodies piled near to the ovens ready to be burned, and they found evidence of torture and systematic brutality. Many soldiers recorded that they’d never seen anything comparable, and these were battle-hardened men, some who had fought for years and seen the hardest days of the Second World War.

Also found were thousands of starving prisoners and inmates who looked like walking skeletons. One British reporter inside of Bergen-Belsen summed up the feeling, and he said that, I quote, “Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which.

The living lay with their heads against the corpses, and around them moved the awful ghostly procession of emaciated aimless people with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life. But as mentioned, shortly after some of these camps were liberated, the shooting and reprisals began.

Now soldiers who found these sites were disgusted, and they felt incredibly angry at their enemy. The anger they felt led to revenge attacks, and they wanted to seek immediate reprisal and justice for the victims of the crimes. Those who encountered this justice were the SS guards of the camps, some of those who were actually hiding inside of the prisoner population.

With this, they were quickly dealt with and were shot. One man who carried out some attacks like this inside of Dachau was Lieutenant William P. Walsh, the commander of Company I of the 157th Infantry of the US Army. Upon seeing the bodies of thousands of emaciated prisoners piled inside of train boxcars, Walsh, who was incredibly angry and emotional, took this out on four German soldiers who had surrendered to him.

The four Germans were shot by Walsh, and then a Private Albert C. Pruitt administered a coup de grace gunshot to the head of these men who had been wounded. Walsh, along with another lieutenant, then organized the captured guards and separated them from Wehrmacht or army troops and SS guards. The SS were marched into an enclosure and were then shot by members of I Company with different weapons.

The legal status of the SS guards was also cast into question at the time of liberation. The Waffen SS and the Totenkopf Bande, as in the Death’s Head units, who ran the camps were not considered ordinary army soldiers. These men had long lists of massacres atrocities from the shooting of Allied prisoners of war and partisans to shootings to shooting thousands upon death marches from one camp to another.

Because they had heard about these actions, many frontline soldiers viewed the camp guards not as lawful enemy combatants, but as personnel who were directly responsible for the murder of civilians. And this led to a psychological barrier for them being removed, meaning they thought they wouldn’t be punished for retaliating.

The Allied forces were also infuriated further by the fact many of the guards who remained at the camp removed their uniforms and tried to mix in with prisoners. Some claimed to be administrative staff or even cooks. And this deception and disguise angered many. Some prisoners pointed out the most brutal guards leading to an on-the-spot shooting.

And soldiers believed they were preventing the escape of war criminals. Another thing the liberators had to contend with was that many of the guards were actually hostile to them and they did not give over the camp without a fight. It was said upon the liberation of Dachau that, and I quote, “At noon on Sunday, the camp was quiet and the SS guards were at their posts in the towers when the cry, ‘Americans!’ went up.

A prisoner rushed towards the gate and a guard shot him. Outside a single American soldier stood looking casually at the towers while the guards eyed him and others who were two or three hundred yards away. When the Americans opened fire, the guards in the gate tower came down, hands in the air. One held a pistol behind his back and the first American shot him.

Inside of watchtower B at Dachau and around this, there were a number of shot SS guards who were armed and who did not want to give up the site to the Allies. So, because of this, there was a shootout, but these men were quickly overpowered. Specifically, the shooting of SS guards was more common at some sites than others.

Dachau’s liberation became infamous for the discovery of the camp, but also for the shooting of guards that came after. The most notorious incident of this involved a group of SS guards rounded up inside of a courtyard. They were stood against a wall in a large group, and they were guarded by a machine gun team. A young soldier turned this weapon onto the men as they were allegedly attempting to escape and run off.

And this resulted in about 12 of the prisoners being shot and several more being wounded. It was said by the commander in charge at the time that, I quote, “It was the foregoing incident which has given rise to wild claims in various publications that most or all of the German prisoners captured at Dachau were executed.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The total number of German guards killed at Dachau during that day most certainly did not exceed 50, with 30 probably being a more accurate figure.” Inside Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the clean-up of the site took days, and there were accounts of some SS guards attempting to escape.

They had been ordered to bury the thousands of bodies around the site in mass graves, and during the clean-up, they tried to make a run for it. The men guarding the SS at the time then just turned their weapons on these men and then shot, bringing their lives to an end. Rather than run after them or go after them, they decided to attack.

This may have also been partly motivated by anger and revenge. Another thing to consider is that the Allied liberators and soldiers may not have shot and killed the majority of the guards themselves. They may have lent their weapons to prisoners to get some revenge of their own, and they did also turn a blind eye to the killings conducted by the prisoners.

It was said of one incident at Dachau that, and I quote, “Prisoners swarmed over the wire and grabbed the Americans and lifted them to their shoulders.” “Other prisoners caught the SS men. The first SS man elbowed one or two prisoners out of his way, but the courage of the prisoners mounted. They knocked them down and nobody could see whether they were stomped or what, but they were killed.

” It was said in another incident that an inmate was seen stomping an SS man’s face until there wasn’t much left. The bigger revenge may have been enacted by the prisoners directly, but what made a difference was the fact that the liberating soldiers were armed. Three former prisoners of Dachau also left the camp during liberation and found one of the worst SS guards hiding in a barn nearby and he was then beaten to death.

Inside Ohrdruf, these liberation reprisals also occurred and some soldiers gave their weapons to prisoners to finish off their former guards. By 1945, Allied soldiers had fought through Normandy, the Ardennes and the Rhineland and had taken casualties from German defensive ambushes. They’d also seen forced labor factories and the massacre of civilians inside different lands, but many soldiers began to encounter trouble distinguishing between the rules of war and retributive justice.

The official policy for Allied armies was for the SS personnel to be arrested, for evidence of their actions to be collected and for crimes to be preserved and then for war crimes charges to be conducted. But in reality, in the heat of the moment and in the chaotic final months of the war, there may have been a breakdown of the German surrender protocol and coupled with the overwhelming emotional shock felt by the soldiers, they themselves just shot surrendered SS men.

Commanders often didn’t punish soldiers involved in camp guard shootings either. So, to finish, captured concentration camp guards were sometimes shot because liberating soldiers encountered unprecedented evidence of systematic mass murder and evil crimes conducted by the SS guards. They considered these men and women to be direct perpetrators of these crimes and the liberators acted under emotional shock after prolonged combat.

The act of shooting captured SS guards was never official Allied policy, but it did occur multiple times in the spring of 1945 in the final days of the Second World War. During the Second World War, there were a number of accounts of captured or wounded soldiers sometimes being shot and dealt with ruthlessly rather than receiving the care and attention that they needed.

This was more common on the Eastern Front, but the shooting of a wounded or captured soldier was a clear war crime and violation of the laws and rules of war. These killings did not happen everywhere or all the time. Millions of prisoners of war were taken and survived the war, but when quick shootings did take place, they usually resulted from a grim mixture of fear, brutality, logistics, ideology, and also battlefield chaos.

These are the dark reasons why captured injured soldiers were shot. The rules of war were very well established before the Second World War. The 1929 Geneva Convention required that prisoners of war were given humane treatment. Medical care was given for wounded captives and there was protection against execution or abuse for them.

Of course, if we think of the fates of those who fell into the hands of, let’s say, the Japanese during the Second World War, they were certainly not given the correct treatment and were starved close to death and were treated with complete barbarism. Also on the Eastern Front, Hitler and his generals had given specific orders for their forces to execute and shoot political commissars, female Soviet soldiers, and resistance fighters without any questions asked immediately on the spot.

But shooting wounded or captured soldiers was illegal, no matter the circumstances. And yet these rules were often ignored when pressure mounted. The fierce combat conditions where soldiers often acted on panic rather than law made war crimes more likely to be carried out. Attacks happened fast and without clear front lines, and wounded enemies could still have weapons or grenades.

Soldiers feared ambush or feigned injury, and also some feigned surrender. And the guarding of prisoners during combat slowed unit movement down and made the soldier take the prisoners actually more vulnerable and also massively more noticeable. It was harder for them to conceal themselves, for example. One common battlefield reasoning was for soldiers that they claimed, “We can’t watch prisoners whilst under fire.

” And soldiers often lacked manpower to escort wounded captives safely to the rear. In some moments of terror or exhaustion, killing was chosen over guarding. On fast-moving fronts, especially in retreats, encirclements, or amphibious landings, wounded enemy prisoners were seen as liabilities. They needed escorts and required medical care, and they also slowed down very mobile units.

During retreats or breakthroughs, some troops believed they had no practical way of dealing with these prisoners and just shot them rather than abandoning them. And they knew if they just left them there, then they would probably later rejoin their enemy forces. Now, after many years of propaganda and brutal fighting, many soldiers began to see the enemy as subhuman and criminal.

And they also personally found them responsible for civilian deaths and suffering. There was particularly intense hatred that existed between German forces and Soviet troops. For example, after Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched, the Germans committed scores of atrocities inside of the lands in the east.

And the Soviets, when they pushed the Germans back years later, well, they took no prisoners and instead even shot injured German soldiers right on the battlefields. Also, the Japanese often shot and killed Allied soldiers who they captured as it was an intense and immense hatred they had for their enemy. The hatred produced a climate where mercy was seen as weakness.

The German propaganda portrayed the Red Army in particular and their soldiers as hordes. And Soviet propaganda emphasized the German atrocities. Now, this complete cycle created battlefield environments where prisoners were no longer viewed as human beings at all. As mentioned, some armies issued direct or implied orders encouraging brutality against the enemy.

Nazi Germany was the clearest example of this. For example, in 1941, issuing the Commissar Order instructing German troops to execute Soviet political officers on capture. Hitler also repeatedly described the Eastern Front as a war of annihilation. And officers tolerated or encouraged shooting of wounded Soviets.

Even when not directly ordered, unit culture often assumed prisoners didn’t need to be taken, especially when injured and incapacitated enemies were considered burdens. Once one side committed atrocities, soldiers feared being treated the same way if captured. They believed that they wouldn’t spare us, so why should we spare them? Many German and Soviet troops believed capture meant death or torture, and that encouraged a preemptive brutality and a breach of the rules of war.

Now, battlefield executions often followed the discovery of slain and slaughtered civilians, seeing mutilated or executed comrades, and finding wounded soldiers murdered. Then, they would take revenge of their own, and soldiers reacted emotionally with absolutely no mercy. Revenge killings became a tit-for-tat in a tragic spiral that escalated the brutality on all sides of the war.

There was also, though, a logistics reason why prisoners were at times not taken. Medical evacuations and prisoner handling required time and discipline that frontline soldiers didn’t always have. Wounded enemies, especially those who were screaming, bleeding heavily, or were unable to move, were sometimes viewed not as human casualties, but as, well, disposable problems blocking movements.

This mindset turned shootings and war crimes into perceived efficiency measures. But, there was also a huge breakdown of military discipline, especially in the final months of the Second World War. Most World War II armies were conscripted forces with young soldiers who had minimal training in handling prisoners of war, and also crumbling commands during defeats led to a hole in officers who could give specific orders.

Once discipline faltered, war crimes increased sharply. Soldiers stopped seeing rules as relevant, and the killing of prisoners became shockingly normalized. After World War II, there would be some soldiers who were brought to trial for their role in executing prisoners of war. Charges were typically war crimes or crimes against humanity, but the majority of the perpetrators were never caught and the deaths were just put down to, sadly, the chaos of the battlefield.

But were these killings normal in World War II? Was it normal for armies to shoot injured captured enemy soldiers? Well, the answer really is no. The majority of wounded soldiers were captured and treated properly and millions of prisoners of war survived the war. Captured injured soldiers were executed mainly, sadly, on the Eastern Front in the battles between the Axis and the Soviet Red Army.

This happened because of an immediate battlefield fear, a lack of manpower to guard prisoners, the logistics in handling soldiers, and also for revenge. But these killings were never legally justified, but the psychology and terror of the front line of the Second World War allowed the killings to happen anyway.

It was a war crime and it was murder, killing a prisoner of war. Thanks for watching this video. If you do have a suggestion for a future video, comment below. I hope you’re enjoying this new series.