Violation of the laws of war by German forces in World War II
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Soviet prisoners of war were often subjected to forced marches without adequate food or water and commonly shot.[1][2]
During World War II, the German Wehrmacht (combined armed forces - Heer, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe) committed systematic war crimes, including massacres, mass rape, looting, the exploitation of forced labour, the murder of three million Soviet prisoners of war, and participated in the extermination of Jews. While the Nazi Party's own SS forces (in particular the SS-Totenkopfverbände, Einsatzgruppen and Waffen-SS) was the organization most responsible for the the Holocaust, the regular armed forces of the Wehrmacht committed many war crimes of their own (as well as assisting the SS in theirs), particularly on the Eastern Front.
Estimates of the percentage of Wehrmacht soldiers who committed war crimes vary greatly, from the single digits to the vast majority. Historians Alex J. Kay and David Stahel argue that, including crimes such as rape, forced labour, wanton destruction, and looting in addition to murder, "it would be reasonable to conclude that a substantial majority of the ten million Wehrmacht soldiers deployed at one time or another in the German-Soviet War were involved or complicit in criminal conduct".[3] The German Wehrmacht is regarded as being a "crucial factor in the most horrendous crime perpetrated by any nation in modern history" in regard to genocides committed by the regime.[4]
^Hartmann, Christian (2013). "Prisoners of War". Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany's War in the East, 1941-1945. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-966078-0.
^Kay, Alex J. (2021). Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing. Yale University Press. pp. 155–156. ISBN 978-0-300-26253-7.
^Kay, Alex J.; Stahel, David (2020). "Crimes of the Wehrmacht: A Re-evaluation". Journal of Perpetrator Research. 3 (1): 96–97, 110. doi:10.21039/jpr.3.1.29. S2CID 218954758.
^Bartov, Omer (2003). Germany's War and the Holocaust. Cornell University Press. p. 14. ISBN 978-0801486814.
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