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Combatants and Noncombatants: Atrocities, Massacres, and War Crimes
Abstract
Violence against Enemy CiviliansWar Crimes during OccupationViolence against Civilians on Home TerritoryCrimes against Prisoners of WarNaval BlockadeLegal Consequences and MemoryReferences and Further Reading
This is a major new naval history of the First World War which reveals the decisive contribution of the war at sea to Allied victory. In a truly global account, Lawrence Sondhaus traces the course of the campaigns in the North Sea, Atlantic, Adriatic, Baltic and Mediterranean and examines the role of critical innovations in the design and performance of ships, wireless communication and firepower. He charts how Allied supremacy led the Central Powers to attempt to revolutionize naval warfare by pursuing unrestricted submarine warfare, ultimately prompting the United States to enter the war. Victory against the submarine challenge, following their earlier success in sweeping the seas of German cruisers and other surface raiders, left the Allies free to use the world's sea lanes to transport supplies and troops to Europe from overseas territories, and eventually from the United States, which proved a decisive factor in their ultimate victory.
War has always been subject to religious and moral prescriptions (the ‘laws and customs of war’) which seek to codify its conduct and limit its violence. Yet the changing nature of that violence, owing to the evolution of both technology and culture, means that such norms are breached in every new conflict. They also result in polemic as each side blames the other for committing excesses while excusing or justifying its own. Afterwards, coming to terms with the new types and thresholds of violence produced by the war entails redefining what is considered legitimate conduct, reinforcing but also modifying the underlying principles. Yet the polemic lingers, especially as the victors have the greater say in who is to blame for what. The First World War is a good example of this dialectic of norm, conflict and revision and of the passions and polemics that accompany it. The conduct of war had been legally codified by international agreement to an unprecedented degree in the half-century before 1914. During the war, for the first time, the habitual charge that the enemy committed atrocities was translated into charges that could be tried under international law. This led to the attempt to create tribunals for war crimes following the war. Although a failure, this opened the way to Nuremberg and Tokyo after the Second World War. The conventions on the conduct of war were also revised during the interwar period. But rather than serving as a lesson, the atrocities of the Great War turned out to be a harbinger of even greater violence in the future.
The anti-German riots which erupted simultaneously in many countries in response to the torpedoing of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915 reflected shifts in the status of minorities in multi-ethnic societies at a time of escalating nationalist emotions. This article shows that the situation of the Germans in South Africa differed in important respects from the dilemma in which Germans found themselves in other parts of the world during the First World War. The dominion of the Union of South Africa was embroiled in a struggle between Afrikaners and English-speaking settlers for the definition of white South Africanism. Since most German immigrants had previously tended to amalgamate with the Afrikaner section of the colonial society and had not laid claims to a hyphenated identity, many Afrikaners perceived the attacks on German residents as an assault by urban English-speakers on the Afrikaner community, and Afrikaner public opinion requested that Germans should be treated in a fair manner. The intra-white dispute about a shared South African identity prevented, therefore, the state from sustaining the kind of assimilationist or even discriminatory pressure which German residents had to face in countries such as the USA or Brazil during and after the Great War.
War Land on the Eastern Front is a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of their encounter with Eastern Europe. It presents an 'anatomy of an occupation', charting the ambitions and realities of the new German military state there. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, it reveals how German views of the East changed during total war. New categories for viewing the East took root along with the idea of a German cultural mission in these supposed wastelands. After Germany's defeat, the Eastern front's 'lessons' were taken up by the Nazis, radicalized, and enacted when German armies returned to the East in World War II. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius's persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.
This book addresses the origins, development, and aftermath of the Armenian genocide in a reappraisal based on primary and secondary sources from all the major parties involved. Rejecting the determinism of many influential studies, and discarding polemics on all sides, it founds its interpretation of the genocide in the interaction between the Ottoman empire in its decades of terminal decline, the self-interested policies of the European imperial powers, and the agenda of some Armenian nationalists in and beyond Ottoman territory. Particular attention is paid to the international context of the process of ethnic polarization that culminated in the massive destruction of 1912-23, and especially the obliteration of the Armenian community in 1915-16. The book examines the relationship between the great power politics of the 'eastern question' from 1774, the narrower politics of the 'Armenian question' from the mid-19th century, and the internal Ottoman questions regarding reform of the complex social and ethnic order under intense external pressure. It presents detailed case studies of the role of Imperial Germany during the First World War (reaching conclusions markedly different to the prevailing orthodoxy of German complicity in the genocide); the wartime Entente and then the uncomfortable postwar Anglo-French axis; and American political interest in the Middle East in the interwar period which led to a policy of refusing to recognize the genocide.
The Nuremberg tribunal following the Second World War is universally considered as the foundation stone of international law with regard to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It may come as a surprise, however, to learn that the first international attempts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity came at the end of the First World War, with trials held at Allied prompting in Turkey and Germany.
Armenien und der Völkermord. Die Istanbuler Prozesse und die türkische Nationalbewegung
- Taner Akçam
Oubliés de la Grande Guerre. Humanitaire et culture de guerre
- Annette Becker
“Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and its Contemporary Legal Ramifications,”
- Dadrian Vahakn N.