US war crimes

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The war crimes of the USA include all violations of international martial law by members of the US armed forces or the US foreign intelligence service CIA after the signing of the Hague Agreement of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949. This includes, among other things, executions of captured enemy soldiers and mistreatment of prisoners during interrogation, the use of torture and the use of force against civilians.

Legal statutes

Since the US has not ratified the Rome Statute through the International Criminal Court , war crimes committed by the US can not be charged there. Even if the US is not a member of the ICC, its citizens can face prosecution if they have committed crimes in a country belonging to the criminal court. The rejection of the international criminal court by US governments can be explained by the large global commitment to security issues. This means that Americans are always threatened with prosecution, unlike countries that do not enter into any international obligations and therefore have little to risk.

War crimes in or outside the United States against members of the armed forces and civilian US citizens can be prosecuted under the War Crimes Act 1996.

The beginning of the law reads:

“'' CHAPTER 118 — WAR CRIMES''Sec. '' 2401. War crimes. "§ 2401. War crimes" (a) OFFENSE.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, inany of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be finedunder this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, orboth, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death. "

- First paragraph of the law in PUBLIC LAW 104–192-AUG. 21, 1996

“Anyone who, in or outside the United States, commits a serious breach of the Geneva Conventions in the circumstances described in subsection (b) will be fined or imprisoned for life or any number of years under this title. If the victim dies, the catalog of punishments is also subject to the death penalty. "

The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) contains US military criminal law for soldiers at home and abroad.

The Judge Advocate General's Corps , an agency with more than 730 judge advocates, 30 law officers, 630 non-commissioned officers and nearly 275 civilian employees, is responsible for prosecuting military criminal offenses .

Wars

Prehistory up to the First World War

Filipino rebels are hanged by American soldiers

Legalized state combatants in the USA crossed the boundaries of human and professional warfare as early as the 19th century, especially in the Indian wars or the civil war . Such examples were the Wounded Knee massacre , the Sand Creek massacre , the Washita massacre . In the wars, the lines between crime, legitimate military action and war crimes were fluid. The massacres were more of a symbolic act. It was about deterrence through indiscriminate violence. The implementation almost followed a ritual logic that served to restore one's own superiority and was thus aggressively intended. In addition, they were part of an ideology and interest-based extermination strategy that was alien to the Indians. The ongoing conflict with the indigenous people, which was oriented towards extermination, took place in a democratic framework. A cultural processing of the violent land grab against the natives by public authorities did not take place until 80 years later. Until then, a paternalistic-assimilatory hegemonic discourse prevailed for a few decades. This approved the eliminatory actions. With films such as Broken Arrow or Devil's Doorway from 1950, the Indians were honored for the first time in detail as victims of white aggression.

The rules of war were only set down in writing at the beginning of the 20th century, but did not lead to any reduction or restriction of such prohibited acts in war zones among any combatants of the time. Around 1900 the foreign policy climate had become more and more heated and strong revisionist , masculine and imperial currents shaped the thinking and behavior of an entire growing generation of young men in Europe (see Militarism in Germany ) and also in the USA. The social potential for violence and xenophobia of young men at this time was overall concise.

During the American rule in the Philippines there were uprising movements, the Filipino-American War , which was fought by ruthless killing of prisoners on the orders of American commanders in chief. The totality of the war was also accelerated by involving the civil sector in the fighting. Concentration camps were formed and the supply lines were interrupted. This resulted in hunger and epidemics. Villages were burned down as planned. Civilians were killed. This resulted in the deaths of an estimated 250,000 Filipino civilians. This happened on the basis of official orders from the US command.

The order of Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith during the Balangiga massacre , known as the Kill and Burn Order, became known :

"I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States. "

First World War

According to historian Richard Rubin, American doughboys developed a strong hatred of all soldiers in the German Army during the Meuse-Argonne offensive . The same was true for soldiers from other war nations. In addition, there was uncertainty, violence and general fear, which were intensified by the stories of atrocities committed by the enemy. In particular, snipers and machine gun carriers along with others, as the most prominent hate groups, were mostly excluded from live captures and killed on the spot.

Only 48,000 German soldiers were taken alive in American captivity, despite the large-scale war of movement against a retreating, disintegrating German army in the last months of the war. In his diary, Private May described the shooting of prisoners by his unit during an advance on September 30, 1918:

"After a 2 hour barrage we made an attempt to break, thru. We did & got 16 prisoners. We saw one of our sergeants get killed and we decided to kill the 16 prisoners. "

- Gilbert May, Private 77th Division, 307th Infantery

Second World War

While the war crimes of the Red Army , but also of the Wehrmacht, have been dealt with well, this has remained a marginal issue with allied war crimes in terms of the number of publications and their position in professional discourse. The behavior of American soldiers during the occupation in the occupied territory towards the former enemies of the war has so far hardly been the subject of historical research.

Europe

If enemy forces surrendered during the course of the battle, the first one to two hours after capture were accompanied by an increased threat of death among all those involved in the war on all sides. In the area close to the front, the fighters on the front line of contact were often ready to liquidate enemy forces that had arisen or had only recently been captured, for various reasons and causes.

Historian Stephen Ambrose stated that of the 1,000 US World War II veterans he interviewed, only one reported killing a prisoner. Nevertheless, around a third said that they had seen other US soldiers who shot unarmed German prisoners with their hands raised. Such cases of shooting of prisoners in the area close to the front shortly after their capture, even before they were brought to the collection points, were not documented in their entirety and were not counted. When in doubt, they counted as a permissible act of combat.

Examples of spatially and temporally separated individual events of US war crimes are (not exhaustive):

Secret war records, made public in 2006, show that American soldiers committed 400 sexual offenses in Europe between 1942 and 1945, including 126 rapes in England. A study by Robert J. Lilly estimated that a total of 14,000 civilian women in Great Britain, France and Germany were raped by American soldiers during the war. However, the numbers vary so widely that the historian Miriam Gebhardt alone estimates the number of German women raped by US soldiers at 190,000.

Shootings of prisoners

The process of transition from formal combatant status to captivity was often kept to the brink of focus in historical appraisals. Strictly speaking, the sign of abandonment in the form of a white flag or raised hands was already a completed transition to the status of a prisoner, from which point the protective rules for the treatment of prisoners came into effect. There are no overall analyzes of how high the proportion of liquidations was after the task. In all five American attack divisions of the D-Day , there were orders in the individual units not to take prisoners. The killing rate of German prisoners of war on the landing section of the Americans was 50 percent.

“If we meet the enemy, we will kill him. If you lead your men against the enemy and he then wants to surrender: Oh no! The bastard is supposed to die. You will kill him. Pierce it between the third and fourth rib. Tell your people that. We need that killer instinct. We'll build a reputation for being killers. And killers are immortal. "

- George S. Patton

An interview with a contemporary and eyewitness, a then 93-year-old war veteran about the so-called "Incident in Chenogne " during the Ardennes offensive , a war crime not prosecuted, shows the recurring pattern of these processes:

"Chris D .: It's the stairs where from the guys game out. The first one was a medic. A German medic.
Roger M: Roger says it was a German medic who surrendered first, climbing out into the front yard where we're standing. He carried a white flag. American soldiers were positioned in a sort of semi-circle around him, rifles raised.
Chris D .: Without any word, when they saw the guy, [rum 00:22:30], he was killed.
Roger M: American soldiers shot the medic trying to surrender.
Chris D .: Second one was maybe a young Belgium boy. They didn't fire, of course.
Roger M: The boy made it out alive. Then another German emerged from the cellar steps, trying to surrender.
Chris D .: Rum.
Roger M: With the basement on fire, one-by-one, German soldiers emerged, trying to surrender. One-by-one, they were shot. Roger turns and I follow him. He crosses the narrow road, makes a sweeping gesture towards a small grassy embankment.
Chris D .: When the mayor came three, four days after, he came back and the bodies were lined here in front of here.
Roger M .: The German soldiers from the cellar, that ones who had tried to surrender.
Chris D ,: It was 19 dead and they were put side by side.
Roger M .: That wasn't all of course, ... "

- Take no prisoners: Inside a WWII American war crime

However, this pattern was found in the same way in all warring parties. From today's point of view, this is an unacceptable violation of regular warfare, according to the view of the time it was an act to be tolerated and widespread within the framework of social development standards. The patterns of perception of war crimes by observers today and then are very different. The level of tolerated social violence was significantly higher in the 1940s than it is today.

Asia and the Pacific

The display of body parts of Japanese dead was a common phenomenon among Americans in the Pacific War

On January 26, 1943, the submarine USS Wahoo shot at survivors in lifeboats of the Japanese transporter Buyo Maru . Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood claimed that the survivors were Japanese soldiers who pointed rifles at the wahoo after it appeared and that this tactic is common in submarine warfare.

During and after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea , US boats and Allied aircraft attacked Japanese rescue ships and approximately 1,000 survivors of eight sunken Japanese troop carriers. The justification given was that the Japanese soldiers had already been near a military base and could quickly be sent back into battle from there.

In Okinawa , in particular , there was widespread rape of women by American forces. Such incidents also occurred in retrospect due to the occupation of the island and repeatedly led to media attention.

The atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki received a strong own doctrine of justification through President Harry S. Truman . Accordingly, this was the only way to end the war without having to accept further high American war losses. This teaching achieved a lasting and dominant effect in the assessment of these processes in the American public and thus a legitimacy carried out by civil society. The controversy was also waged in other countries and was earmarked for political purposes especially on the part of the ideological opponents in the Cold War . Historical research in the 21st century evaluates events in an increasingly differentiated manner.

Classification of the crimes

The actions of American combatants were not detached from the events and social framework conditions of this time, in which a totalitarian war was waged by all war participants and the actions of the war opponents also had an impact on the American behavior in the nearby war zone. Basically, all armed forces, regular and irregular, of all warring parties participate in war crimes against their own and hostile groups. The extent and nature of the crimes varied. In general, rape, lynching and shooting of innocent or defenseless people were carried out by all those involved in the war. Gassings, death by starvation and the systematic liquidation of districts behind the front (ghettos), on the other hand, were purely German means for the planned annihilation of hostile population groups. The war crimes of the individual war participants differed in their planned execution. On the German side, these were arranged top-down and on the Allied side, they occurred as a result of the acts of war in the course of events, i.e. not planned. This fundamentally differentiates the character of the crime.

The majority of US crimes were heat of battle atrocities , ie actions carried out in the “heat of the moment” that could spread due to the adrenaline- puffed furious mental state of the soldiers, general pent-up anger or unlawful zones created by hierarchical disorder. These took place during the fighting or shortly afterwards, until a regulated chain of command in the troops began to function again and the usual operations began. But there were also cases that did not take place in these special situations, but were carried out behind the front and, for example, German women were simply tortured and killed.

The American bombing war on cities was planned and carried out technocratically, and the resulting civil losses were rationalized and legitimized as a necessary evil.

Cooking human skulls clean
US Navy Lieutenant EV McPherson with the skull of a killed Japanese soldier on the USS PT-341

Decades of silence prevailed on the US side in dealing with their own atrocities. Warfare by one's own troops was generally viewed as romanticized and glorified. At least immediately after the war there were a few opposing voices that were also heard. Edgar L. Jones, US Army ambulance driver and war correspondent, wrote a critical description of US actions in an Atlantic Monthly newspaper article :

“What kind of a war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civlilans, finished off the enemy wounded, tosses the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts or carved therir bones into letter openers. As victims we are privileged to try our defeated opponents for their crimes against humanity, but we should be realistic enough to appreciate that if we were in trial for breaking international law, we shoul be found guilty on a dozen counts. "

- Edgar L. Jones

Translation:

“What do the civilians think, what kind of war we have fought? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, sank lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, "killed" wounded (and helpless, note) enemies, threw the dying into a hole with the dead and in the Pacific boiled the body tissue of enemy skulls to make table decorations or to make carved bones as letter openers for our loved ones. As winners, we have the privilege of bringing our defeated opponents to justice for their crimes against humanity, but we should be realistic enough to understand that if we were found guilty of the same in a dozen cases, we would be found guilty of violating that International law has been brought to justice. "

- Edgar L. Jones

Korean War

In the Nogeun-ri massacre in late July 1950 during the Korean War, hundreds of Korean refugees died as a result of targeted shelling by US troops near the village of Nogeun-ri, Hwanggan-myeon, Yeongdong -gun, Chungcheongbuk-do . According to official information so far, this should have been an oversight, but according to more recent information there is a possibility that the fire was fired on command.

The Nogun-ri massacre was not an isolated incident. Other refugees, US veterans and Korean survivors claim, were later killed in similar situations. The hunt for communists of the time, in the hot Cold War , led to further crimes of a mass character, in which thousands of suspected communists were also killed directly by US troops. A widespread or well-known and central processing with exact documentation of these US investments is missing so far.

The events surrounding the Koje prisoner-of-war camp represented gross violations of all known fundamental rights statutes.

The insight of those who participated in the war in retrospect was rather small in a reply to a report on the events it says:

"Some US veterans were addressed by the AP report. They retorted, “Every combat veterans knows that the only law during war is to kill or be killed… Not one single American who served in South Korea owes the people of that country an apology for anything” “

-

Vietnam War

My Lai massacre

The Mỹ Lai (Son My) massacre was committed on March 16, 1968 during the Vietnam War in the Mỹ Lai parish of the village of Sơn Mỹ, called My Lai 4 . The US Army initially covered up the massacre of 504 civilians . Only after research by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh did the event come to the public, although the publication of the report had initially been rejected by all media for about a year. Hersh was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 and the publication was instrumental in changing public opinion about the war. Another massacre took place at the same time in the hamlet of My Khe. When massacre of My Khe another 90 Vietnamese civilians were killed. Based on the testimony of participants and other Vietnam veterans, it became clear in retrospect that this event was only the climax of an everyday occurrence of criminal acts by the US military. It was not a deviation from the set course, but adherence to the course. Rape, kidnapping and mistreatment of Vietnamese civilians were the order of the day.

The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group Files are the result of a task force of the Pentagon, which in the 1970s, after the media attention surrounding the massacre, was tasked with checking the accuracy of the many emerging war crimes accusations. The focus was particularly on the Tiger Force , an elite unit in the USA at the time. The Tiger Force acted like a death squad in the Quảng Ngãi and Quảng Tin area in 1967 . In doing so, she set standards of her own in the Vietnam War. Her crimes included, among other things, arson , rape , torture of prisoners, massive machine gun fire on inhabited villages, target shooting at civilians, the indiscriminate shooting of peasants, the murder of people who happened to be encountered - Beatings of the defenseless, individual and group executions , the deliberate killing of the elderly, the sick, the disabled and women, stabbing , scalping , bayonetting and strangling , the beheading of a baby, the mutilation of corpses and the decoration of corpse parts.

The investigation spanned over 9,000 pages of investigation files, affidavits from witnesses, and status reports for senior military officers showing that 320 alleged incidents were factually justified.

Napalm victim 1967/68

The rules of engagement of the US troops in war allowed the troop leaders in the field to establish a permissive free-fire zone at their own discretion (fire at will). In particular, the aerial warfare with helicopters such as the Bell UH-1 , which were manned by machine guns and had rocket launchers equipped with air- to-surface missiles , led to area bombardments of villages in the jungle from the air, with no information on their combatant status, mostly due to a lack of close reconnaissance. This led to innumerable anonymized distance killings of non-combatants. This warfare strategy aimed at the terrorization of the civilian population of the non-openly fighting enemy. This also included the use of Agent Orange , which, due to the long-term damage as with the later born, represented a violation of permissible warfare.

The undirected and widespread use of napalm in Vietnam was directed equally against the civilian population. This was also taken into account by the US commanders and tolerated as permissible. The lack of separation of the combat zone in warfare led to the civilian population being included in the war. Since precautions to avoid such situations were not taken or maintained by the US command in the beginning, this is also a violation of the permissible warfare, through the active failure of those responsible in their areas.

Gulf Wars (Iraq)

Journalist Seymour Hersh quoted American witnesses as alleging that in 1991 a platoon of U.S. Bradley combat vehicles belonging to the 1st Brigade of the 24th Infantry Division opened fire on a large group of more than 350 disarmed Iraqi soldiers who escaped revealed at a makeshift military checkpoint prior to the devastation on Highway 8.

Basically was opened in 2003 and the Iraq war , a war of aggression with a lack of legitimacy as a threat did not exist real. As such, waging a war of aggression that was not covered represented a breach of international law. This was considered highly controversial at the time and led to a split in the international community into a coalition of the willing and those of the war opponents, including the federal government led by Gerhard Schröder .

The conflict in the ensuing occupation was an irregular one. There were no opposing forces operating in the field, but guerrilla-like attacks, ambush attacks on US troops. These lacked a clear friend-enemy scheme. In daily use, for example on patrols in urban areas, these were under increased and permanent threat of being attacked from ambush. Combat actions therefore took place almost exclusively in urban areas. The unintentional killing of civilians, for example by indirect fire, is not yet a war crime, even if this number is probably a very high five or six-digit number.

Permanently exposed to psychological stress, symptoms of illness increased in individual troop members. Mental dropouts occurred during these missions, which grew into fatal attacks on bystanders.

Abu Ghraib torture scandal

US soldier Charles Graner poses next to the prisoner Manadal al Jamadi who was killed in interrogation.

The Abu Ghraib torture scandal ( also: Abu Graib or Abu Ghraib) was a torture affair during the occupation of Iraq by the United States , which caused a worldwide sensation. In this Iraqi inmates of Abu Ghraib prison abused, raped and by guards tortured , often to death. Most of the inmates were "innocents who were in the wrong place at the wrong time," a general later said. The scandal was exposed through the publication of photos and videos of evidence by the press. Some of the images were published in May 2004, and some in February and March 2006.

Killing civilians in haditha

On November 19, 2005, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich led Marines from the Third Battalion to Haditha. Lance Cpl died in Al-Subhani (a neighborhood of Haditha). Miguel Terrazas by a roadside bomb. Later that day, 24 Iraqi women and children were found dead, suspecting Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich and his marines. Wuterich acknowledged in the military tribunal that he gave his soldiers the order "shoot first, ask questions later" after the roadside bomb exploded. The military judge Lt. He also assured Col. David Jones that he had not fired his gun at any woman or child that day. On January 24, 2012, Frank Wuterich was sentenced to 90 days in prison and a reduction in his rank and salary. One day earlier, Wuterich pleaded guilty to a negligent breach of duty. No other Marine was sentenced to prison for this incident.

Further single events

  • Violation of the permissible level of violence in Operation Iron Triangle : Killing of four unarmed Iraqis by US military personnel on the basis of inadequate orders from the command center to "kill everything that moves".
  • Baghdad Canal Killings : In the spring of 2007 along a remote stretch of canal in southern Baghdad there were executions of previously captured Iraqi insurgents by US nationals.
  • In the 2006 Mahmudiyya massacre, Iraqi civilians were killed and raped by US military personnel.
  • On March 15, 2006, 11 Iraqi civilians were handcuffed and executed by US nationals ( Ishaqi incident ). Five of the civilians were under 6 years old, of the other six four were women and one 75 year old old man.

War on terror

Andrew Holmes poses with the bare body of Gul Mudin (face pixelated) shortly after his murder on January 15, 2010
US military video showing a scene from the July 12, 2007 air strikes on Baghdad in which more than a dozen people, including two Reuters employees, were killed. The video was published by WikiLeaks on April 5, 2010 .
US Marines urinate on killed Taliban fighters in Helmand Province, Afghanistan (July 2011); Strictly speaking, it is not an active act of violence, but an expression of a cross-border inhumane attitude

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , US President George W. Bush circumvented international martial law against so-called unlawful combatants with extraordinary extraditions and “ extended interrogation techniques ”. This included waterboarding , which has become known worldwide . Guantanamo Bay became a world famous torture prison for suspected Islamist terrorists. The lack of a legal basis for the uncovered long-term detention of non-Americans who have not been legally convicted, which apply according to democratic standards, has not yet been established. In May 2018, the European Court of Human Rights condemned, among other things, the US practice in Lithuanian and Romanian prisons as a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights . A criminal court conviction of the responsible politicians in the USA did not take place despite a public prosecutor's investigation.

The kill team murders in Afghanistan caused international excitement. Repeatedly inaccurate air strikes on suspected fighter groups led to false attacks on completely uninvolved civilians, as in the air strike at Garani . More frequent attacks by the US armed forces involved the airborne bombing of wedding parties in Afghanistan. Even if the target selection always adhered to a militarily permissible framework, the indirect effects of the use of weapons were often disproportionate to the target. Instead of a single person, entire streets or villages were often affected in such aerial warfare missions. The result was high collateral damage . This also happened during the Azizabad air strike on August 22, 2008. A Taliban commander was the target, the crew of an AC-130 carried out the attack, killing 78-92 civilians in a larger area. The majority were affected by children. There are dozen other known examples of this type of attack. These were always accompanied by disproportionate technical weapons use in densely populated civil areas. Other violations of permissible and covered violence were the Kandahar massacre and the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners in Bagram in 2002.

The major controversies surrounding warfare against terrorism include drone attacks on suspected targets in countries with terrorist structures as a concept of so-called targeted killings . These include, for example, the drone attacks in Pakistan . The admissibility of the calculation of collateral damage resulting from the imprecise conduct of the operation and the legality of such attacks under international law are debatable.

As early as 2013, Amnesty International described the US drone program as a “license to kill” and a violation of international law. The transparency announced by President Barack Obama has never been complied with and his administration has continued to violate international law.

Prosecution

Only a fraction of the crimes committed by GIs in Germany were punished by US courts. 3.5 million US soldiers were deployed in Europe during World War II. However, there were only two US military justice court martial against GIs. Not a single one was convicted.

The legal processing of the crimes in the free fire zones during the Vietnam War has not yet taken place. More than three million Vietnamese were poisoned by Agent Orange, 4.4 million injured, and between 1975 and 1997 50,000 children were born with deformities. The USA has not yet paid any compensation to the victims. The events around Hiroshima, Dresden or the use of napalm against the villages of tabernacles were not prosecuted either.

In early 2020, the international court began investigating alleged war crimes committed by US citizens in Afghanistan.

Classification of US war crimes

In the 20th century, US soldiers were represented in large numbers in many theaters of war like no other army. As such, they came into contact with active violence much more frequently. Because of their state-commissioned actions, they were permanently subject to formal rules of warfare. On the other hand, the local conditions of the theaters of war, always far away from home and often left to their own devices, required the deliberate overstretching of formal operations from the point of view of the local management forces. The increase in asymmetrical warfare made it increasingly difficult for orderly armed forces to keep civilians out of the fighting from 1950 onwards. They often came between the fronts. The fact that these groups were not protected also depends on the level of social development at that time and the thinking and acting of the actors of that time. The higher officers simply did not feel they were commissioned or responsible to protect the civilian life of foreign nations or opponents in particular. The 1950s and 1960s were particularly characterized by a planning, technocratic leadership culture. This marked the level of social development of the generations who were in active service until 1990. Such groups formed a strong inner faction in the military staff. After that, softer and more prudent types of commanders came into the higher ranks. As such, they had a more moderate effect on the conduct of the war at the central points than before. The army opened up to women. Freedom of movement and the reduction of instincts were increasingly taken into account and accepted instead of relying on the suppression of instincts , which in combination with adrenaline rushes in young men lead to uncontrolled outbreaks of violence in chaotic situations.

Basically, many events that have occurred since 1990 and are war crimes are violations on an individual basis, which have taken place due to the unsuitable character of the perpetrator but also due to mission-related characteristics. A systematic terrorization of civilians like in the Vietnam War did not take place at least on a large scale.

If one takes into account the large number of US-led conflicts, the duration of the conflicts, the number of combatants in the war zones and the usual brutality tendencies, especially of male fighters in lawless zones, then the extent of US war crimes is no more difficult to assess than typical crimes of others Nations. However, the scale is only partially suitable for this. The German war crimes, the Japanese war crimes , the Soviet war crimes , the French, British, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Belgian war crimes (all in their colonies and colonial wars) in the 20th century are purely quantitative and the way they are carried out in a structured and orderly manner were not a useful comparison for the pioneering democracy and advocate of freedom of the 20th century.

Cultural processing

The scientific processing of the incidents shows an existing basic level. There are publications on many events.

The public debates on this have also occurred again and again at different times. For example the anti-war movement in the Vietnam War.

In the USA there are diverging patterns of perception in the popular memory image of the role of one's own armed forces. The critical attitude towards its own armed forces, which has long been deeply rooted in Germany, due to the past, is less pronounced there. There is a strong glorifying and herorizing image production in the collective knowledge of one's own military history.

The baby boomer generation in the USA in particular received a form of socialization that, according to Tom Engelhardt , resembled a victory culture that superimposed the thinking and imagination of adolescents. A transfiguring and heroic wave of media processing began, carried by the film industry. Television and cinema images led to a political cultural transformation in the population in the 1950s and 1960s. Dominant male models ( Born to Be Wild , Rock 'n' Roll , Der Wilde , Route 66 , John Wayne etc.) created an aura of striving for individual uniqueness and masculine strength . The up-and-coming generation of the war generation, who held back in silence, pressed for the establishment of war and warrior myths. For them the war became a kind of fascinating adventure asset, almost comparable to the militaristic German youth in the 1930s. The kind of hero worship , for example of an Audie Murphys, reinforced this basic attitude.

An exemplary description of the self-perception of adolescents at the time by Ron Kovic shows the susceptibility of male adolescents to depictions that glorified war:

“ I'll never forget Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back . At the end of the film, he jumps on a burning tank that could explode at any moment. He grabs the machine gun and fires into the German lines. He was acting so heroically it ran cold down my spine. I would have liked to swap with him. Flames were already licking around his legs, but he was still shooting wildly with the machine gun. That was the greatest film I've ever seen. "

- Kovic 1990, p. 43

The generation socialized in this way went into the Vietnam War and waged the war they waged.

Popular newer film and series productions such as Band of Brothers or more thoughtful Hollywood productions such as Flags of Our Fathers and others also bear witness to the horrors of war and the sometimes difficult tightrope walk of soldiers in action. However, productions that were more glorifying and resembling pro-war films in their effect continued to dominate, focusing on conveying thoughts of adventure, fame and honor . A striking example of this is the TV series JAG - On behalf of the honor or Top Gun . These productions are aimed at the consumption of the broad section of the population, unlike the low-frequented expert reports on individual acts of war or the legal processing of particularly striking cases, which can then also be given media attention.

Americans did not consciously deal with or process the dark chapters of their history. Myths could thus collectively solidify.

“We are not like the Germans, who work through their history in minute detail. If I show the pictures of the destroyed cities, the rubble, the mountains of corpses, many look away and answer: The Japanese would not have deserved otherwise. "

- Peter Kuznick , professor at the American University in Washington.

For regions or states affected by violence, dealing with US crimes presented hurdles. For the Federal Republic of Germany during the Cold War, these topics were a taboo, because they were seen as a potential burden on the relationship with the Western allies.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ FACT SHEET: United States Policy on the International Criminal Court . This article contains material from the United States Department of State.
  2. ↑ lmd / dpa: USA: Employees of the criminal court are not allowed to enter. In: Spiegel Online . March 15, 2019, accessed May 8, 2020 .
  3. ↑ (dpa): War crimes in Afghanistan: World Criminal Court does not determine against the USA. In: tagesspiegel.de . April 12, 2019, accessed May 8, 2020 .
  4. ↑ US torture in Afghanistan possibly war crimes. In: sueddeutsche.de . November 15, 2016, accessed May 8, 2020 .
  5. ^ War Crimes Act of 1996 United States Congress , accessed April 2, 2020.
  6. ↑ 18 US Code § 2441, War Crimes Cornell Law School, accessed April 2, 2020.
  7. ↑ Public Law 104–192 104th Congress of August 21, 1996 (PDF)
  8. ↑ Michael Scott Bryant: American Military Justice from the Revolution to the UCMJ: The hard Journey from Command Authority to due Process Creighton International and Comparative Law Journal 2013, pp. 1-14 (English).
  9. ↑ Thoralf Klein, Frank Schumacher: Colonial Wars: Military Violence in the Sign of Imperialism , Hamburger Edition HIS, 2012, p. 76f
  10. ↑ Thoralf Klein, Frank Schumacher: Colonial Wars: Military Violence under the Sign of Imperialism , Hamburger Edition HIS, 2012, p. 78.
  11. ↑ Thoralf Klein, Frank Schumacher: Colonial Wars: Military Violence in the Sign of Imperialism , Hamburger Edition HIS, 2012, p. 79.
  12. ^ Charles Quince: Resistance to the Spanish-American and Philippine Wars: Anti-Imperialism and the Role of the Press, 1895-1902 , McFarland, 2017, ISBN 9781476629544 , p. 144.
  13. ^ President Retires Gen. Jacob H. Smith, The New York Times, 1902-07-17
  14. ^ Richard Rubin: The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and their Forgotten World War . 2013, p. 349 .
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