Hué massacre

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Funeral of the victims of the massacre (1968)

The Hue massacre was a war crime committed by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army in the city of Hue in 1968 as part of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War . It began in the course of the Battle of Huế on January 31, 1968 and lasted 28 days. The North Vietnamese soldiers murdered numerous civilians because they believed them to be anti-communists . Religious leaders, mostly Roman Catholic clergymen, were executed, as were foreigners and government officials. These were tortured or buried alive , among other things . The number of victims is between 2800 and 6000 people, including children. The mass graves were discovered in the months to years afterwards.

Other sources report that a smaller proportion of the casualties may have been ascribed to the intense bombing by the US Air Force during and at the end of the Battle of Huế.

Four German citizens were also found among the victims: the three medical professors Horst-Günther Krainick , Alois Alteköster and Raimund Discher , who had been building up the university's medical faculty at the University of Huế as participants in an educational aid program of the German federal government since 1961, and Krainick's wife Elisabeth . The group was kidnapped from the Krainick's apartment at the beginning of February, even though they had identified themselves as Germans with ID on the doorstep. The hypothesis that they were mistaken for Americans is therefore now outdated. A fourth German doctor, Erich Wulff , had left the city shortly before.

Since there are hardly any neutral sources and the fighting also claimed many civilian victims, the historical discussion about this event is not yet over.

literature

  • Scott Ladderman: A Necessary Salve: The 'Hue Massacre' in History and Memory. In Philip Dwyer, Lyndall Ryan (Eds.): Theaters Of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History. Berghahn Books, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-1-78238-922-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ World: The Massacre of Hue . Time of October 31, 1969 (English).
  2. ^ Douglas Pike: Massacre at Hue . Excerpt from The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror (PDF; 4.3 MB), pages 23–39 of February 1, 1970 (English).
  3. ↑ Simon Reuter: The Vietnam Mission of the Medical Faculty Freiburg (1961–1968) - Freiburg (Breisgau), Univ., Diss., 2011
  4. ↑ Article in the "Indochina Chronicle" by Gareth Porter, June 1974 (PDF; 2.7 MB)