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Concentration camps and slave work
The Holocaust was the killing of approximately six million European
Jews, as well as six million others who were deemed "unworthy of life"
(including the disabled and mentally ill, Soviet POWs, homosexuals,
Freemasons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Roma) as part of a program of
deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist
government in Germany led by Adolf Hitler. About 12 million forced
laborers, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, were employed in the
German war economy inside the Nazi Germany.
In addition to the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet Gulag, or labor
camps, led to the death of citizens of occupied countries such as
Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as German prisoners of
war (POW) and even Soviet citizens themselves who had been or were
thought to be supporters of the Nazis. Sixty percent of Soviet
POWs died during the war. Vadim Erlikman estimates the number at
2.6 million Soviet POWs that died in German Captivity.
Richard Overy gives the number of 5.7 million Soviet POWs. Of those, 57%
died or were killed, a total of 3.6 million. The survivors on
their return to the USSR were treated as traitors (see Order No. 270).
Body disposal at Unit 731, the infamous Japanese biological warfare
research unit.Japanese POW camps also had high death rates, many were
used as labour camps. According to the findings of the Tokyo tribunal,
the death rate of Western prisoners was 27.1% (American POWs died at a
rate of 37%), seven times that of POW's under the Germans and
Italians[157] The death rate of Chinese was much larger as, according to
the directive ratified on 5 August 1937 by Hirohito, the constraints of
international law were removed on those prisoners. Thus, if 37,583
prisoners from the UK, 28,500 from Netherlands and 14,473 from USA were
released after the surrender of Japan, the number for the Chinese was
only 56.
According to a joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju, Mark
Peattie, Toru Kubo, and Mitsuyoshi Himeta, more than 10 million Chinese
were mobilized by the Japanese army and enslaved by the Koa-in for slave
labor in Manchukuo and north China.[160] The U.S. Library of Congress
estimates that in Java, between 4 and 10 million romusha (Japanese:
"manual laborer"), were forced to work by the Japanese military. About
270,000 of these Javanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held
areas in South East Asia. Only 52,000 were repatriated to Java, meaning
that there was a death rate of 80%.[161] According to Mitsuyoshi Himeta,
at least 2.7 million died during the Sanko Sakusen implemented in Heipei
and Shantung by General Yasuji Okamura.
Mistreated and starved prisoners in the Mauthausen camp, Austria,
1945.On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066,
interning thousands of Japanese, Italians, German Americans, and some
emigrants from Hawaii who fled after the bombing of Pearl Harbor for the
duration of the war. 150,000 Japanese-Americans were interned by the
U.S. and Canadian governments, as well as nearly 11,000 German and
Italian residents of the U.S.
Allied use of slave labor occurred mainly in the east, such as in
Poland[2], but more than a million was also put to work in the west. By
December 1945 it was estimated by French authorities that 2,000 German
prisoners were being killed or maimed each month in mine-clearing
accidents.
Chemical and bacteriological weapons
Despite the international treaties and a resolution adopted by the
League of Nations on 14 May 1938 condemning the use of toxic gas by
Japan, the Imperial Japanese Army frequently used chemical weapons.
Because of fears of retaliation, however, those weapons were never used
against Westerners but only against other Asians judged "inferior" by
the imperial propaganda. According to historians Yoshiaki Yoshimi and
Seiya Matsuno, the authorization for the use of chemical weapons was
given by specific orders (rinsanmei) issued by Hirohito himself. For
example, the Emperor authorized the use of toxic gas on 375 separate
occasions during the invasion of Wuhan, from August to October 1938.
The biological weapons were experimented on human beings by many units
incorporated in the Japanese army, such as the infamous Unit 731,
integrated by Imperial decree in the Kwantung army in 1936. Those
weapons were mainly used in China and, according to some Japanese
veterans, against Mongolians and Soviet soldiers in 1939 during the
Nomonhan incident. According to documents found in the Australian
national archives in 2004 by Yoshimi and Yuki Tanaka, cyanide gas was
tested on Australian and Dutch prisoners in November 1944 in the Kai
islands.
Bombings
Massive aerial bombing by both Axis and Allied air forces took the lives
of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Anglo-American bombing of German
cities claimed up to 600,000 civilian lives, most notably, the
bombing of Dresden. The city of London was heavily bombed by the German
Luftwaffe from September, 1940 to May, 1941 during their blitz of
Britain; at one point the city was bombed for 57 straight nights. For
the first, and so far only, time, nuclear weapons were used in combat:
two atomic bombs released by the United States over Japan devastated
Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki. The number of total
casualties in these bombings has been estimated at 200,000.
War trials
From 1945 to 1951, German and Japanese officials and personnel were
prosecuted for war crimes. Charges included crimes against peace, crimes
against humanity, waging wars of aggression, and other crimes. The most
senior German officials were tried at the Nuremberg Trials, and many
Japanese officials at the Tokyo War Crime Trial and other war crimes
trials in the Asia-Pacific region. Many other minor officials were
convicted in minor trials, including subsequent trials by the Nuremberg
Tribunal, the Dachau Trials, and the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials.
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