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But the laws of war do not cover, in time of either war or peace, a government's actions against its own nationals (such as Nazi Germany's persecution of German Jews). And at the Nuremberg war crimes trials , the tribunals rebuffed several efforts by the prosecution to bring such "domestic" atrocities within the scope of international law as ...
Crimes against the Polish nation committed by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion of Poland, [3] along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II, [4] included the genocide of millions of Polish people, especially the systematic extermination of Jewish Poles.
World War II saw the largest scale of war crimes and crimes against humanity ever committed in an armed conflict, mostly against civilians and POWs.Most of these crimes were carried out by the Axis powers who constantly violated the rules of war and the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, mostly by Imperial Japan.
The offenses that would be prosecuted were crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. [26] At the conference, it was debated whether wars of aggression were prohibited in existing customary international law; regardless, before the charter was adopted there was no law providing for criminal responsibility for aggression.
Crimes against prisoners of war were exposed to the German public in the Wehrmacht exhibition around 2000, which challenged the still popular myth that the German military was not responsible for Nazi crimes. [260] [261] Memorials and markers have been established at cemeteries and former camps by state or private initiatives. [262]
Nazi Germany also committed crimes against citizens of other countries deported to occupied Poland, especially Soviet and Italian prisoners of war, who were deliberately neglected and starved, deprived of rudimentary sanitation and medical care, resulting in numerous epidemics, or executed. [185]
After the war, these crimes were tried at what became known as the Doctors' Trial, and revulsion at the abuses perpetrated led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics. The Nazi physicians in the Doctors' Trial argued that military necessity justified their experiments and compared their victims to collateral damage from ...
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the ...