Atrocity

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For other uses, see Atrocity (disambiguation)

An atrocity (from the Latin atrox, "atrocious", from Latin ater = "matte black" (as distinct from niger = "shiny black")) is a term used to describe crimes or excesses ranging from an act committed against a single person to one committed against a population or ethnic group.

In general use, an atrocity or massacre designates a politically or ethnically motivated killing of civilians. In international law, more precise terms are war crime and crime against humanity.

An atrocity can be a single specific event, or a series of events, or can refer to genocide. The defining characteristic of an atrocity is its brutal or systematic nature. It is an act of killing that is in violation of most traditional moral principles, although some societies do not condemn such behavior. Often, hostilities exceed the legitimate mandate of killing enemy combatants to include attacks upon unarmed people, upon combatants after their surrender, or upon otherwise non-combative peoples. Thus, nearly every culture has in its history acts of killing which are atrocities.

The historical record is clouded by a failure to determine if mutilated bodies represent torture before death, or mutilation of a dead body. In either case, the important effect is the propaganda value, and its effect on the morale of the enemy.

Sometimes mass killing is imposed on civilian populations of no military significance, simply as a warning. For example, Dresden or Hiroshima. In other cases, they are targeted at military sub-groups, such as African-American summary execution in the field by the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. Small-scale atrocities may represent anything from disrespect, regional propaganda or both.

In modern settings not involving ethnic conflict, atrocities on individual leaders are rare, partially because they tend backfire or simply escalate, as in the case of Breaker Morant.

1 During World War II
2 See also
- 2.1 Disambiguation

[edit] During World War II

[edit] Germany

Main Article: Holocaust

During World War II, Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" killed millions of people.

Slavs (Russians, Ukranians, Belorussians), Jews (after the end of World War II this genocide came to be known as the Holocaust), Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma, and homosexuals (and anybody considered a threat to the Nazi party) were rounded up and sent to labor camps and death camps or just killed in their homes.

[edit] Japan

Japanese soldiers rounded up and killed millions of civilians and prisoners of wars from surrounding nations (especially from Korea, China and the United States) during World War II.

Unit 731 was amongst one of the most notorious examples of wartime atrocities committed on a civilian population during World War II, where cruel and inhumane "medical" experiments were done to thousands of Chinese civilians and Allied prisoners of war.

The Rape of Nanking is another example of Japanese atrocity committed on a civilian population where hundreds of thousands of men were slaughtered, while women of all ages were systematically raped and/or killed by Japanese soldiers.

[edit] Soviet Union

Soviet atrocities were committed against various groups.

After the initial revolution, the Soviet Union under Lenin denied peasants food; forcing millions onto collective farms to provide it for industrial workers. ^{[citation needed]}

During World War II, to boost war production and resist the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the Soviets also worked many of Russia's peasants to death in factories, gulags, and other work camps. The Soviet government also denied food to non-military personnel to keep up the war effort, leaving thousands of civilians to starve. Estimates put the death toll in the millions.

The USSR committed numerous atrocities against the citizens of Poland, Hungary, the Ukraine, and other Eastern Bloc countries whom the Soviet Union wanted as territory. For example, most of the Polish population was sent to camps in the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian populaiton was culled by artificial famine.^{[citation needed]}

All political dissidents, ethnic groups, etc. were also all subject to survellience by the KGB, which committed human rights violations in its own right but also sent "enemies" of the USSR to death camps called gulags to be starved and worked to death.

[edit] United States

The United States arguably has its own list of WWII atrocities. For example, the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo in the second world war, both operations which killed tens of thousands of civilians, were met with much criticism. Both cities were not defended and thousands of civilians were killed. In the case of Dresden, the bombing's intent was to further the goal of German defeat but was viewed as excessive. Many felt that not enough action was taken to prevent the loss of civilian life. In Tokyo's case the reasoning behind the bombing was the principle of Total War. The bombing, however, received similar criticism. The atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima have also been the topic of debate since the end of WWII. Although the intention behind the bombings was a quick end to the war, the military action was responsible for roughly 200,000 deaths.