German War Crimes

The government of Germany ordered, organized and condoned several war crimes in both World War I and World War II. The most notable of these is the Holocaust in which millions of people were murdered or died from abuse and neglect, 60% of them (approximately 6 million out of 10 million) Jews. However, millions also died as a result of other German actions in those two conflicts.

According to the Schlieffen plan, the German Army needed a quick victory against France in the West (as in 1870, and again in 1940), before engaging the Russian Empire in the East. The price for this was an attack on neutral Belgium.

Due to fears of Belgian Francs-tireurs, over 6,000 Belgian civilians were shot, sometimes in large groups by machine gun, in a brief ten-day period during the second half of August 1914 that came to be known as the "Rape of Belgium". In some cases, whole villages were destroyed, or towns as the centre of Dinant (674 of its citizens killed by the German soldiers), or in Louvain where the University's Library was burned (248 of its citizens killed).

ISBN-13: 9786133804142
Author : Frederic P. Miller, Agnes F. Vandome (Editor), John McBrewster (Editor)
Publisher: Alphascript Publishing
Publication date: 11/01/2010