Take (No) Prisoners! The Red Army and German POWs, 1941–1943

Abstract

From the outset of the German-Soviet war (1941-45), Soviet soldiers, commanders, political officers, and police agents killed captured Germans. Investigation into the reasons and extent, the perpetrators and dynamics of these war crimes was hampered from the start. 1 One obstacle was that alleged Soviet atrocities were part of German propaganda well before the Wehrmacht's attack on June 22, 1941. The "Commissar Order" of June 6, 1941, decreed the execution of Soviet political officers (politruki, or commissars) should they be captured in battle or while organizing resistance. The order attempted to legitimize this open breach of

Harnessing Dehumanization Theory, Modern Media, and an Intervention Tournament to Reduce Support for Retributive War Crimes

“…Victims of unjust military attacks often retaliate with reciprocal war crimes that ignite cycles of intensifying bloodshed (Edele, 2016;Weingartner, 1992). Although powerful third parties can de-escalate incipient conflicts, their citizens may instead support committing retributive war crimes against the aggressors (Sagan & Valentino, 2019;Watkins & Goodwin, 2020).…”

“…During World War II, American servicemen extracted ears, teeth, and skulls from the corpses of Japanese troops as "trophies" (Weingartner, 1992). On the other side of the world, soldiers of the USSR were executing German POWs en masse (Edele, 2016). More recently, American soldiers mutilated al-Qaeda prisoners at Abu Ghraib (Fiske et al, 2004) while Iraqi armed forces did the same to captured ISIS insurgents (Abdul-Ahad, 2017).…”