new type of warfare. The Germans, Japanese and
Italians went beyond even what, in the Second
World War, came to be considered legitimate
warfare against all those involved in the war effort.
What would have been in store for Europe, Asia
and Africa if Germany and Japan had won the war
can be seen from their ruthlessly brutal behaviour
as occupying powers. The contrast with the First
World War in this respect could not be greater.
Murder and terror became deliberate acts of
policy.
Hitler’s Reich was no respecter of the human
values of those regarded as belonging to lesser
races, or of the lives of the Germans themselves.
The ‘euthanasia’ programme, for example, was
designed to murder ‘useless’ incurably ill or men-
tally handicapped German men, women and chil-
dren. Many thousands of gypsies, classified as
‘non-Aryans’, were murdered in Auschwitz.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose faith would not allow
them to be subservient to Hitler’s commands,
were persecuted and killed, as were countless
other civilians of every nationality who were
defined as opponents of the ideals of the regime.
Hostages were picked off the streets in the occu-
pied countries and shot in arbitrary multiples for
the resistance’s killing of German soldiers.
Offences against the occupying powers were pun-
ishable by death at the discretion of the local mil-
itary authorities. To hide partisans or Jews meant
the death penalty if discovered or denounced. For
the Jews in Europe, who were not so much oppo-
nents as defenceless victims, a unique fate
awaited: physical destruction, as foretold in
Hitler’s Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939.
Yet, side by side with these horrors, the
German armies fighting the Allied armies in the
west behaved conventionally too and took pris-
oners who were, with some notable exceptions,
treated reasonably. In Russia, however, the
German army became increasingly involved with
the specially formed units attached to the army
commands, which committed atrocities on a huge
scale. Here, there was to be no ‘honourably’ con-
ducted warfare.
More than 3 million Russian prisoners of war in
German hands died through exposure and famine.
Himmler, who as head of the SS organisation
wielded ever-increasing power, later in the war
recognised the waste of manpower involved, and
Russian prisoners of war and civilians were used as
forced labour in German war industries. Many
died from exhaustion. On the Allied side, some
300,000 German prisoners of war in Russian
hands never returned to Germany. There was also
the Soviet murder of Polish officers at Katyn, their
bodies discovered by the Germans in mass graves
in April 1943. The full horror of this slaughter
was only revealed by Russia’s new leaders in
September 1992. The orders to shoot Polish offi-
cers and civilians in prison for suspected enmity to
the Soviet Union were signed in March 1940 by
Stalin himself and by three Politburo comrades,
Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, at the sugges-
tion of Beria, chief of the secret police. In the for-
est of Katyn, near Smolensk, 4,421 Polish officers
were shot. They were only a proportion of the
total victims. Another 17,436 soldiers and civilians
were murdered as well. All the Soviet leaders,
Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, were told
of the dark secret in the files, which were kept in a
special safe. Brezhnev minuted, ‘Never to be
opened’; Gorbachev passed on some information
to the Polish government. The Yeltsin govern-
ment revealed the full account of the murders.
Japanese troops also became brutalised. To be
taken prisoner was regarded as a disgrace. Allied
prisoners of war were treated inhumanely by the
Japanese military authorities, and thousands of
them died. Many were employed together with
forced Asian labour on such projects as the con-
struction of the Burma–Siam railway. By the time
that death line was completed in October 1943,
100,000 Asians and 16,000 Europeans had lost
their lives. In China, the Japanese slaughtered
civilians – tens of thousands.
The horrors and ordeals, the depravity and
brutality behind the battlefronts, the mass murder
of millions are an inseparable part of the history
of the Second World War. The atrocities cannot
be set aside by the misguided argument that those
on one side cancel out those on the other.
In Poland, and then in Russia, the German
conquerors displayed a degree of barbarism that
has no parallels with Germany’s conduct during
the First World War. In the 1930s, for tactical rea-