Who commit the Worst War Crime of ALL

This is a little off topic,its not the worst war crime and i'm going to upset a lot of people but I think its still a war crime.
Camp X-ray
If these are considered soldiers then treat them as P.O.W.s
If they are terrorists they should be tried in the country they commited their crimes as criminals and receive the appropriate sentences that that country dictates for terrorists.
My own personal feelings is shoot them all but that is irrelevent.
Laws are there for a reson and you cant change the rules to suit yourself no matter how evil these people are.
 
sven hassell said:
This is a little off topic,its not the worst war crime and i'm going to upset a lot of people but I think its still a war crime.
Camp X-ray
If these are considered soldiers then treat them as P.O.W.s
If they are terrorists they should be tried in the country they commited their crimes as criminals and receive the appropriate sentences that that country dictates for terrorists.
My own personal feelings is shoot them all but that is irrelevent.
Laws are there for a reson and you cant change the rules to suit yourself no matter how evil these people are.

They are enemy combatants, not POWs and not common criminals.
 
Missileer said:
They are enemy combatants, not POWs and not common criminals.
That is just creating a term to justify what is being done.
They are soldiers or civilians,you cant say because of the need to do what the U.S. is doing (dont think I have any sympathy for them) then there is something in between. Were the I.R.A.,E.T.A. ,R.A.F. enemy combatants?
Some inmates of X-ray have never been in combat or theatres of conflict(but are obviously guilty of terrorist activities) so how does that work?
I fully support the U.S. in its recent conflicts but by not adhering to the principles it stands for it makes a mockery of itself and its allies.
 
From the 3rd Geneva Convention:

Art. 4. A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
(1) Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.

(2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:[ (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

(3) Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.

(4) Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civilian members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization, from the armed forces which they accompany, who shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card similar to the annexed model.

(5) Members of crews, including masters, pilots and apprentices, of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under any other provisions of international law.

(6) Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.

And from the 4th Geneva Convention:

Art. 64. The penal laws of the occupied territory shall remain in force, with the exception that they may be repealed or suspended by the Occupying Power in cases where they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the present Convention.
Subject to the latter consideration and to the necessity for ensuring the effective administration of justice, the tribunals of the occupied territory shall continue to function in respect of all offences covered by the said laws.
The Occupying Power may, however, subject the population of the occupied territory to provisions which are essential to enable the Occupying Power to fulfil its obligations under the present Convention, to maintain the orderly government of the territory, and to ensure the security of the Occupying Power, of the members and property of the occupying forces or administration, and likewise of the establishments and lines of communication used by them.

http://www.genevaconventions.org/

If one would take the time to read the actual conventions instead of listening to what mouthpeices with microphones say is in them, they would find that that AQ operatives and like persons have NOTHING coming to them in the way of protections. 60 years ago when a Werewolf was captured, they were shot. No trial, no trip to an internment camp. I am sick and tired of hearing about how bad off and mistreated these peices of garbage are when they are enjoying better living conditions and more "rights" than not only the men and women guarding them, but almost every other incarcerated person on earth. The only thing these people understand is death, and their ultimate honor is to die for Allah, so lets grant them their wish and move on.

And sven, nobody has lived at camp X-Ray for years.
 
Forrest_Gump said:
From the 3rd Geneva Convention:

Art. 4. A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
(1) Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.

(2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:[ (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

(3) Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.

(4) Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civilian members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization, from the armed forces which they accompany, who shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card similar to the annexed model.

(5) Members of crews, including masters, pilots and apprentices, of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under any other provisions of international law.

(6) Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.

And from the 4th Geneva Convention:

Art. 64. The penal laws of the occupied territory shall remain in force, with the exception that they may be repealed or suspended by the Occupying Power in cases where they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the present Convention.
Subject to the latter consideration and to the necessity for ensuring the effective administration of justice, the tribunals of the occupied territory shall continue to function in respect of all offences covered by the said laws.
The Occupying Power may, however, subject the population of the occupied territory to provisions which are essential to enable the Occupying Power to fulfil its obligations under the present Convention, to maintain the orderly government of the territory, and to ensure the security of the Occupying Power, of the members and property of the occupying forces or administration, and likewise of the establishments and lines of communication used by them.

http://www.genevaconventions.org/

If one would take the time to read the actual conventions instead of listening to what mouthpeices with microphones say is in them, they would find that that AQ operatives and like persons have NOTHING coming to them in the way of protections. 60 years ago when a Werewolf was captured, they were shot. No trial, no trip to an internment camp. I am sick and tired of hearing about how bad off and mistreated these peices of garbage are when they are enjoying better living conditions and more "rights" than not only the men and women guarding them, but almost every other incarcerated person on earth. The only thing these people understand is death, and their ultimate honor is to die for Allah, so lets grant them their wish and move on.

And sven, nobody has lived at camp X-Ray for years.

Yes x-ray shut some time ago but I think theres a replacement for it isnt
there?
Also please dont think i'm some kind of bleeding heart liberal.I would like nothing more than to see them all slotted but do you not think the U.S. is applying the convention as it sees fit?
I have lived my entire life under the shadow of Republican terrorism and when these 'enemy combatants' were caught they were treated as common criminals and not P.O.W.s
Now I'm confused?
 
Japan is one, without a doubt,
11 million Chinese civlians died in WW2 directly due to Japanese invasion..
Japanese was so brutal that even animals in my grandpa's town runs away when they heard "ribenren lai la.." (japanese is coming)
 
After reading the posts here, I can only make one point: I suggest that people stop reading about Nazi or Japanese atrocities and start to think a little more broadly about the actions of other states. [How about the Sovs? Some people mention this point]

Before suggesting another avenue worthy of examination, I would like to qualify the list that I compiled below. (1) The list is totally incomplete and is intended as a rough guide. (2) I do not care about moral relativism or equivalence. What follows are numbers only. (3) Numbers hide why and how these people died. (4) The murder of one person is a crime. (5) I really only want to point out just how depraved Marxian socialism was. (5) The differences between war crimes/crimes against humanity sort of vanish. The communists for example waged war against the upper classes, Hitler against the Jews, etc. I do not want to debate this side of the argument because sweeping deathtoll lists contain both cases. Doppleganger is again correct in suggesting that we stop placing "regular" war casualties on the atrocities list. If that were the case, and people like attributing every death during WWII including the Pacific Theatre to Germany, then the Americans (1945-1996) would be in real trouble.

This post looks at the Soviet side of communism. There are others of course. Mao's forced collectivization program killed about 30 million people alone. The communist regimes in North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Eastern Europe killed millions more. The Communist Black Book offers the following breakdown:

Soviet Union: 20 million
China: 65 million
Vietnam: 1 million
North Korea: 1 million
Cambodia: 2 million
Eastern Europe: 1 million
Latin America: 150,000
Africa: 1,7 million
Afghanistan: 1.5 million
COMINTERN: 10,000

[Stephane Courtois, Das Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus (1997), p. 16]

---------------------------------
A SHORT AND INCOMPLETE LIST OF SOVIET ATROCITIES
---------------------------------

NOTE: The old argument that Stalin killed his own people, one that floats around and will not go away, holds no validity. Stalin was Georgian and not Russian. Russia is composed of hundreds of ethnic groups. The Soviet Union in any case "impacted" the demographic structures of Spain, Mongolia, Latvia, Hungary, Germany, etc.

NOTE: There is no agreed total number of deaths and the stats run between 10 and 50 million. The major problems here seem to be the lack of resources devoted to the study, the lack of proper documentation, and probably ideologically driven assessments.
[http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin]

A. GERMAN CIVILIANS & POWS KILLED:

German POWS Killed: "[A]t least one million German prisoners died [DURING the war] out of the 3,150,000 taken by the Red Army".
[S.P. MacKenzie, "The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II", p. 511.]

GERMAN CIVILIANS KILLED: This one is hard to say. Conventional assessments place the figure around 3 million.

GERMAN RAPE: "How many German women were raped? One can only guess, says The Telegraph, but it had to be a high proportion of at least 15 million women who either lived in the Soviet Union zone or were expelled from the eastern provinces. The scale of rape is suggested by the fact that about two million women had illegal abortions every year between 1945 and 1948". Conventional arguments suggest about 3 million women between 10 and 80 years of age.
[http://www.americanfreepress.net/Books/New_History_Tome_Exposes_Massi/new_history_tome_exposes_massi.html]

B. NON-GERMANS KILLED: (Some Examples)

STALIN'S PURGES: Counting immediately executed and those who died later in the Gulags (about 90%), "[t]his would give a total death toll for the MAIN Purge period of just under ten million people".
[Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, pp. 485-88.]

ETHNIC CLEANSING: Hundreds of thousands of Volga Germans, Polish officers, Ukranian peasants (millions), etc.

A LAST NOTE: When we think of atrocities, we seem to think of "Schindler's List"-type material. That is, of Nazi freaks doing God knows what to a whole lot of people. [Dirlewanger's crazed boys did play soccer with human heads and that sort of thing] The Soviets, however, really "got medieval" during WWII. Here are a couple of examples that I found in the Robert Murphy (Political Advisor to OMGUS General Lucius D. Clay) State Department Files for the period 1945-1947:

1. German civilians were forced to swallow excrement until they suffocated. (Thirty Years War-style)
2. Babies were thrown into mud pits where they sank and died.
3. Girls aged 10 or so were gang-raped to death. Their fathers were forced to watch and then put out of their misery.
4. Civilians including babies were crucified--ie. nailed to barns or houses in Jesus-fashion.

Ollie Garchy
 
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I doubt the number for Mao's atrocities is accurate, for several reasons:
1. the number included all kind of death, normal, or die in accident or wutever
2. back then, the records of population were a mess in China, lot of people didn't even exist on the list
3. Mao's craps were not war atrocities.

However, I still agree that Mao is a piece of Crap that delayed China's rise.
 
I am not an authority on death figures...and I do not know who is. Forced starvation however counts as a crime. Starvation probably even counts as a war crime. Most of the Soviet POWs who died in 1941 starved to death. The German armed forces are held responsible.

Now, forget what you read about ideology in the "Wehrmacht". Think realistically instead. The Germans moved into a Soviet Union that experienced the following: (1) significant war damages and (2) Stalin's scorched earth policies. The destruction of communications and the generally poor food situation led directly to the deaths of millions of Soviet POWs. Were the German politicians and generals responsible? Of course. They generally let it happen and did not seem to care.

This example is used by historians to demonstrate one type of war crime. It therefore stands to rest that other incidents in other countries will count as well.

Ollie Garchy
 
sven hassell said:
That is just creating a term to justify what is being done.
They are soldiers or civilians,you cant say because of the need to do what the U.S. is doing (dont think I have any sympathy for them) then there is something in between. Were the I.R.A.,E.T.A. ,R.A.F. enemy combatants?
Some inmates of X-ray have never been in combat or theatres of conflict(but are obviously guilty of terrorist activities) so how does that work?
I fully support the U.S. in its recent conflicts but by not adhering to the principles it stands for it makes a mockery of itself and its allies.

About the IRA... I don't sympathize with terrorists by any means, but if I recall clearly, it was the invading PROTESTANTS who kicked off the Troubles- google "Peep o'Day Boys".

After that little side note, I'm fairly certain that at some point, suffering becomes unmeasureable. What about the Iraqis who forced an SAS sergeant to clean a toilet with his hands, and then lick the excrement from his fingers? Not something I'd want to go through, but like I said, suffering is unmeasureable at some point. To base the whole thing on numbers alone is to define it as measureable- which (this is hypocritical coming from me) is a bit callous. On the plus side, it's healthy debate:)
 
War is fought when there is a conflict of interests, not a conflict of ideology.
Thought for the day.
Cheers.
 
What, Bulldog even worse than the systematic betrayal and genocide of the Native Americans? be careful my friend we've all got our skeletons in our closets........
 
We gave them their land back.

The parts we weren't using anyways.

He shoots, he scores! Griffin wins the game!
 
Nothing personal Poacher, just adding spice to the conversation rather than the same boring villians.
 
So then it is ok for me to mention that the Spanish killed more "Native Americans" than America? Just to spice things up a bit.
 
I found these definitions regarding war crimes and crimes against humanity. If you want to determine, who was the wost war criminal, it seem logical to cross reference the culprits against the definitions and see, who has (for the want of a better expression) the most ticks. Scale also has to be a factor in determination.

A definition of a war crime is a punishable offense, under international (criminal) law, for violations of the law of war by any person or persons, military or civilian.

The Nuremberg Principles, created during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. are a set of guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime. The document was created by necessity during the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi party members following World War II.

The guidelines are as follows:
Principle I
Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment.

Principle II
The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.

Principle III
The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Principle V
Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and law.

Principle VI
The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
(a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
(b) War Crimes:
Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.
(c) Crimes against humanity:
Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

Principle VII
Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.

For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
(a) Murder;
(b) Extermination;
(c) Enslavement;
(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
(f) Torture;
(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;
(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;
(j) The crime of apartheid;
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.


I think if you only include those from the 20th century, based on the quality of recorded information, you get a manageable list.

I think you get Nazi Germany, Stalins Russia, Japan 1930s-1940s. Not in that order. Not a great surprise. The only issue is do you attribute the crime to the state and leaders. For example would you have Germany with Hitler as the major criminal with Himmler next. How much blood do you need on your hands and what link?

Thankfully now we seem to have a process in place to take to trial anyone no matter how much blood.

Although Saddam was undoubtably a criminal cannot classed in the same league as Hitler, Stalin and (who from Japan?).
 
I believe the name you are searching for is Hirohito, Reiben. Somehow he was involved with the decision making at the highest level of the Japanese military yet he had nothing to do with the war crimes they committed, hmmm. (Yeah, I know, the Allies gave the Emperor a free pass because they need him to rebuild Japan.)
 
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