Was Georgy Zhukov implicated in any War Crimes?

by TheWalrus5

Not /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov, I'm well aware of his crimes. I'm talking about the Soviet Commander.

Spoonfeedme

We can basically separate the Soviet crimes into three distinct types during the war: local disorder, directed purges, and population transfers. Local disorder is the situation whereby officers lose control over the actions of their troops (with either no action or tacit approval of those officers), resulting in circumstances like we saw in East Prussia or Berlin in 1945. Directed purges are the targeted elimination of ideological enemies, as we saw in Poland (and elsewhere) in 1939 and again in 1944/45. Finally, population transfers (forced relocation, basically a form of genocide) is the banishment of peoples from land, as we saw with the Germans in East Prussia, the Poles in modern Belarus/Ukraine, etc. These are the three main types of crimes being committed by the Soviets. I don't personally know of any evidence directly linking Zhukov to any of them. The political purges and population relocation were organized mainly through the NKVD, controlled directly by Beria and outside of Zhukov's purview. The more localized violence by Red Army soldiers against civilians is a bit more murky. I don't know of any evidence that exists that it was a purposeful action (or at least, any evidence that survives), but under the doctrine of command responsibility, one could make the argument that he has some responsibility for the late war atrocities. Most accounts I've read suggest they were mostly organic reactions of incredibly battered and traumatized men riled up by propaganda driven fervor; if you tell your soldiers that the enemy is doing terrible things and dehumanize them, treat them like crap, and then put them through the grinder of the Eastern Front, it shouldn't be a surprise that such things might happen. That said, once the war was won, order was mostly restored to soldiers as the expediency of allowing them to continue to hurt civilians was outweighed by the need to look good and create functioning administrations in newly occupied areas. This does suggest that Zhukov could have controlled them earlier, if he so desired, and assuming he was aware of the scale of the atrocities (which even today we are not even close).