I am far from a historian of the Second World War, but one of the larger and more notable Allied atrocities is the Chenogne massacre. The Malmedy massacre, in which Waffen SS troops had shot and killed approximately 80 American POWs, had occurred in December of 1944, sparking outrage among American forces. In retaliation for the brutality at Malmedy, 60 German POWs were killed by American troops at Chenogne, Belgium on New Year's Day of 1945. A number of other small scale incidents likely occurred, as some units issued orders to give no quarter to soldiers of the SS. At least two historians of the Battle of the Bulge have based their accounts on the recollections of John Fague, the relevant section of which can be found here.

A good overall source for the Malmedy massacre and the trials of its perpetrators is Weingartner, Crossroads of Death: The Story of the Malmedy Massacre and Trial, though it makes little or no mention of in kind responses to it by Allied soldiers.

The saturation bombing of German and Japanese cities was a completely American and British affair. Dresden and Tokyo were particularly horrific. You can bet that if the Allies had lost the war, it would have been considered a war crime.

I would suggest you watch/listen to the Intelligence Squared podcast on the subject; it's a debate about whether the Allied bombing of German cities was justifiable. It's only about the campaign against Germany, but since it is an intelligent and passionate debate, a lot of facts, figures, and history of the endeavor are thrown around. Linked below:

http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/bomber-command/

Everyone,

War is brutal, and the Allied powers did a number of acts that are worth discussing here. However, unless you are willing and able to go into detail, and provide the sort of comprehensive and in-depth response that we expect in this subreddit, we will have no choice to remove your comment. We've had to remove a number of single-sentence answers and Wikipedia links already.

Thank you!

Just as a side question if i may: how do historians define the term "atrocities"? Does it actually have a agreed-upon definition in a historical context?

It really depends if we're being honest or not. So it depends if we apply the standards that we apply to others to ourselves. That's the principle of universality. Namely, if something is wrong for the enemy to do, it ought to be wrong for me to do. The question, therefore, is if we apply the Nuremberg Laws universally, would the Allies be war criminals? The answer, of course, is unequivocally yes.

Let's just take the example of General Yamashita. He was the commander of Japanese troops in Manila, Phillipnes, some of whom committed gross war crimes (many more troops outside of his command committed the bulk of the crimes in Manila). The issue is that General Yamashita never ordered these crimes, never knew about the crimes, lacked communication with his troops, and had no power to stop them if he knew what they were doing. He was hanged at the dissent of two U.S. Supreme Court Justices for the crime of being a general in the Japanese army.

See: "Race and War Crimes: The 1945 War Crimes Trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita"; A. Marie Prévos in Human Rights Quarterly (v. 14 n. 3), Aug. 1992.

See: "The Trial of Yamashita"; J. Gordon Feldhaus in Current Legal Thought, 1946.

If we applied this principle universally, how many U.S. Army generals do you think we would have had at the end of the War? Very few.

But that's just the small picture. There were unspeakable war crimes committed by the Allies, chief among them being the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian centers. But in most cases when it came to the war tribunals, which of course were held by the victors of the War, they very deliberately focused on the crimes of the Axis in an ex post facto manner and legitimized the crimes of the Allies. So for example, mass fire bombings of urban cities like Dresden were not a crime, because we did that. Unrestricted submarine warfare was going to be a war crime, until the defense showed that the Allies also committed similar crimes. There was really one independent Asian judge and that was Radhabinod Pal of India who really highlighted the farce of it all in his dissent. Today, the Japanese have monuments dedicated to him, not that the Japanese forces were innocent of war crimes, but that he was the singular voice opposed to the type of hypocrisy that we witnessed in the war tribunals following the War.

See: Judgement : Dönitz, Avalon Project, Yale Law School

See: "The Law of Naval Warfare: A Collection of Agreements and Documents with Commentaries"; N. Ronzitti (1988)

See: "Review Symposium: War Crimes, the Rule of Force in International Affairs"; N. Chomsky in The Yale Law Journal (v. 80 n. 7), June 1971.

See: "How we can prevent genocide"; G. Stanton (2000)

It really depends on how you define "Atrocity"; but there are definitely at least a few. I've found surprisingly few definitions of "atrocity" which don't use the word "atrocious":

1. An extremely wicked or cruel act, typically one involving physical violence or injury.

2. Behaviour or an action that is wicked or ruthless.

Etymology: From Latin atrox (“terrible, cruel”), from āter (“matte black”)

In recent years it's taken on an additional meaning; it's specifically used to refer to violent actions against civilians during wartime. So we're not really just looking at "events which killed civilians", we're looking for events in which Allied soldiers were intentionally cruel and terrible towards unarmed people.

I think you could make the case that Operation Keelhaul represents something between complicity and actual participation in an atrocity. Again, the Wikipedia page does not really go into detail about how exactly the operation was carried out. It mentions that according to a Soviet Newspaper, " English and American bayonets, truncheons, machine guns and tanks" were used against refugees. Soviet Newspapers, of course, have always been highly valued for their attention to detail and journalistic integrity. In short, the Wikipedia article doesn't quite hit the nail on the head.

One of the sources cited in the article describes the chaos in the refugee camps, but doesn't adequately explain the role the Allies played in fomenting the chaos. There's a missing link in both the Wikipedia page's (very short) description and Jeffrey Hummel's article.

The link we're missing is accounts from the refugees themselves. I stumbled across an account while doing unrelated research, before I knew what Operation Keelhaul was, and decided to look into it further, and realized that (as far as I could see) there is currently no scholarly work linking the numerous 'survivor stories' from the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System to the larger body of scholarship on the operation. So, here's some OC from an interview with a 57 year old Russian man, taken in 1951. The interviewer said "As far as I know, many DP's were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union from Kempten and Fussen. Weren't they?", and in response the interviewee said:

"Oh yes, yes. It was horrible. Even today I wonder how Americans could be such savages as they were in Kempten and Fussen. One day an American officer came to our camp and called a meeting. Although people were very cautious in regard to all kinds of meetings, they gathered in the big hall. When the door was closed, two Americans and one Soviet officer appeared on the stage. We turned pale (The respondent gets up and lowers his voice). We did not know what to do. Then, the red devil began to talk about happiness and the wonderful life at home. Idiot! Whom did he want to fool? We kept silent. At the end of his talk, he asked us to prepare ourselves for repatriation. When the meeting was over, people hurried to their rooms, took their suitcases, and rushed into the wood. On the next day the camp was empty. Except for camp-officials, nobody was there. Thus, the first attempt to repatriate us was unsuccessful. But four days later at 6 o'clock in the morning, we noticed army guards all around the camps. On each roof of the wooden barracks there were also armed guards. At eight o'clock the first groups of soldiers arrived into the camp. But when they saw that people had locked and barricaded their doors, they left the camps. Many people gathered in the church in order to ask God to help them. I was there too. In the afternoon new groups of Americans came to the camp. Now they behaved quite in a different way from in the morning. First of all, they entered the church and ordered the priest to stop praying. Nobody listened to them. We joined our arms and sang religious songs. The Americans (all of them were drunk, Respondent's note) began to keck us and beat us with their butts. At the same time, the other group broke the doors, threw out of the windows all they found in the rooms. The entire camp looked like a battle field. Women, children, old people cried and prayed. Several people poisoned themselves on the spot. I also kept in my pocket a razor with which I intended to cut my wrist in case of repatriation. In the Church, the Americans destroyed the altar and led all people out into the camp yard. Dispite our resistance, they succeeded in loading several trucks with poor DP's. Many of them committed suicide. Finally, when they (Americans) noticed that it was impossible to repatriate the whole camp, they gave up. In Fussen it was almost the same."

The interviews in the Harvard Social Project would not be useful in a statistical analysis because almost all of those who were repatriated were not available for interview in the 1950s, but the fact that there are so many people who escaped repatriation is in itself telling. It does seem that Operation Keelhaul's implementation was not entirely uniform, but the examples Hummel cites, along with the other examples in the Harvard Project, show that the pattern described by the interview shown above was repeated across a significant portion of the territory occupied by the Western allies, especially in South and East Germany. Here's a few more quotes from other interviews:

"If the Americans had not forcefully repatriated our soldiers immediately after the war, everybody in the Soviet Army would have fled."

"I was supposed to go to Kempten to the hospital but I heard that a German Communist was in charge of that hospital and they said that he was turning Russians back to the Soviets for repatriation. I refused to go and I went instead to Warner Kaserne to try to get into the camp there."

"In Germany we turned ourselves over to the Americans at Regensburg. I was put in a camp and when my name appeared on a list of Soviet citizens which were to be sent back to Russia, I ran away... I was forced to run away from the camp at Kempton as well and went to Munich, and then to Füssen."

And finally, this account is interesting because the interviewee knows which American Army groups were present.

"There are American concentration camps which are worse than the SS camps... I once saw an American officer line up 500 DP's who were hungry and tired, and he had a can of food and he called his dog and fed the food to his dog right in front of the DP's to torture them. I have been in American concentration camps. There is nothing to eat. Of course, afterwards, the American generals and the American state came and saw and it became better. (I told the respondent that I had been in the American Army and had never heard of any such things.) Excuse me, it was the 7th American Army which saved us. I am grateful for that. It was the 1st Army that did all those things. The 7th Army was the army which was doing the fighting; the 1st Army was composed of Americans who were in the rear, They were not at the front."

There are other examples of Allied cruelty, but this is one of the few examples in which Allied soldiers were intentionally cruel in an organized manner, and it's noteworthy that it took place after the war was over, in the absence of an immediate threat or a need, real or perceived, to act decisively in a combat situation.

you may also be interested in britains "cages" most famous of which was the london cage, where many german agents were tortured by MI5. After ww2 the war office established the bad nenndorf interrogation centre in germany in which they attempted to prevent a resurgence of nazism by torturing and killing those who had benefited from the nazis, this included not only government and high ranking military personnel but also businessmen whos businesses had flourished since the nazis had literally eliminated their jewish competitors. The methods used here were far more brutal than those used in the cages, prisoners endured shin screws,beatings, starvation etc.Below is a link to a rather good article by the guardian on the centre. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/dec/17/secondworldwar.topstories3

If you include the area bombing of cities in your definition of atrocity, then the Western Allies are well and truly on the hook. In particular, Japanese industry tended to be well dispersed within cities, with many small workshops existing among commercial or residential neighborhoods rather than in exclusive heavy industrial areas. The proximity of industry to dense populations was considered by 12th Air Force leaders, but concerns for loss of civilian life were dismissed. The 12th also soon made the switch from high explosive bombs to incendiaries as fire would spread among the closely spaced wooden buildings in Japanese cities whereas damage from HE bombs was more limited. (IMPACT: Eve of Triumph)

Setting aside the topic of bombing, most references I have run across tend to involve the shooting of prisoners. Members of the 12th SS Panzer Division found it difficult to surrender to the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division in the vicinity of le Mesnil Patry. This after several groups of Canadian prisoners had been shot near Caen and Authie. (Zuehlke: Holding Juno)

As others have mentioned, American soldiers shot Germans attempting to surrender during the Ardennes counteroffensive. This followed the massacre of close to 100 Americans at a crossroads near Malmedy. (Holt-Giles: The Damned Engineers)

The above instances are a couple of "binges of retribution" where multiple instances occurred in one small area. There are plenty of accounts of Allied soldiers shooting unarmed Germans out of hand absent a preceeding German misdeed. One example that I can immediately source is American paratroopers shooting Germans attempting to surrender in actions along the Waal during Market Garden (Kershaw: It Never Snows in September)

To tag on to this, does the bombing of Manila by America count? It always seemed horrifying to me. Pearl of the Orient shattered by its former master to drive out the Japanese. I have heard horror stories of what the Japanese also did in Manila. Like cutting babies out of wombs with bayonets type of horrible things.

Do any historians of WWII in the pacific have any sense of this? It seems we only talk about Bataan Death march but Manila seemed obliterated. You see Manila before and after photos…a university turned into a prison camp. So much destruction of life and architecture during "liberation".

During the end and after WW2, an estimated 500-600 thousand Germans died during the 'flight, expulsion, and relocation' of Germans from Eastern Europe into modern day Germany. Although many of these deaths could be no means be considered the result of a planned, calculated atrocity, the huge death toll is nonetheless noteworthy.

The Gegenmiao massacre was pretty awful. Soviet and Chinese troops murdered and raped around 1,800 Japanese refugees after they had surrendered. Children were kidnapped to be sold, women we raped, wounded were run over with tanks and trucks, the list goes on. The firebombing of Tokyo was also terrible.

Australian historian Peter Brune has discussed in his works war crimes committed by Australia in the Pacific. It was unofficial Australian policy (the higher ups knew of it but did little to stop it) to not take Japanese prisoners, even if they surrendered, due to the Australians wishing to get revenge due to the Japanese rarely taking prisoners in New Guinea. Even Japanese who were taken prisoner and sent to the rear rarely actually made it to the rear alive.

What is the historical consensus of British culpability for the Bleiburg incident?

Question.

I thought ive heard and read that the US starved to death over a million German POWs after the war ended, and knowingly sent millions of South-Eastern European civilians to the soviets to be killed and sent to death/labour camps? Is this true?

I'm surprised no one has mentioned European Imperialism in Asia and Africa. [European imperialism was one of the biggest factors why war in Asia broke out to begin with] (http://www.japanfocus.org/-Richard_J_-Smethurst/3825). In fact, there's a plausible argument used by the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal that had there been no European imperialism in Asia Japan would not have modeled herself off of them and therefore would not have become an imperialist herself (International Military Tribunal for the Far East: Dissentient judgment, 1953).

If we are to look at the Nuremberg/Tokyo judgements, class A war crimes were Crimes Against Peace. It would be difficult to argue European imperialism in Asia and Africa did not constitute a Crimes Against Peace.