Did the United States or any Allies commit horrors akin to The Rape of Nanking or The holocaust in World War 2?

by MrElbo
Georgy_K_Zhukov

No, the Western Allies did not commit mass war crimes akin to those of Japan or Germany. Certainly, members of their armed forces did commit war crimes, but they were not part of a systematic or widespread campaign, let alone representative of official, encouraged policy in the same way you see there.

The Soviet Union however did commit war crimes on a larger, and more systematic scale, although I would stress that none reach the unique horror of the Holocaust. In this odler answer I touch on the Katyn Massacre, which was part of the Soviet attempts to destroy the Polish intelligentsia and ensure post-war control of the country, and this deals with the widespread sexual violence committed by the Red Army as they entered German territory. These aren't the only examples, but do get to what you are asking, certainly.

Edit for the guy who deleted their comment in 30 seconds:

The internment and deprivation of the civil rights of Japanese-Americans is many horrible things, but it was committed on US soil against American citizens and permanent residents, so no, it is not a war crime. And however awful it was, and to be frank I would say that the terminology we use for it downplays just how awful it was, it also isn't comparable to what OP is asking, as it was simply not comparable to the Holocaust.

Dicranurus

The Soviet Union committed many war crimes, but as /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov has written, they take both a different valence and different scale than your comparisons.

In addition to the Katyn Massacre and mass rapes of German (and Soviet, Polish, and Baltic citizens), several others come to mind. Also in 1940 the Soviet Union, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, invaded Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These citizens were variously forcibly moved and conscripted, many of whom were executed by the summer of 1941.

The Soviet invasion of Poland was similarly fraught. Witold Pilecki, who produced one of the first reports on the Holocaust in 1943, was ultimately executed after the war for his support of Polish independence. (On this note, the Soviet Union was assuredly complicit in the razing of Warsaw in the autumn of 1944, in which tens of thousands of Poles died). In 1944 the Vainaikh Caucasians were forcibly migrated to Siberia, putatively expelling them due to German allegiance (there were rebellions, but they weren't so much pro-German as anti-Soviet); the Soviet Union would forcibly remove many ethnic groups, but the Chechens faced particularly high fatalities.

The Soviet Union did systematically execute German citizens in Metgethen, near Königsberg, in early 1945, while in the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in the summer of 1945, thousands of Japanese citizens were raped and executed as well. Certainly in 1945 and 1946 many tens of thousands of Baltic and Volga Germans were executed and forcibly migrated by the Soviet Union.

It doesn't make much sense to me to sort of sum up German or Soviet war crimes to compare them. When Fussell defends the atomic bomb against Galbraith's claim that the war would have ended a few weeks later regardless, he argues that a "few more weeks mean the world if you’re one of those thousands." A massacre of a few dozen - as happened at Nemmersdorf - is a massacre nonetheless. At the same time, I don't see any Soviet action as comparable in scale or intentionality to the Holocaust.