War crimes in World War II
The AVNOJ Presidium issued a decree that ordered the government confiscation of all property of Nazi Germany and its citizens in Yugoslavia, persons of ethnic German nationality (regardless of citizenship), and collaborators.
Officially, Yugoslavia denied the forcible starvation and killing of their Schwowisch populations, but reconstruction of the labor camps reveals that of the 170,000 Danube Swabians interned from 1944 to 1948, over 50,000 died of mistreatment.
[51] The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.
According to the Nuremberg Trials, there were four major categories of crimes alleged against the German political leadership, the ruling party NSDAP, the military high command, the paramilitary SS, the security services, the civil occupation authorities, as well as individual government officials (including members of the civil service or the diplomatic corps), soldiers or members of paramilitary formations, industrialists, bankers and media proprietors, each with individual events that made up the major charges.
At least 10 million, and perhaps over 20 million perished directly and indirectly due to the commission of crimes against humanity and war crimes by Hitler's regime, of which the Holocaust lives on in particular infamy, for its particularly cruel nature and scope, and the industrialised nature of the genocide of Jewish citizens of states invaded or controlled by the Nazi regime.
The first tribunal indicted 24 major Nazi war criminals, and resulted in 19 convictions (of which 12 led to death sentences) and 3 acquittals, 2 of the accused died before a verdict was rendered, at least one of which by killing himself with cyanide.
Major General Yoshitaka Kawane and Colonel Kurataro Hirano were found guilty of ordering the march and sentenced to death.
The defense failed, establishing the Yamashita Standard, which holds that a commander who makes no meaningful effort to uncover and stop atrocities is as culpable as if he had ordered them.
[citation needed] Chetnik ideology revolved around the notion of a Greater Serbia within the borders of Yugoslavia, to be created out of all territories in which Serbs were found, even if the numbers were small.
A directive dated 20 December 1941, addressed to newly appointed commanders in Montenegro, Major Đorđije Lašić and Captain Pavle Đurišić, outlined, among other things, the cleansing of all non-Serb elements in order to create a Greater Serbia:[105] The Chetniks systemically massacred Muslims in villages that they captured.
[113] In early October 1942 in the village of Gata, where an estimated 100 people were killed and many homes burnt in reprisal taken for the destruction of roads in the area carried out on the Italians' account.
[108] That same month, formations under the command of Petar Baćović and Dobroslav Jevđević, who were participating in the Italian Operation Alfa in the area of Prozor, massacred over 500 Croats and Muslims and burnt numerous villages.
The strategy to achieve their goal was:[115][116] The Independent State of Croatia government cooperated with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust and exercised their own version of the genocide against Serbs, as well as Jews and Gypsies (Roma) inside its borders.
[117] According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center (citing the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust), "Ustasa terrorists killed 500,000 Serbs, expelled 250,000 and forced 250,000 to convert to Roman Catholicism.
[119] A Gestapo report to Heinrich Himmler from 1942 stated, "The Ustaše committed their deeds in a bestial manner not only against males of conscript age but especially against helpless old people, women and children.
"[120] Numerous concentration camps were built in the NDH, most notably Jasenovac, the largest, where around 100,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, as well as a number of Croatian and Muslim political dissidents, died, mostly from torture and starvation.
Jasenovac was a complex of five subcamps and three smaller camps spread out over 240 square kilometres (93 sq mi), in relatively close proximity to each other, on the bank of the Sava river.
Ustasha militias and death squads also burnt villages and killed thousands of civilian Serbs in the country-side in sadistic ways with various weapons and tools.
Ante Pavelić, leader of the Ustasha, fled to Argentina and Spain which gave him protection, and was never extradited to stand trial for his war crimes.
Pavelić died on 28 December 1959 at the Hospital Alemán in Madrid, where the Roman Catholic church had helped him to gain asylum, at the age of 70 from gunshot wounds sustained in an earlier assassination attempt by Montenegrin Blagoje Jovović.
[137] The Ukrainian OUN-B group, along with their military force—Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—are responsible for a genocide on the Polish population in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
