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Comment by HeWhoLurksLate | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, the Geneva Convention was barely used at all, and the "excuses" given were mostly based on the politics of the military instead.

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That's because civilian protections where only added in 1949 to the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Convention as-of WW2 would only be applicable to PoWs, not civilians.

To be fair I don't think anybody saw systemic violence upon civilians during a war between states (as opposed to a civil one) as a realistic possibility during the inter-war period. It was well outside the customs of war in our corner of the world at that point.

The national-social cocktail completely tore apart common decency.

I was not only about the land anymore, the massive industry [1] and agriculture [2] needed a lot of free stuff. Mistreatment of civilians was an implication, and we overestimate the destructiveness of hate - until the unification of Germany their fragmented principalities had been trembling from hate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monowitz_concentration_camp#Bu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostarbeiter

> To be fair I don't think anybody saw systemic violence upon civilians during a war between states (as opposed to a civil one) as a realistic possibility during the inter-war period. It was well outside the customs of war in our corner of the world at that point.

Really? Atrocities against civilians in war were common even then. No need to look further than e.g. the colonies.

> Really? Atrocities against civilians in war were common even then. No need to look further than e.g. the colonies.

I think the point was that scale of it was quite different in WW2. In WW2 the majority of casualties were civilians, which was new compared to previous conflicts.

> In WW2 the majority of casualties were civilians, which was new compared to previous conflicts

I'd have to see data on that, not that I definitely disbelieve it. But it does seem to me that this was more often the case than not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio is of relevance here. WW1 already had an almost 1:1 ratio, though this ratio isn't really indicative of atrocities per se. E.g. previously you might have rather seen pillaging. Going a bit back, the people's crusade of 1096 mostly pillaged European cities and landscape.

Russian pows where murdered by neglect in large numbers

It's true both ways: for the German POWs who were sent to Russia, almost none of them made it back alive.

That's just plain wrong. German PoWs in the USSR had a death rate of 15% to 30% depending on the sources, while Soviet PoWs in Germany had a death rate of 57% to 65% depending on the sources.

Well I don't want to make this into an argument about who was worse but the Russians didn't honor the Geneva convention. The last German POWs weren't released until the mid 50s.

The Soviets did not honor the Geneva convention, as they had not even signed it at the time.

The Germans explicitely suspended its use in their armed forces for the Eastern Front – which is why millions of Soviet PoWs were left to die of starvation in what was basically large cattle pens while Jews or card-carrying Communists were to be shot on the spot after capture.

What are the sources you are quoting?

Zemskov, Krivosheev, Overmans, Glantz, Goldhagen.

Countries east of Germany were not signatories of the Geneva Convention as of WWII. The civilians of these countries were basically considered as and treated as cattle, including when they were kidnapped to inland Germany as slave labor. I don't think the Geneva Convention would change anything though...

Why would they care for the Geneva Convention? The whole point of the war was to ignore and bypass all kinds of previous signed conventions (regarding WWI, borders, alliances, etc).

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