War against Subhumans: Comparisons between the German War against the Soviet Union and the American War against Japan, 1941-1945

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While both the United States and Germany were principal combatants in the Second World War and confronted many similar challenges, the two societies differed profoundly from one another. The Nazi dictatorship, having built a brutally repressive system of domestic social control during peacetime, evolved during the war years into a machine of mass terror and extermination. Hitler supplemented the slaughter precipitated by military aggression with the murder of millions of non-combatant inhabitants of Europe in an effort to realize the objectives of genocidal Nazi ideology. The United States, by contrast, in fighting what was essentially a defensive war, preserved, with some notable exceptions, the fundamentals of a pluralistic democracy. Although the titanic U.S. military machine inflicted vast physical damage and great loss of life on non-combatant populations, this was the product not of ideological fanaticism but of a sometimes brutal pragmatism.

Nevertheless, a significant similarity of attitude shared by the two powers invites analysis and promises a more stimulating exercise in comparative history than the perhaps more obvious parallels between Germany and Japan. The United States and Nazi Germany each regarded at least one of its multiple adversaries in a manner encouraging, if not dictating, a higher degree of brutality and disregard for the laws of war than that shown to more favored enemies. For Germany, the pariah among its foes was the Soviet Union; for the United States, a comparable status was held by Japan.(1)

To be sure, atrocities occurred even in the course of combat with enemies who were regarded more positively. In the notorious Malmedy Massacre of 17 December 1944, 72 captured American soldiers were executed by members of the 1st SS Panzer Division. Less well-known, but similar in scope and nature, was the killing of approximately 75 Axis prisoners by troops of the U.S. 45th Infantry Division near Biscari, Sicily, on 14 July 1943. Both atrocities were encouraged by inflammatory pre-combat rhetoric delivered by commanding officers. According to testimony presented at the postwar Malmedy Massacre trial (U.S. v. Valentin Bersin et al.), SS-Oberstgruppenfuehrer "Sepp" Dietrich, commander of the 6th Panzer Army, had instructed his officers to remember the German victims of Allied bombing and to kill prisoners where combat circumstances required it. Multiple witnesses testified that the commander of the U.S. 7th Army, Lieutenant General George Patton, had delivered a pre-invasion address in which he directed that enemy troops who continued to resist to within 200 yards of advancing U.S. forces were to be killed, even if they offered to surrender.(2) Both atrocities occurred within the context of highly stressful combat situations. The German perpetrators had the crucial assignment of establishing a bridgehead over the Meuse river for the 6th Panzer Division during the last-ditch Ardennes offensive, an objective that strongly discouraged the delay attendant on holding prisoners. Practices learned in Russia, where the 1st SS Panzer Division had spent much combat time, may also have played a role. At Biscari, American troops new to combat were advancing against a well-concealed enemy who had inflicted casualties upon them by what they perceived as sniper fire, some allegedly directed at American wounded and medical personnel.(3)

The Malmedy and Biscari massacres were not unique occurrences on the more "civilized" battlefields of the West. But these and many similar incidents were sporadic events, precipitated by varying combinations of factors, including the elevated emotions of combat, a desire to avenge real or imagined atrocities, or acts of treachery committed by the enemy. Any or all of these stimuli might be aggravated by pre-combat indoctrination or exhortations as well as prior combat experience and the institutional ethos of the perpetrators. The perceived inherent nature of the enemy, however, did not in itself justify his destruction. The foe might often be perceived as evil--the German as "Nazi" or the American as "gangster"--but these could be construed as acquired characteristics, not shared by all enemy personnel and not necessarily indelible. Popular wartime depictions of Germans sometimes came close to denying their humanity, but this perspective was not strongly reflected in the attitudes of American troops. Surveys conducted among veteran combat infantrymen indicate that a majority of those whose battle experience was gained in Europe believed that the enemy "were men just like Us."(4) While such surveys were not conducted among German troops, German propaganda organs also did not attempt to dehumanize the Western adversary. Negative qualities were attributed instead to the corrupting influences of alien (and themselves subhuman) forces. An indoctrination leaflet distributed to units of the Waffen-SS in 1944, for example, explained blandly that:

Yes, the American soldier is racially related to us, but he does not carry

the same spirit. Most of these people are empty vessels, without any

well-founded knowledge of the great "why" of personal sacrifice and

commitment. They say, "We want to secure a new base for American commerce

in Europe." . . . But this rests on pure Jewish-materialistic thought.(5)

Atrocities in the Western combat environment between adversaries who recognized their common humanity were tangential to the war itself, but combat with enemies perceived as "subhuman".--the German struggle with the Soviet Union and the United States' conflict with Japan--was fundamentally different. Both circumstances had deep roots within the respective societies. Nazi consignment of the Slav to the status of Untermensch was based on attitudes that originated in the Drang nach Osten (Drive to the East) of the Middle Ages and assumed their modern forms in the great nineteenth-century upswelling of European nationalism. These attitudes were reinforced by the popularization of pseudo-scientific racism, the horrors of World War I, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Negative opinion in the United States toward the Japanese must be viewed within the context of the 400-year history of contacts between Europeans and peoples of color, where the tendency of the former was to view the latter as inferior and dangerous. American attitudes had already been manifested in brutal and murderous fashion in the institution of slavery, genocidal policies applied to indigenous American populations, and in the bloody "pacification" of the Philippines. Such beliefs may be traced as far back as the ancient Greek belief in the existence of "monstrous races" of wild men living in far-distant lands, a concept that was absorbed into early Christian thought.(6)

In purely military terms, the Russo-German and Japanese-American wars of 1941-45 were very different. The former was a confrontation between enormous land forces maneuvering over many thousands of square miles and continuing virtually uninterrupted for almost four years. The latter, on the other hand, involved smaller land forces in sporadic contact with one another in the course of Japanese expansion after the Pearl Harbor raid and the U.S. counter-offensive that began in …