The Allies Committed War Crimes Too

The Allies committed acts during the Second World War that have been the subject of legitimate historical and ethical debate, including some that meet the contemporary legal definition of war crimes. The bombing of civilian areas of German cities, the firebombing of Japanese cities, the atomic bombs, the Soviet behaviour in occupied territories, and the failure to prevent the Bengal famine of 1943 are all part of the historiographical record and have been examined in serious scholarship. The denier argument is not about whether these acts occurred (they did) or whether they should be discussed (they should). The argument is about what the existence of Allied wrongdoing implies for the moral status of the Nazi operation. The implicit conclusion is that since the Allies did wrong, the Nazis did less wrong, or at any rate something less unique than the Holocaust narrative claims. This conclusion does not follow from the comparison.

Distinguishing categories of wartime violence

The categories matter. The strategic bombing of cities, conducted by both the British and the Americans against Germany and Japan, killed approximately 350,000 to 600,000 civilians depending on the methodology of the count. The bombings were carried out under the laws of war as they were then understood; the relevant Allied governments treated them as legitimate acts of war (the dehousing of working populations, the disruption of war production, the demoralisation of the enemy population). Whether the bombings should have been so understood, and whether the targeting of civilian areas was proportionate to the military gain, are questions that historians and ethicists have debated extensively from at least the 1960s onwards. The proper scholarship, including A. C. Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities (2006) and the broader literature on strategic bombing, treats the bombings as morally serious acts that warrant criticism on grounds of proportionality and discrimination. The bombings are not, however, classified as genocide by any serious historian, because they were not directed at a defined ethnic, religious or racial group with the aim of eliminating that group; they were directed at the urban populations of belligerent nations with the aim of ending the war.

The Soviet violence against German civilians in 1944 to 1945 included mass rape on a scale estimated by the historians Norman Naimark, Antony Beevor and others at approximately one to two million women raped in the Soviet zones of occupation. The pattern of behaviour was a war crime by any reasonable standard, was occasionally prosecuted by Soviet authorities (rarely, and inconsistently), and is part of the legitimate historical record. The behaviour was not, however, an organised programme directed at the elimination of the German civilian population; it was the criminal behaviour of individual soldiers in conditions where the chain of command failed to suppress it.

The Bengal famine of 1943 killed approximately three million people in British India, and the historian Madhusree Mukerjee in Churchill’s Secret War (2010) has made a forceful case that British policy decisions, particularly the diversion of food shipments and the requisitioning of boats, contributed substantially to the famine’s death toll. The famine is a serious moral charge against the British wartime administration. It is not in itself part of the Second World War’s combatant violence; it is a consequence of imperial mismanagement under wartime conditions, and stands or falls on its own terms.

The structural difference

None of these episodes, however serious, was structurally analogous to the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the deliberate, sustained, organised killing of approximately six million people defined by ancestry, run by a state apparatus specifically created for the purpose, conducted for years with no military necessity (the operation continued and indeed accelerated after Germany’s military prospects had collapsed), and aimed at the elimination of an entire people from the face of the earth. The strategic bombings, the Soviet rapes, the Bengal famine, the various Allied excesses are all structurally different operations, with different aims, different methods, different durations and different categorisations under international law. To equate them is to lose the analytical specificity that distinguishes wartime violence from genocide.

The deniers’ rhetorical move is the equation, not the comparison. The proper scholarship compares; the denial equates. The bombing of Dresden killed approximately 25,000 people in two nights of attack on a particular German city for stated military reasons in the closing weeks of a total war. The killing of Hungarian Jewry in summer 1944 killed approximately 437,000 people in fifty-six days of organised deportation to a dedicated killing facility, with no military rationale and no end-point other than the elimination of the targeted population. The two are different operations under any honest description.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it uses real Allied moral failings as a rhetorical balance against the Holocaust, in the implicit hope that the failings on both sides cancel each other out. The cancellation is not how moral judgement works in any other context. The German wrongs are not cancelled by Allied wrongs; the Allied wrongs are not cancelled by German wrongs; both stand on their own terms. The proper response to legitimate Allied criticism is to examine and address the Allied actions on their own merits, which serious historians have done. The improper response is to use the Allied actions as a rhetorical wash for the German actions. The wash does not remove the stain.

What was the structure of the Allied wrongdoing? What was the structure of the German wrongdoing? Are the two operations the same kind of thing, in the same legal and moral category?

See also

• The Bombing of Dresden Was as Bad as the Holocaust
• Hungary

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Sources

• A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, Bloomsbury, 2006
• Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, HarperCollins, 2004
• Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939 to 1945, Allen Lane, 2013
• Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Viking, 2002, on the Soviet violence in occupied Germany
• Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation 1945 to 1949, Belknap, 1995
• Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, Basic Books, 2010
• Cormac Ó Gráda, Eating People is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future, Princeton University Press, 2015, with the chapter on the Bengal famine
• Mark Selden, “A Forgotten Holocaust: U.S. Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities, and the American Way of War from the Pacific War to Iraq”, in Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 5:5, 2007
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, 9 December 1948, with the legal distinctions between genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity
• Hague Convention IV (Laws and Customs of War on Land), 1907, the framework under which Allied bombings were assessed at the time
• Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy, Quadrangle Books, 1970, on the Allied prosecutors’ own consideration of the comparative question
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org