World War II (1939–1945)

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The best-known Japanese atrocity was the Nanking Massacre, in which several hundred thousand Chinese civilians were raped and murdered.Between 3 million to more than 10 million civilians, mostly Chinese, were killed by the Japanese occupation forces.

Mitsuyoshi Himeta reported 2.7 million casualties occurred during the Sankō Sakusen. General Yasuji Okamura implemented the policy in Heipei and Shantung.

The Axis forces employed limited biological and chemical weapons. The Italians used mustard gas during their conquest of Abyssinia, while the Imperial Japanese Army used a variety of such weapons during their invasion and occupation of China (see Unit 731)and in early conflicts against the Soviets.

Both the Germans and Japanese tested such weapons against civilians and, in some cases, on prisoners of war.

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While many of the Axis's acts were brought to trial in the world's first international tribunals, incidents caused by the Allies were not. Examples of such Allied actions include population transfers in the Soviet Union and Japanese American internment in the United States; the Operation Keelhaul, expulsion of Germans after World War II.rape during the occupation of Germany; the Soviet Union's Katyn massacre, for which Germans faced counter-accusations of responsibility.

Large numbers of famine deaths can also be partially attributed to the war, such as the Bengal famine of 1943 and the Vietnamese famine of 1944–45. Brutalised by war and fuelled by racist propaganda, many American soldiers in the Pacific mutilated corpses and kept grizzly war trophies.

It has been suggested by some historians, e.g. Jörg Friedrich, that the mass-bombing of civilian areas in enemy territory, including Tokyo and most notably the German cities of Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne by Western Allies, which resulted in the destruction of more than 160 cities and the deaths of more than 600,000 German civilians be considered as war crimes.

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Concentration camps and slave work

Further information: The Holocaust, Consequences of Nazism, Japanese war crimes, and Allied war crimes during World War II

The Nazis were responsible for The Holocaust, the killing of approximately six million Jews (overwhelmingly Ashkenazim), as well as two million ethnic Poles and four million others who were deemed "unworthy of life" (including the disabled and mentally ill, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Romani) as part of a programme of deliberate extermination. About 12 million, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy as forced labourers.

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