History: Prisoners of War

Abstract

Throughout history, defeated enemies have been treated in strikingly distinct ways. Many instances are known in which they were treated with utmost brutality and massacred in large numbers. In his history of the crusades Runciman (1955, p. 274) tells us, for example, that when the Persians conquered Jerusalem in the year 614, 60,000 Christians were murdered regardless of sex or age. The crusaders conquering Jerusalem 500 years later (1099) butchered men, women and children in the city (among them Christians) for an entire afternoon and throughout the following night. During the French Revolution which was based, after all, on the ideal of fraternity among men, all prisoners taken by the revolutionaries in the Vendée (1793–1795)—more than 150,000 in all—were massacred (Hetzel 1889, p. 8). Snow (1981, p. 164) reports that the Japanese killed more than 42,000 men after having conquered Nanking in December 1937. Chinese sources quote much higher figures: 300,000 people are said to have been murdered by the Japanese, among them 30,000 disarmed soldiers in the northern part of the city (China aktuell, October 1985, p. 672).