Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide - The Twentieth-Century Experience

Like their Nazi and Turkish colleagues, Japanese soldiers were "hardened for the task of murdering Chinese combatants and noncombatants alike." Quickly desensitized, the officers and soldiers of the Japanese armies killed Chinese for sport and for bayonet practice. "Soldiers impaled [Chinese] babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling water," a medical doctor, Nagatomi Hakudo, recalled fifty years after his participation in Nanking's descration in 1937. He recalled the first test of his courage on the streets of Nanking when a superior officer gave him a sword and instructed him to kill bound Chinese captives. "I remember smiling proudly as I took his sword and began killing people."The Nazi charge d'affaires in Nanking was so horrified at the brutality of the marauding Japanese soldiers that he wrote to Berlin: "The Japanese Imperial Army is nothing but a beastly machine."The general in charge of the Japanese forces who commented the atrocities, Matsui Iwane (one of the twenty -eight leaders indicted, tried, and convicted after the war), noted, while the events were still taking place, "My men have done something very wrong and extremely regrettable."(Nazi diplomats in Nanking in 1937, repulsed by the killing orgy of the Japanese occupiers, provided safe haven for many Chinese as well as vigorously complaining to their government about Japanese cruelties.)Pol Pot, leader of the victorious Khmer Rouge forces (recently deceased before he could be brought to trial on charges of genocide), ordered his troops to commit genocide against nearly 2 million Cambodians - various ethnic, intellectual, and professional groups of "enemies" of the agrarian communist revolution. He reflected Hitler's views before the start of World War II. In late August 1939, Hitler remarked to a group of soldier just before Germany's unprovoked invasion of Poland: "I have put my death-head formations in place with the command recklessly and without compassion to seed into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?"Chap teuv is the Cambodian phrase for "taken away, never to be seen again."