German war crimes | |
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![]() Jewish women and children removed from a bunker by Schutzstaffel (SS) units during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising for deportations to Majdanek or Treblinka extermination camps (1943) | |
Location | Africa (1904–1908) and Europe |
Date | 1904–1918 (first phase) 1939–1945 (second phase) |
Target | Until 1918
Until 1945 |
Attack type | Genocide, Mass murder, Ethnic cleansing, War crimes, starvation, forced labour, genocidal rape, mass looting |
Perpetrators | German Empire (1904–1918) Nazi Germany (1939–1945) |
Motive | until 1918
until 1945 |
The governments of the German Empire and Nazi Germany (under Adolf Hitler) ordered, organized, and condoned a substantial number of war crimes, first in the Herero and Namaqua genocide and then in the First and Second World Wars. The most notable of these is the Holocaust, in which millions of European Jewish, Polish, and Romani people were systematically abused, deported, and murdered. Millions of civilians and prisoners of war also died as a result of German abuses, mistreatment, and deliberate starvation policies in those two conflicts. Much of the evidence was deliberately destroyed by the perpetrators, such as in Sonderaktion 1005, in an attempt to conceal their crimes.