The Third Reich killed more prisoners of war than any other force in World War II

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There are […] both similarities and differences between the way the Red Army and the Wehrmacht treated their POWs. Both sides shot some of their prisoners; both sides exploited their labor; both sides at times tried to recruit some of the enemy’s troops for their own cause; and on both sides appalling numbers of war prisoners died of malnutrition, disease, and overwork. Both sides, finally, actively brutalized their troops through propaganda. Official discourse on both sides expected enemy atrocities from the very start, well before they had any evidence for these expectations. Both sides had a history of such victimization fantasies.¹⁵³

But here is where the similarities end.¹⁵⁴ The [Wehrmacht] had a policy of shooting certain categories of prisoners; the Soviets did not. Isolated [Soviet] orders to give no quarter and toleration of murder do not constitute a policy of extermination, nor does atrocity propaganda, even if all of these contribute to the actual killing of actual human beings. The constant orders to take prisoners, and the occasional prosecution of those who did not, have to be seen as part of the official stance as much as the negative utterances and acts.¹⁵⁵

In their war planning the [Third Reich’s officials] callously projected the deaths of large numbers of prisoners and civilians and passed regulations mandating a maximum food allowance for enemy prisoners;¹⁵⁶ the Soviets put together an administration for POWs and established guidelines attempting to keep them alive for use as [penal] labor.

The death toll of 15 percent in Soviet camps is certainly appalling, especially compared to the perhaps 4 to 5 percent of British or American POWs who died in [the Third Reich’s] captivity. But it is considerably better than the 27 percent of Americans, Australians, British, Canadians, Dutch, and New Zealanders who perished in [Imperial] camps.¹⁵⁷ And no other example in this war could compete with the [Third Reich’s] treatment of Soviet POWs, which resulted in the deaths of between 43 and 63 percent.¹⁵⁸

Thus, the comparison of the Soviets with the most genocidal régime of the twentieth century is misleading. Killing unarmed prisoners is a fact of war in many contexts, and the twentieth century was no exception. That the international rules of warfare forbid such acts is itself proof for the likelihood of their occurrence.

The Russian Civil War’s brutality has already been mentioned, but the Western Front of World War I also saw the emergence of a distinct culture of giving no quarter on both sides of the trenches. In the Pacific theater of World War II, Australians and Americans executed enemy captives, sometimes as part of gruesome rituals such as the collection of ears and noses or the boiling of skulls to send home, signed, to sweethearts or parents.

As the Allies fought their way through Western Europe at war’s end, they too broke the rules of warfare. The enemy who, overwhelmed, put up his hands in desperation, should not be spared, General Patton advised his soldiers who were about to invade Sicily. “That bastard will die! You must kill him! Stick him between the third and fourth ribs. […] Stick them in the liver.”¹⁵⁹

When the 2nd Armored Division, known as “Hell on Wheels” and once commanded by Patton, took [Axis] POWs in 1945, the Americans marched them to the Soviet lines, according to one survivor, shooting stragglers in their wake. “Well, that’s when we definitively lost our illusions about American captivity,” he mused.¹⁶⁰ While such excesses were exceptional in the West European theater, they were more common in the Pacific.¹⁶¹

Even if the astonishing mass executions during the Rape of Nanjing were the exception rather than the rule, it is nonetheless true that the [Imperial] Japanese army denied quarter often.¹⁶² On the other side of the front line, too, prisoners were not only shot but their corpses mutilated, stripped of gold teeth, or urinated upon as well. Sometimes, particularly brutalized American marines robbed Japanese of the precious metal in their mouths while the victims were still alive.¹⁶³

Such examples—and other examples from other wars could be added—suggest that wartime barbarism does not rely upon a preexisting “culture” or “civilization” of violence, upon political [propaganda] dehumanizing the enemy, or upon dictatorships forcing their soldiers into battle. The dynamics of warfare itself, if not checked by politics, law, and morality, tend toward greater and greater force, and prisoners (or, for that matter, civilians) are not excluded from this maelstrom.¹⁶⁴

In fact, the logic of the situation—what has been described as the “captor’s dilemma”—loads the scales against the survival of prisoners: from a purely instrumental viewpoint, all the benefits of taking prisoners go to the collective the soldier is fighting for (the army and the nation benefit from their labor power, the weakening of enemy resolve, and their potential for yielding intelligence), while all the risks and hardships (the potential that the surrender is a ruse of war, the problem of how to evacuate, guard, and feed the enemy) are borne by the soldier and his primary group.¹⁶⁵

(Emphasis added.)