World War II saw the largest scale of war crimes and crimes against humanity ever committed in an armed conflict, mostly against civilians and specific groups (such as Jews; Poles and other Slavs; homosexuals; and people who were mentally ill or disabled) and prisoners of war (POWs). The war also saw the indiscriminate mass rape of captured women, carpet bombing of civilian targets and the use of starvation as a weapon of war.

Most of these crimes were carried out by the Axis powers who constantly violated the rules of war and the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, mostly by Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. Belgian historian observed that "forced labor carried out in murderous circumstances by Allied soldiers [POWs] and civilians in Japanese hands and the death by execution and starvation of over 3 million Soviet POWs in German hands are among the most infamous crimes of the Second World War".

However the decision by the United States to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still debated to this day on whether it could amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity.

This is a list of war crimes committed during World War II.

Allied powers

Crimes perpetrated by the Soviet Union

Concurrent with World War IIIncident Type of crimePersons responsibleNotesKatyń massacreWar crimes (murder of Polish intelligentsia)Lavrenty Beria, Joseph StalinFischer, Benjamin B., "The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field ". "Studies in Intelligence", Winter 1999–2000. Retrieved on 10 December 2005.Sanford, George. "Katyn And The Soviet Massacre Of 1940: Truth, Justice And Memory ". Routledge, 2005.An NKVD-committed massacre of tens of thousands of Polish officers and intelligentsia throughout the spring of 1940. Originally believed to have been committed by the Nazis in 1941 (after the invasion of eastern Poland and the USSR), it was finally admitted by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that it had been a Soviet operation.Invasion of Estonia, Latvia and LithuaniaWar crimesVladimir Dekanozov, Andrey Vyshinsky, Andrei Zhdanov, Ivan Serov, Joseph StalinAn NKVD-committed deportation of hundreds of thousands of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian intelligentsia, land owners and their families in June 1941 and again in March 1949.NKVD prisoner massacresWar crimes; torture; mass murderIvan Serov, Joseph StalinAn NKVD-committed mass murder.Anglo-Soviet invasion of IranCrimes against peace (waging aggressive war with Iran)No prosecutionsIn contravention of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact and the 1907 Hague Convention (III), the Soviet Union and Britain jointly invaded neutral Iran without a declaration of war on 25 August 1941 for reasons such as securing the Allied supply lines to the USSR (see the Persian Corridor) and limiting German influence there (the Shah of Iran, Reza Shah, was considered friendly to Nazi Germany).Deportation of the Chechens and IngushCrimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, genocideNo prosecutionsDeportation of the entire Chechen and Ingush population to Siberia or Centra Asia in 1944. It was acknowledged by the European Parliament as an act of genocide.Deportation of the Crimean TatarsCrimes against humanity, ethnic cleansingNo prosecutionsForced transfer of the entire Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia or Siberia in 1944. Nemmersdorf massacre, East PrussiaWar crimesNo prosecutionsNemmersdorf (today Mayakovskoye in Kaliningrad Oblast) was one of the first German settlements to fall to the advancing Red Army on 22 October 1944. It was recaptured by the Germans soon afterwards and the German authorities reported that the Red Army killed civilians there. Nazi propaganda widely disseminated the description of the event with horrible details, supposedly to boost the determination of German soldiers to resist the general Soviet advance. Because the incident was investigated by the Nazis and reports were disseminated as Nazi propaganda, discerning the facts from the fiction of the incident is difficult. Invasion of East PrussiaFlight and expulsion of Germans from Poland during and after World War IIExpulsion of Germans after World War IICrimes against humanity (mass expulsion)?War crimes committed against German civilian population by the Red Army in occupied Eastern and Central Germany, and against ethnic-German populations of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia. The number of civilian victims in the years 1944–46 is estimated in at least 300,000, not all victims of war crimes; many died from starvation, cold weather and diseases.A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 Alfred-Maurice de Zayas 1994. (No pages cited)Barefoot in the Rubble Elizabeth B. Walter 1997. (No pages cited)TreuenbrietzenCrimes against humanity (Mass murder of civilians)?Following the capture of the German city of Treuenbrietzen after fierce fighting. Over a period of several days at the end of April and beginning of May roughly 1,000 inhabitants of the city, most of them men, were executed by Soviet troops.Claus-Dieter Steyer, ("City without men"), Der Tagesspiegel online 21 June 2006; viewed 11 November 2006.Rape during the Soviet occupation of Poland (1944–1947)War crimes (mass rape)?Joanna Ostrowska and Marcin Zaremba of the Polish Academy of Sciences wrote that rapes of the Polish women reached a mass scale during the Red Army's Winter Offensive of 1945.  Dr. Marcin Zaremba of Polish Academy of Sciences, the co-author of the article cited above – is a historian from Warsaw University Department of History Institute of 20th Century History (cited 196 times in Google scholar ). Zaremba published a number of scholarly monographs, among them: Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm (426 pages), Marzec 1968 (274 pages), Dzień po dniu w raportach SB (274 pages), Immobilienwirtschaft (German, 359 pages), see inauthor:"Marcin Zaremba" in Google Books. Joanna Ostrowska of Warsaw, Poland, is a lecturer at Departments of Gender Studies at two universities: the Jagiellonian University of Kraków, the University of Warsaw as well as, at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the author of scholarly works on the subject of mass rape and forced prostitution in Poland in the Second World War (i.e. "Prostytucja jako praca przymusowa w czasie II Wojny Światowej. Próba odtabuizowania zjawiska," "Wielkie przemilczanie. Prostytucja w obozach koncentracyjnych," etc.), a recipient of Socrates-Erasmus research grant from Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin, and a historian associated with Krytyka Polityczna.Battle of BerlinWar crimes (Mass rape)Antony Beevor "They raped every German female from eight to 80" , The Guardian, 1 May 2002.?(description/notes missing)Przyszowice massacreWar crimes; crimes against humanityNo prosecutionA massacre perpetrated by the Red Army against civilian inhabitants of the Polish village of Przyszowice in Upper Silesia during the period 26 to 28 January 1945. Sources vary on the number of victims, which range from 54 to over 60 – and possibly as many as 69.Gegenmiao massacreWar crimes; crimes against humanityNo prosecutionA massacre perpetrated by the Red Army against Japanese refugees in Inner Mongolia during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. The Red Army murdered over 1,000 Japanese refugees by the end of the massacre.

Crimes perpetrated by the United Kingdom

Incident Type of crime Persons responsible NotesUnrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shippingBreach of London Naval Treaty (1930)No prosecutions; Allied representatives admitted responsibility at Nuremberg Trials; questionable whether war crime or a breach of a treaty.It was the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials of Karl Dönitz that Britain had been in breach of the Treaty "in particular of an order of the British Admiralty announced on 8 May 1940, according to which all vessels should be sunk at sight in the Skagerrak."Judgement: Doenitz the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran Crimes against peace (waging aggressive war against Iran)No prosecutions In contravention of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact and the 1907 Hague Convention (III), Britain and the Soviet Union jointly invaded neutral Iran without a declaration of war on 25 August 1941 for reasons such as securing the Allied supply lines to the USSR (see the Persian Corridor) and limiting German influence there (the Shah of Iran, Reza Shah, was considered friendly to Nazi Germany). HMS Torbay incident War crimes (murder of shipwreck survivors) No prosecutions In July 1941, the submarine HMS Torbay (under the command of Anthony Miers) was based in the Mediterranean where it sank several German ships. On two occasions, once off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, and the other off the coast of Crete, the crew attacked and killed dozens of shipwrecked German sailors and troops. None of the shipwrecked survivors posed a major threat to Torbay's crew. Miers made no attempt to hide his actions, and reported them in his official logs. He received a strongly worded reprimand from his superiors following the first incident. Miers' actions violated the Hague Convention of 1907, which banned the killing of shipwreck survivors under any circumstances.Sinking of German hospital ship TubingenWar crimes (attacking hospital ships)No prosecutionsOn 18 November 1944, the German hospital ship Tubingen was sunk by two British Beaufighter bombers off Pola, in the Adriatic Sea. The vessel, which had paid a brief visit to the Allied-controlled port of Bari to pick up German wounded under the auspices of the Red Cross, was attacked with rockets nine times, despite the calm sea and good weather allowed a clear identification of the ship's Red Cross markings. Six crewmembers were killed. American author Alfred M. de Zayas, who evaluated the 266 extant volumes of the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, identifies the sinking of Tübingen and other German hospital ships as war crimes according to the Hague Convention (X) of 1907.

Crimes perpetrated by the United States