During World War I (1914–1918), belligerents from both the Allied Powers and Central Powers violated international criminal law, committing numerous war crimes. This includes the use of indiscriminate violence and massacres against civilians, torture, sexual violence, forced deportation and population transfer, death marches, the use of chemical weapons and the intentional targeting of Red Cross personnel and medical facilities.
The governments of all major combatants had previously signed the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which these atrocities intentionally violated. Even so, both the decisions to commit, and to refuse to court-martial, the perpetrators of World War I crimes was motivated by what American Civil War historian Thomas Lowry has termed "the European tradition … that to victors belong the spoils - the losers could expect pillage and plunder",[1] and that enemy civilians are "grist for the mills of more hardheaded conquerors such as Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Ivan the Terrible."[2]
- ^ Thomas P. Lowry, MD (1997), Tarnished Eagles: The Courts-Martial of Fifty Union Colonels and Lieutenant Colonels, Stackpoole Books. p. 161.
- ^ Thomas P. Lowry, MD (1997), Tarnished Eagles: The Courts-Martial of Fifty Union Colonels and Lieutenant Colonels, Stackpoole Books. p. 163.