It is well known that wars are a time when, at times, all the darkest and most cruel that is in human nature awakens in people. Reading the memoirs of eyewitnesses of the events of the Second World War, getting acquainted with the documents, you are simply amazed at the human cruelty, which at that time, it seems, simply knew no boundaries. And it's not about military operations, war is war. It is about torture and executions that were applied to prisoners of war and civilians.
Germans
It is well known that representatives of the Third Reich during the war years put the cause of the destruction of people simply on stream. Mass shootings, killings in gas chambers are striking in their soulless approach and scale. However, in addition to these methods of murder, the Germans used others.
On the territory of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, the Germans practiced the burning of entire villages alive. There were cases when people who were still alive were thrown into pits and covered with earth.
But even this pales in comparison with the cases when the Germans approached the problem especially "creatively".
It is known that in the Treblinka concentration camp, two girls who were members of the Resistance were boiled alive in a barrel of water. At the front, the soldiers were having fun, tearing apart prisoners tied to tanks.
In France, the Germans used the guillotine en masse. It is known that with the help of this device more than 40 thousand people were beheaded. Among others, with the help of the guillotine, a member of the Resistance, the Russian princess Vera Obolenskaya, was executed.
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At the Nuremberg Trials, cases were made public when the Germans sawed people with hand saws. This took place in the occupied territories of the USSR.
Even to such a time-tested form of execution as hanging, the Germans approached "outside the box." To prolong the torture of the executed, they were hung not on a rope, but on a metal string. The victim did not die immediately from a fracture of the vertebrae, as with the usual method of execution, but suffered for a long time. In this way, the participants in the conspiracy against the Fuhrer in 1944 were killed.
Moroccans
One of the least known pages in the history of World War II in our country is the participation of the French expeditionary corps in it, which recruited Moroccan residents - Berbers and representatives of other indigenous tribes. They were named Moroccan gumiers. The gumiers fought against the fascists, that is, they were on the side of the allies who were liberating Europe from the "brown plague". But in their cruelty towards the local population, the Moroccans, according to some estimates, surpassed even the Germans.
First of all, the Moroccans raped the inhabitants of the territories they had occupied. Of course, first of all, women of all ages suffered - from little girls to old women, but boys, adolescents and men who dared to resist them were also subjected to violence. As a rule, gang rape ended with the murder of the victim.
In addition, Moroccans could mock victims, gouging out their eyes, cutting off their ears and fingers, since such "trophies" raised the status of a warrior in Berber beliefs.
However, this behavior can be explained: these people lived in their Atlas Mountains in Africa almost at the level of the tribal system, were illiterate, and, finding themselves in the theater of war of the XX century, transferred their medieval, in fact, representations to it.
Japanese
If the behavior of the Moroccan gumiers is understandable, then the actions of the Japanese are extremely difficult to find a reasonable interpretation.
There are a lot of memories of how the Japanese mocked prisoners of war, representatives of the civilian population of the occupied territories, as well as their own compatriots suspected of espionage.
One of the most popular punishments for espionage was cutting off fingers, ears, or even legs. Amputation was performed without anesthesia. At the same time, they carefully monitored that the punished person continuously felt pain during the procedure, but survived.
In the American and British POW camps, a form of execution for riot was practiced, such as burial alive. The convict was placed vertically in a pit and heaped up with a heap of stones or earth. The man was suffocating and dying slowly, in terrible agony.
The Japanese also used medieval execution through beheading. But if in the era of the samurai the head was cut off with one masterful blow, then in the 20th century there were not so many such blade masters. Inexperienced executioners could beat the unfortunate man's neck many times before the head was separated from the neck. The suffering of the victim in this case is even difficult to imagine.
Another type of medieval execution that was used by the Japanese military was drowning in the waves. The convict is tied to a post dug into the shore in the tide zone. The waves rose slowly, the man choked and finally died painfully.
And finally, probably the most terrible method of execution that came from antiquity - tearing with growing bamboo. As you know, this plant is the fastest growing in the world. It grows 10-15 centimeters per day. The man was chained to the ground, from which young shoots of bamboo peeped out. For several days the plants tore apart the body of the sufferer. After the end of the war, it became known that the Japanese during the Second World War applied such a barbaric method of execution to prisoners of war.