IkeLibrary's video: Benjamin Schneider Ph D 2023 WWII Emerging Scholars Symposium

"No Good Options: Eisenhower, American War Crimes, and the Legacy of the Second World War" In July of 1945, the United States of America prepared to undertake an unprecedented task: trying the agents of the Third Reich for crimes committed during the war. For the first time, an international tribunal would hold soldiers accountable under international law for crimes they had committed against citizens of other nations. To prepare for this watershed, Dwight D. Eisenhower faced a difficult decision: whether to engage in similar trials for American soldiers accused of war crimes. The war had been long and brutal, and a chorus of voices, some of them American, had begun to argue that the Germans had not behaved any worse than any of the other combatants, they had simply had the misfortune to end up on the losing side. To forestall these claims of victor’s justice, Eisenhower ordered an army wide investigation into any and all possible mistreatment of Axis POWs by American soldiers, particularly instances where prisoners had been killed on the order of American officers. He expected every major formation under his command to render an accounting of their conduct. He had good reason: he knew for a fact that American soldiers had massacred their foes, sometimes by the dozen, and sometimes with the approval of commanders both high and low. Yet despite his best efforts, Eisenhower’s report found basically nothing and the army washed its hands of the affair. The official position was that Americans had not committed war crimes, except for “isolated incidents, magnified in the retelling.” They had fought a clean war. This paper reexamines those conclusions and the ramifications of Eisenhower’s fateful decision, looking at American conduct during the war and how and why the killing of Axis POWs – a problem well known to the army when the fighting was hot – came to be ignored once the war came to a close.