vendredi 19 janvier 2018

War crime or not - clearing Denmark's WWII mines

Last night I watched an amazing film about the clearing of German mines laid around Denmark during WWII. German POWs were used, many of them youths who had been drafted into the German army during the last months of the fighting.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3841424/

The film is called "Land of Mine" (Under sandet) and it follows one group of Germans, mostly teenagers, under the command of a Danish soldier as they clear an area of beech of various mines. It is not much of a spoiler to say that many died. The reality was

https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-mov...rror-1.5377084

"...the forced deployment by the Danish government of more than 2,000 German prisoners of war, many of them still teenagers, to clear some two million land mines laid by Germany along Denmarks western coast during the Nazi occupation. According to the most recent research, nearly half of these POWs were killed or injured — in some cases, left with permanent, serious disabilities — during the operation.
The Danes did not resist the decision, which was made by the British military that controlled the area and violated the Geneva Convention prohibition against making prisoners of war do dangerous work.
The operation has been described by some as a death march, since the Germans were required to periodically march through the mine fields to make sure all the mines had been cleared."

Through out the film, the Danish characters regularly justify the use of the Germans because "they put the mines there".

The alternatives were for Danish people to clear the mines or, use some sort of mechanical device to sweep the beeches. Neither alternative is touched on during the film. That is possibly because of the sheer hatred of the Germans by the Danes (and some British soldiers who make a brief appearance).

So, was it a war crime?


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2Dpdm5l

Aucun commentaire:

Enregistrer un commentaire