War Crimes peace War crimes were formal violations of international criminal law as laid out in the Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions, or municipal law governing the locale where an illegal act was committed Traditionally, there were two defenses against charges of war crimes: an “act of state” that invoked sovereign immunity, and an argument that action flowed from superior orders, thereby deflecting responsibility to a higher authority Both defenses were rejected in 1945 as new legal principles of direct accountability were developed for international war crimes trials overseen by the Nuremberg Tribunal and Tokyo Tribunal, and by various national tribunals The changes were codified in later treaties, including the Genocide Convention (1948) In addition to normally criminal acts such as murder, before World War II express military acts were already classed in international and military law as war crimes These included: pillaging; killing or wounding civilians, unless as inescapable collateral damage in the course of operations; firing on a flag of truce; abusing a flag of truce or a request for mercy to gain a military advantage and continue hostilities; killing or wounding enemy combatants who asked to surrender; accepting surrender terms, then disregarding them; employing “ruses de guerre” such as hiding military targets under a hospital signature or the emblem of the Red Cross or Red Crescent, or otherwise abusing humanitarian privileges to gain military advantage, such as by firing from the sanctuary of a hospital; hiding among civilians by discarding uniforms or wearing mufti, if done to commit hostile acts, but not if done to effect escape; concealing oneself in the uniform of the enemy for purposes of deceit and advantage in combat; killing, wounding, or abusing prisoners in medical or other experimentation; using prisoners as slave or forced labor on military installations; forcing prisoners to serve in one’s own armed forces or auxiliary units, against former comrades; using prohibited weapons of war such as biological, chemical, or nerve agents; targeting militarily insignificant areas; using torture to elicit information about the enemy from a civilian population; abusing the dead in any way; sacking hospitals or similarly protected buildings; and deliberate terror attacks on a civilian population With appropriate adjustments, the same rules applied to naval and air warfare: no flying a false flag or use of false markings, no firing from or against hospital ships or aircraft; no indiscriminate bombardment or bombing, no sudden killing after false surrender by lowering one’s flag, and so on War crimes were central to the way several major armies approached war from 1937 to 1945, not merely an adjunct of combat The Japanese Army killed civilians up close and intimately, with cruel and personal methods far beyond the normal “collateral damage” suffered by civilians trapped in a war zone Allied armies committed atrocities and war crimes as well, notably the Red Army during the conquest of Germany in 1945, and isolated units and individuals from the armies of the Western powers But no army, not even the Imperial Japanese Army, conducted itself in the savage manner of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front German soldiers joined Einsatzgruppen and other death squads in killing noncombatants, while the Wehrmacht officer corps and High Command maliciously neglected to death millions of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians as a matter of basic policy These were war crimes on a mass scale unparalleled in the history of war 1159