No. Mass rape, kidnapping and murder of civilians is not how wars have historically been won, and they are certainly not "necessary". Wars are won when the enemy no longer has the ability or willingness to fight. Committing atrocities against civilians rarely accomplishes anything more than increasing of the enemy, unless their situation was already hopeless to begin with.
>No. Mass rape, kidnapping and murder of civilians is not how wars have historically been won, and they are certainly not "necessary"
I cant believe I actually need to say this but trucks leave tire tracks in the dirt. You're gonna have a hell of a time dragging an army (especially a conscript army that needs far more ideological motivation than a professional army) across a country without leaving some ancillary destruction behind.
I think this only helps my point, because with the benefit of hindsight it is clear that the bombings of London, Dresden, Tokyo, Stalingrad and many other cities were of absolutely minimal value in ending the war except insofar as it damaged military targets in those cities - and in many cases it was outright counterproductive (e.g. London).
Name a single war, or battle in which atrocities against civilians have helped the aggressors, in a situation where the defending side wasn't already militarily defeated (e.g. German or Soviet occupied countries)? It didn't help in Chechnya, Vietnam, or Yugoslavia (either during WWII or in the 90s).
Even the impact of the nuclear bombs is heavily debated. The Imperial Japanese military still wanted to continue the war, and the Emperor was less concerned with the plight of civilians than what was going to happen to himself after the war.
The only universally effective method of winning a war is destroying the enemy's ability to fight. Cruelty towards non-belligerents is not required to do this.
So there definitely are differences in how the rules of engagement are interpreted from one actor to another. Needless to say this doesn't justify anything the Germans did and I acknowledge that Russia was instrumental in beating the - actual - Nazi's but still, that difference does stand out.
It's a pretty tricky thing because technically the Russians were 'on our side' and the Germans were clearly the enemy and just writing about it in an objective way is hard enough keeping in the back of your mind everything else that the Nazi's were up to.
+ Note that the Germans committed plenty of war crimes in Poland as well and that there were quite a few really bad things that happened in areas under German occupation, but on a relative scale they were considered the 'lesser of two evils' from the point of view of the civilian population that was not directly in the crosshairs of the Germans.
Having no control over your army and the atrocities it commits because the higher ups simply don't care at all about the kind of image they are projecting is exactly the reason why things are utterly out of control in Ukraine today. Lack of discipline, lack of enforcement and in general using the army as a weapon of terror is what is happening, there is zero restraint.
It is not often discussed, but millions of Poles, not just Jews or Jewish Poles were killed in concentration camps.
This (sans "millions" which is my own research finding) was my grandfather's observation as a US officer liberating such camps- there were a lot of non Jewish Poles in such places.
"Lebensraum" came through Polish genocide from what I can tell.
(I am not Polish.)
All 6 siblings of my partner’s grandmother were killed on arrival in Ausschwitz, as were her parents. She was spared by Mengele and subjected to experiments.
Ultimately weighing atrocities against each other is not super productive. But the myth of a “clean Wehrmacht” had been so persistent and convenient that it took decades to root out in German main stream opinion.