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WAR CRIMES
During the Second World War Allied nations determined to prosecute German war criminals and defined ‘war crimes’ as plotting aggressive warfare and committing atrocities against any civilian population. This definition was used in the trials of war criminals which began in 1945. In recent years there have been suggestions that Canada (for its involvement in the fire bombing of German civilians) and the United States (for the dropping of atomic bombs on largely civilian inhabited cities) as well as other nations were also guilty of committing atrocities against civilians, but these nations were never brought to trial. In the 1990s the United Nations again initiated tribunals to prosecute war criminals in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda.

Last updated 2002--0-9-

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Athabaca University ICAAP

© Robert Drislane, Ph.D. and Gary Parkinson, Ph.D.
The online version of this dictionary is a product of
Athabasca University and
ICAAP

*This social science dictionary has 1000
entries covering the disciplines of sociology, criminology, political
science and women's study with a commitment to Canadian examples and
events and names