Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (2024)

FAQs

Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act? ›

The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act mandates that the Government now take the steps necessary to declassify and open remaining classified records related to war criminals and criminality.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, the U.S. Government declassified the majority of its security-classified records relating to World War II. Yet, 60 years after the war, millions of pages of wartime and postwar records remained classified.

The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.

Their military capabilities were employed instead in terrorizing the civilian population through acts that included hunting down straggling Polish soldiers, confiscating agricultural produce and livestock, and torturing and murdering large numbers of Polish political leaders, aristocrats, businessmen, priests, ...

According to postwar German estimates, more than 35,000 soldiers were convicted by military courts of leaving their units during the course of the war. Some 23,000 were sentenced to death, and at least 15,000 of these were actually executed.

There are hundreds of documents that have not been declassified yet! Ranging through a plethora of subjects. Things like Hitler's escape, to the German Nuclear program.. Japanese atrocities and the disposition of Post war Germany.

The Marburg Files, also known as the Windsor Files or Duke of Windsor Files, are a series of top-secret documents discovered in Germany during May 1945 near the Harz Mountains and compiled at Marburg Castle, Hesse.

In Taken by Force, J. Robert Lilly estimates the number of rapes committed by U.S. servicemen in Germany to be 11,040. As in the case of the American occupation of France after the D-Day invasion, many of the American rapes in Germany in 1945 were gang rapes committed by armed soldiers at gunpoint.

Militarism, nationalism and racism, especially during Japan's imperialist expansion, had great bearings on the conduct of the Japanese armed forces both before and during the Second World War.

During World War II, in all theaters of the war, the United States military executed 102 of its own soldiers for rape or unprovoked murder of civilians, but only Slovik was executed for the military offense of desertion. Colonel Robert C.

Why were American soldiers executed in WWII? ›

With the exception of Eddie Slovik, who was shot for desertion, all of these soldiers were executed for murder and/or rape.

Massacre revealed

In the early afternoon of 17 December 1944, 43 U.S. POWs who survived the Malmedy massacre emerged from hiding from the Waffen-SS and then sought help and medical aid in the nearby city of Malmédy, which was held by the U.S. Army.

The Red Army claimed responsibility for the majority of Wehrmacht casualties during World War II.

In fact, the Asian countries victimized by the Japanese war machine tried far more Japanese -- an estimated five thousand, executing as many as 900 and sentencing more than half to life in prison.

More than 4,000 people were convicted of war crimes in other international tribunals, and about 920 of them were executed. Tojo and the six others who were hanged were among 28 Japanese wartime leaders tried for war crimes at the 1946-1948 International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

If the information can not be traced, review for declassification at 25 years from the creation of the document.

Use the National Archives Catalog at National Archives Catalog to help find World War II records preserved at the National Archives.

Check the Classification Markings: Government documents that are classified will have a classification marking (such as "Confidential," "Secret," or "Top Secret") printed on the document. If the document has been declassified, these markings will be removed or marked as "Declassified."

Roosevelt who in 1941 would publicly label the conflict the “Second World War,” and his fellow Americans quickly followed suit. (In Britain, it remained simply “the War” until the late 1940s.)