The Hadassah convoy massacre took place on April 13, 1948, when a convoy, escorted by Haganah militia, bringing medical and military supplies and personnel to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, was ambushed by Arab forces. [non-primary source needed] Seventy-eight Jewish doctors, nurses, students, patients, faculty members and Haganah fighters, and one British soldier were killed in the attack, including twenty three women. Dozens of unidentified bodies, burned beyond recognition, were buried in a mass grave in the Sanhedria Cemetery.
The Jewish Agency claimed that the massacre was a gross violation of international humanitarian law, and demanded action be taken against a breach of the Geneva Conventions. The Arabs claimed they had attacked a military formation, that all members of the convoy had engaged in combat, and that it had been impossible to distinguish combatants from civilians. An enquiry was conducted. Eventually an agreement was reached to separate military from humanitarian convoys.[non-primary source needed]
...The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when around 130 fighters from the Far-right Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi killed at least 107 Palestinian Arabs, including women and children, in Deir Yassin, a village of roughly 600 people near Jerusalem. The assault occurred as Jewish militia sought to relieve the blockade of Jerusalem during the civil war that preceded the end of British rule in Palestine.
The Balad al-Shaykh massacre was the killing of a large number of Arab villagers by the Haganah in the Palestinian Arab village of Balad al-Shaykh during the early stages of the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine. It was one of the largest, and earliest, massacres during the 1948 Palestine war.
The massacre took place in the early morning – some of the men, women and children were killed in their beds. The killings had a significant effect on morale amongst Palestinian civilians in the Haifa region.
The Haifa Oil Refinery massacre took place on 30 December 1947 in Mandatory Palestine. It began when six Arabs were killed and 42 wounded after members of the Zionist paramilitary organisation, the Irgun, threw a number of grenades at a crowd of about 100 Arab day-labourers. These Arab day-labourers had gathered outside the main gate of the then British-owned Haifa Oil Refinery to look for work.
Minutes after this Irgun attack, Arab refinery workers and others began attacking the Jewish refinery workers, resulting in 39 deaths and 49 injuries, before the British army and Palestine Police units arrived to put an end to the violence. This came to be known as the "Haifa Oil Refinery massacre". Haganah later retaliated by attacking two nearby Arab villages in what became known as the Balad al-Shaykh massacre, where between 21 and 70 Arabs were killed, while skirmishes followed in Haifa.
...1946
1947–1948
1949
...The Portella della Ginestra massacre was one of the most violent acts in the history of modern Italian politics, when 11 people were killed and 27 wounded during May Day celebrations in Sicily on May 1, 1947, in the municipality of Piana degli Albanesi. Those held responsible were the bandit and separatist leader Salvatore Giuliano and his gang – although their motives and intentions are still a matter of controversy.
The February 28 incident, also rendered as the February 28 massacre, the 228 incident, or the 228 massacre (from Chinese: 二二八事件; pinyin: Èr'èrbā shìjiàn), was an anti-government uprising in Taiwan that was violently suppressed by Governor Chen Yi of the Kuomintang-led Republic of China government, which killed thousands of civilians beginning on February 28, 1947. The number of Taiwanese deaths from the incident and massacre was estimated to be between 18,000 and 28,000. The massacre marked the beginning of the White Terror, in which tens of thousands of other Taiwanese went missing, died, or were imprisoned. The incident is one of the most important events in Taiwan's modern history and was a critical impetus for the Taiwan independence movement.
...The Sétif and Guelma massacre was a series of attacks by French colonial authorities and pied-noir settler militias on Algerian civilians in 1945 around the market town of Sétif, west of Constantine, in French Algeria. French police fired on demonstrators at a protest on 8 May 1945. Riots in the town were followed by attacks on French settlers (colons) in the surrounding countryside, resulting in 102 deaths. The French colonial authorities and European settlers retaliated by killing between 6,000 and 30,000 Muslims in the region. Both the outbreak and the indiscriminate nature of its retaliation marked a turning point in Franco-Algerian relations, leading to the Algerian War of 1954–1962.
In May 1945, at the end of World War II in Europe, during which Yugoslavia had been occupied by the Axis powers, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians associated with the Axis powers fled Yugoslavia to Austria as the Soviet Union (Red Army) and Yugoslav Partisans took control. When they reached Allied-occupied Austria, the British refused to accept their surrender and directed them to the Partisans instead. The prisoners of war were subjected to forced marches, together with columns captured by other Partisans in Yugoslavia. Tens of thousands were executed; others were taken to forced labor camps, where more died from harsh conditions. The events are named for the Carinthian border town of Bleiburg, where the initial repatriation was carried out, hence the Bleiburg repatriations (see terminology).
...The parsley massacre (Spanish: el corte "the cutting"; Creole: kout kouto-a "the stabbing"[page needed]) (French: Massacre du Persil; Spanish: Masacre del Perejil; Haitian Creole: Masak nan Pèsil) was a mass killing of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic's northwestern frontier and in certain parts of the contiguous Cibao region in October 1937. Dominican Army troops came from different areas of the country: 161 and carried out the massacre on the orders of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. As a result of the massacre, virtually the entire Haitian population in the Dominican frontier was either killed or forced to flee across the border.
...The Manila massacre (Filipino: Pagpatay sa Maynila or Masaker sa Maynila), also called the Rape of Manila (Filipino: Paggahasa sa Maynila), involved atrocities committed against Filipino civilians in the City of Manila, the capital of the Philippines, by Japanese troops during the Battle of Manila (3 February 1945 – 3 March 1945) which occurred during World War II. The total number of civilians who were killed was at least 100,000.
The Manila massacre was one of several major war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army, as judged by the postwar military tribunal. The Japanese commanding general, Tomoyuki Yamashita, and his chief of staff Akira Mutō, were held responsible for the massacre and other war crimes in a trial which started in October 1945. Yamashita was executed on 23 February 1946 and Mutō on 23 December 1948.
...The Chenogne massacre was a war crime committed by members of the 11th Armored Division, an American combat unit, near Chenogne, Belgium, on January 1, 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge.
According to eyewitness accounts, an estimated 80 German prisoners of war were massacred by their American captors; the prisoners were assembled in a field and shot with machine guns. It was one of several war crimes committed during the Battle of the Bulge by members of both Allied and Axis forces.
The events were covered up at the time, and none of the perpetrators were ever punished. Postwar historians believe the killings were carried out on verbal orders by senior commanders that "no prisoners were to be taken".
...The Malmedy massacre was a German war crime committed by soldiers of the Waffen-SS on 17 December 1944, at the Baugnez crossroads near the city of Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945). Soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper summarily killed eighty-four U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs) who had surrendered after a brief battle. The Waffen-SS soldiers had grouped the U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, where they used machine guns to shoot and kill the grouped POWs; the prisoners of war who survived the gunfire of the massacre then were killed with a coup de grâce gun-shot to the head.
Besides the summary execution of the eighty-four U.S. POWs at the farmer’s field, the term "Malmedy massacre" also includes other Waffen-SS massacres of civilians and POWs in Belgian villages and towns in the time after their first massacre of U.S. POWs at Malmedy; these Waffen-SS war crimes were the subjects of the Malmedy massacre trial (May–July 1946), which was a part of the Dachau trials (1945–1947).
...The Marzabotto massacre, or more correctly, the massacre of Monte Sole, was a World War II war crime consisting of the mass murder of at least 770 civilians by Nazi troops, which took place in the territory around the small village of Marzabotto, in the mountainous area south of Bologna. It was the largest massacre of civilians committed by the Waffen SS in western Europe during the war.[citation needed] It is also the deadliest mass shooting in the history of Italy.
The Ochota Massacre (in Polish: Rzeź Ochoty – "Ochota slaughter") was a wave of German-orchestrated mass murder, looting, arson, torture and rape, which swept through the Warsaw district of Ochota from 4–25 August 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising. The principal perpetrators of these war crimes were the Nazi collaborationist S.S. Sturmbrigade R.O.N.A., the so-called "Russian National Liberation Army" (Russian: Русская Освободительная Народная Армия, RONA), commanded by Bronislav Kaminski.
The worst atrocities were committed in the local hospitals, in the Curie Institute, the Kolonia Staszica housing estate, and the Zieleniak concentration camp. In all, about 10,000 residents of Ochota were killed and had their property stolen, after which the district was systematically burnt down by German forces, as were the bodies of many of the victims.
...The Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre was a German war crime committed in the hill village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany, Italy, in the course of an operation against the Italian resistance movement during the Italian Campaign of World War II. On 12 August 1944 the Waffen-SS, with the help of the Brigate Nere, murdered about 560 local villagers and refugees, including more than a hundred children, and burned their bodies. These crimes have been defined as voluntary and organized acts of terrorism by the Military Tribunal of La Spezia and the highest Italian court of appeal.
...The Wola massacre (Polish: Rzeź Woli, lit. 'Wola slaughter') was the systematic killing of between 40,000 and 50,000 Poles in the Wola neighbourhood of the Polish capital city, Warsaw, by the German Wehrmacht and fellow Axis collaborators in the Azerbaijani Legion, as well as the mostly-Russian RONA forces, which took place from 5 to 12 August 1944. The massacre was ordered by Adolf Hitler, who directed to kill "anything that moves" to stop the Warsaw Uprising soon after it began.
Tens of thousands of Polish civilians along with captured Home Army resistance fighters were brutally murdered by the Germans in organised mass executions throughout Wola. Whole families, including babies, children and the elderly, were often shot on the spot, but some were killed after torture and sexual assault. Soldiers murdered patients in hospitals, killing them in their beds, as well as the doctors and nurses caring for them. Dead bodies were piled up to be burned by the Verbrennungskommando ("burning detachment") to destroy the evidence of the massacre; though first, dogs were let loose to find survivors to be killed. The operation was led by Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, though its main perpetrators were the Dirlewanger Brigade and the "RONA" Kaminski Brigade, whose forces committed the cruelest atrocities, drawing criticism from Bach-Zelewski himself.
...The Qissa Khwani massacre (Pashto: د قصه خوانۍ بازار خوڼۍ پېښه) in Peshawar, British India (modern day Pakistan) on 23 April 1930 was one of the defining moments of the independence movement in British India. It was the first major confrontation between British troops and demonstrators in the city, belonging to Abdul Ghaffar Khan's non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar (servants of God) movement against the British Indian government. Estimates at the time put the death toll from the shooting at between the official count at 20, and the figure of 400 dead put forth by Pakistani and Indian sources. The gunning down of unarmed people triggered protests across British India and catapulted the newly formed Khudai Khidmatgar movement into prominence.
The Distomo massacre (Greek: Σφαγή του Διστόμου; German: Massaker von Distomo or Distomo-Massaker) was a Nazi war crime perpetrated by members of the Waffen-SS in the village of Distomo, Greece, in 1944, during the German occupation of Greece during World War II.
On 10 June 1944, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne in Nazi-occupied France was destroyed when 642 civilians, including non-combatant women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company.
A new village was built nearby after the war. President Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of the old village be maintained as a permanent memorial and museum.
The Ascq massacre was a massacre of 86 men on 1 April 1944 in Ascq, France, by the Waffen-SS during the Second World War.
The 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend set out by rail for Normandy at the end of March, 1944. On 1 April, their train was approaching the gare d'Ascq, a junction where three railroads intersected, when an explosion blew the line apart, causing two cars to derail. The commander of the convoy, SS Obersturmführer Walter Hauck, ordered troops to search and arrest all male members of the houses on both sides of the track. Altogether 70 men were shot beside the railway line, with another 16 killed in the village itself. Six more men were arrested and charged with the bomb attack after an investigation by the Gestapo; they were eventually ordered to be executed by firing squad.
The Octoberfeldkommandant of Lille justified the massacre, stating:
...The Ardeatine massacre, or Fosse Ardeatine massacre (Italian: Eccidio delle Fosse Ardeatine), was a mass killing of 335 civilians and political prisoners carried out in Rome on 24 March 1944 by German occupation troops during the Second World War as a reprisal for the Via Rasella attack in central Rome against the SS Police Regiment Bozen the previous day.
Subsequently, the Ardeatine Caves site (Fosse Ardeatine) was declared a Memorial Cemetery and National Monument open daily to visitors. Every year, on the anniversary of the slaughter and in the presence of the senior officials of the Italian Republic, a solemn state commemoration is held at the monument in honour of the fallen. Each year, 335 names are called out, a simple roll call of the dead, to reinforce that 335 discrete individuals symbolise a collective entity.
The Huta Pieniacka massacre was a massacre of the Polish inhabitants of the village Huta Pieniacka, located in modern-day Ukraine, which took place on February 28, 1944. Estimates of the number of victims range from 500, to 1,200.
Polish and Ukrainian historians disagree over the responsibility for the Huta Pienacka massacre. According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, the action was committed by the 14th subunit of the 14th SS Volunteer Division "Galizien" of the Waffen-SS. Polish witnesses testified that the orders were given by German officers. According to witness accounts and scholarly publications, SS Galizien were accompanied by a paramilitary unit of Ukrainian nationalists under Włodzimierz Czerniawski's command, including members of the UPA and inhabitants of local villages who intended to seize property found in the households of the murdered. According to Ukrainian historians, the massacre was committed by SS Police regiments.
...The foibe massacres, or simply the foibe, refers to mass killings both during and after World War II, mainly committed by Yugoslav Partisans against the local ethnic Italian population (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians), mainly in Julian March, Istria, Kvarner, and Dalmatia. The term refers to the victims who were often thrown alive into foibas (deep natural sinkholes; by extension, it also was applied to the use of mine shafts, etc., to hide the bodies). In a wider or symbolic sense, some authors used the term to apply to all disappearances or killings of Italian people in the territories occupied by Yugoslav forces. They excluded possible 'foibe' killings by other parties or forces. Others included deaths resulting from the forced deportation of Italians, or those who died while trying to flee from these contested lands.
The estimated number of people killed in Trieste is disputed, varying from hundreds to thousands. The Italian historian, Raoul Pupo estimates 3,000 to 4,000 total victims, across all areas of former Yugoslavia and Italy from 1943 to 1945, with the primary target being military and repressive forces of the Fascist regime, and civilians associated with the regime, including Slavic collaborators. He places the events in the broader context of "the collapse of a structure of power and oppression: that of the fascist state in 1943, that of the Nazi-fascist state of the Adriatic coast in 1945." The events were also part of larger reprisals in which tens-of-thousands of Slavic collaborators of Axis forces were killed in the aftermath of WWII, following a brutal war in which some 800,000 Yugoslavs, the vast majority civilians, were killed by Axis occupation forces and collaborators.
...The Kalavryta massacre (Greek: Σφαγή των Καλαβρύτων), or the Holocaust of Kalavryta (Ολοκαύτωμα των Καλαβρύτων), refers to the near-extermination of the male population and the total destruction of the town of Kalavryta, Axis-occupied Greece, by the 117th Jäger Division (Wehrmacht) during World War II, on 13 December 1943.
1941
1942
The Frog Lake Massacre was part of the Cree uprising during the North-West Rebellion in western Canada. Led by Wandering Spirit, young Cree men attacked officials, clergy and settlers in the small settlement of Frog Lake in the District of Saskatchewan in the North-West Territories on 2 April 1885. Nine settlers were killed in the incident.
The Massacre Canyon battle took place in Nebraska on August 5, 1873 near the Republican River. It was one of the last hostilities between the Pawnee and the Sioux (or Lakota) and the last battle/massacre between Great Plains Indians in North America. The massacre occurred when a large Oglala/Brulé Sioux war party of over 1,500 warriors led by Two Strike, Little Wound, and Spotted Tail attacked a band of Pawnee during their summer buffalo hunt. In the ensuing rout more than 150 Pawnees were killed, men with mostly women and children, the victims suffering mutilation and some set on fire.
The Quaker agent John W. Williamson stated that 156 Pawnee were killed. This massacre ranked among "the bloodiest attacks by the Sioux" in Pawnee history. Cruel and violent warfare like this had been practiced against the Pawnee by the Lakota Sioux for centuries since the mid-1700s and through the 1840s. Attacks increased further in the 1850s until 1875. Historically the Pawnee were forced to give up what remained of their Nebraska homeland to the US Government after the Pawnee realized US Government were never going to honor any of the previous treaties. The Pawnee villages and Quaker agency near Genoa were attacked by the Lakota months and years prior without US Government protection as promised.
...The Cypress Hills Massacre occurred on June 1, 1873, near Battle Creek in the Cypress Hills region of Canada's North-West Territories (now in Saskatchewan). It involved a group of American bison hunters, American wolf hunters or "wolfers", American and Canadian whisky traders, Métis cargo haulers or "freighters", and a camp of Assiniboine people. Thirteen or more Assiniboine warriors and one wolfer died in the conflict. The Cypress Hills Massacre prompted the Canadian government to accelerate the recruitment and deployment of the newly formed North-West Mounted Police.
Sook Ching was a mass killing that occurred from 18 February to 4 March 1942 in Singapore after it fell to the Japanese. It was a systematic purge and massacre of perceived "hostile elements" in Singapore, with the Singaporean Chinese particularly targeted by the Japanese military during the occupation. Singapore was a crucial strategic point in World War II. From 8 February to 15 February, the Japanese had fought for control of the city. The combined British and Commonwealth forces surrendered in a stunning defeat to the outnumbered Japanese on 15 February which led to its fall. The loss of Singapore was and still is Britain's largest surrender in history.
Three days later after the fall on 18 February, the occupying Japanese military began mass killings of a wide range of "undesirables", who were mostly ethnic Chinese, influenced by the events of the Second Sino-Japanese War that was raging simultaneously as far back as 1937. The operation was overseen by the Imperial Japanese Army's Kempeitai, its secret police. Along with Singapore, Sook Ching was subsequently also extended to include the Chinese population in Malaya, which was also under occupation by the Japanese. Concurrently, non-Chinese individuals were also not completely spared in other parts of Asia under Japanese occupation; the Japanese had also killed at least 150,000 Tamil Indians as well as an additional 90,000 civilians in Burma and Thailand, many of which were also forced to work on the Siam–Burma Railway, infamously known as the Death Railway.
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