A Wikipedea of world-wide crime

1942

• Tarakan
• Manado
• Balikpapan
• Kendari
• Samarinda
• Banjarmasin
• Ambon
• Makassar Strait
• Sumatra
• Palembang
• Badung Strait
• Timor
• USS Langley
• 1st Java Sea
• Sunda Strait
• Java
• 2nd Java Sea

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During World War II, Japanese forces invaded Burma (now Myanmar), that was then under British colonial rule. The British forces retreated and in the power vacuum left behind, considerable inter communal violence erupted between pro-Japanese Buddhist Rakhine and pro-British Muslim villagers. As part of the 'stay-behind' strategy to impede the Japanese advance, the Commander-in-Chief of forces in Delhi, Wavell, established "V-Force" which armed Rohingya locals in northern Arakan to create a buffer zone from Japanese invasion when they retreated.

The period also witnessed violence between groups loyal to the British and Burmese nationalists.

The Rumbula massacre is a collective term for incidents on November 30 and December 8, 1941, in which about 25,000 Jews were murdered in or on the way to Rumbula forest near Riga, Latvia, during the Holocaust. Except for the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine, this was the biggest two-day Holocaust atrocity until the operation of the death camps. About 24,000 of the victims were Latvian Jews from the Riga Ghetto and approximately 1,000 were German Jews transported to the forest by train. The Rumbula massacre was carried out by the Nazi Einsatzgruppe A with the help of local collaborators of the Arajs Kommando, with support from other such Latvian auxiliaries. In charge of the operation was Höherer SS und Polizeiführer Friedrich Jeckeln, who had previously overseen similar massacres in Ukraine. Rudolf Lange, who later participated in the Wannsee Conference, also took part in organizing the massacre. Some of the accusations against Latvian Herberts Cukurs are related to the clearing of the Riga Ghetto by the Arajs Kommando. The Rumbula killings, together with many others, formed the basis of the post-World War II Einsatzgruppen trial where a number of Einsatzgruppen commanders were found guilty of crimes against humanity.

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The Ninth Fort massacres of November 1941 were two separate mass shootings of 4,934 German Jews in the Ninth Fort near Kaunas, Lithuania. These were the first systematic mass killings of German Jews during the Holocaust. The question of where these killings fit into the development of the Final Solution is a matter of dispute among historians.

Babi Yar (Ukrainian: Бабин Яр, Babyn Yar or Babin Yar; Russian: Бабий Яр, Babiy Yar) is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, killing approximately 33,771 Jews. The decision to kill all the Jews in Kyiv was made by the military governor Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. Sonderkommando 4a as the sub-unit of Einsatzgruppe C, along with the aid of the SD and Order Police battalions with the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police backed by the Wehrmacht, carried out the orders. Sonderkommando 4a and the 45th Battalion of the German Order Police conducted the shootings. Servicemen of the 303rd Battalion of the German Order Police at this time guarded the outer perimeter of the execution site.

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The Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre was a World War II mass shooting of Jews carried out in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, by the German Police Battalion 320 along with Friedrich Jeckeln's Einsatzgruppen, the Hungarian soldiers, and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The killings were conducted on August 27 and August 28, 1941, in the Soviet city of Kamianets-Podilskyi (now Ukraine), occupied by German troops in the previous month on July 11, 1941. According to the Nazi German reports a total of 23,600 Jews were murdered, including 16,000 who had earlier been expelled from Hungary.

The NKVD prisoner massacres were a series of mass executions of political prisoners carried out by the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, across Eastern Europe, primarily Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. After the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the NKVD troops were supposed to evacuate political prisoners into the interior of the Soviet Union, but the hasty retreat of the Red Army, the lack of transportation and other supplies and the general disregard for legal procedures often meant that the prisoners were executed.

Estimates of the death toll vary between locations; nearly 9,000 in the Ukrainian SSR, 20,000–30,000 in eastern Poland (now part of Western Ukraine), with the total number reaching approximately 100,000 victims of extrajudicial executions in the span of a few weeks.

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The Massacre of Kondomari (Greek: Σφαγή στο Κοντομαρί) was the execution of male civilians from the village of Kondomari in Crete by an ad hoc firing squad consisting of German paratroopers on 2 June 1941 during World War II. The shooting was the first of a series of reprisals in Crete. It was orchestrated by Generaloberst Kurt Student, in retaliation for the participation of Cretans in the Battle of Crete which had ended with the surrender of the island two days earlier. The massacre was photographed by Franz-Peter Weixler, a German army war propaganda correspondent, whose negatives were discovered 39 years later in the Federal German archives by a Greek journalist.

The Glina massacres were killings of Serb peasants in the town of Glina in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) that occurred between May and August 1941, during World War II. The first wave of massacres in the town began on 11 or 12 May 1941, when a band of Ustaše led by Mirko Puk murdered a group of Serb men and boys in a Serbian Orthodox church before setting it on fire. The following day, approximately 100 Serb males were murdered by the Ustaše in the nearby village of Prekopi. Estimates of the overall number of Serbs killed from 11–13 May range from 260 to 417. Further killings in Glina occurred between 30 July and 3 August of that same year, when 700–2,000 Serbs were massacred by a group of Ustaše led by Vjekoslav Luburić.

In many of these massacres, the prospect of conversion was used as a means to gather Serbs together so that they could be killed. Ljubo Jednak, the only survivor of these killings, went on to testify at the trials of the several prominent figures in the NDH after the war. Puk was captured by British forces in 1945 while attempting to flee to Austria and was extradited to Yugoslavia the following year, where he committed suicide. Luburić escaped Yugoslavia after the war and moved to Francoist Spain, where he was killed by a person generally assumed to be an agent of the Yugoslav State Security Service.

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The Gudovac massacre was the mass killing of around 190 Bjelovar Serbs by the Croatian nationalist Ustaše movement on 28 April 1941, during World War II. The massacre occurred shortly after the German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the Ustaše-led Axis puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). It was the first act of mass murder committed by the Ustaše upon coming to power, and presaged a wider Ustaše-perpetrated campaign of genocide against Serbs in the NDH that lasted until the end of the war.

The Ustaše used the mysterious deaths of two of their local followers as a pretext for the killings. The victims were drawn from Gudovac and its surroundings on 28 April. Most were arrested under the guise that they were rebels loyal to the ousted Yugoslav government. They were taken to a nearby field and collectively shot by a firing squad of up to 70 Ustaše guards. Five of the prisoners managed to survive the initial volley and crawled away to safety. The Ustaše forced Gudovac's surviving inhabitants to dig a mass grave for the victims and pour quicklime on the bodies to speed up decomposition. The following day, relatives of one of the victims informed the Germans of what had transpired. The Germans ordered a partial exhumation of the mass grave, and had 40 suspected perpetrators arrested. Mladen Lorković, a senior Ustaše official, used his influence to have the detained men released and promised German ambassador Siegfried Kasche that the Croatian authorities would carry out a thorough investigation. No investigation took place.

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The Fântâna Albă massacre took place on April 1, 1941, in Northern Bukovina when between 44 and 3,000 civilians were killed when their attempt to forcefully cross the border from the Soviet Union to Romania, near the village of Fântâna Albă, now in Chernivtsi Oblast, Ukraine, was met with open fire by the Soviet Border Troops. Although according to Soviet official reports no more than 44 civilians were killed, local witnesses assert a much higher toll, claiming that survivors were tortured, killed, or buried in mass graves. Other survivors were allegedly taken away to be tortured and killed at the hands of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Some sources refer to this massacre as "The Romanian Katyn."

In 2011, the Chamber of Deputies of Romania adopted a law establishing April 1 as the National Day honoring the memory of Romanian victims of massacres at Fântâna Albă and other areas, of deportations, of hunger, and other forms of repression organized by the Soviet regime in Hertsa, northern Bukovina, and Bessarabia.

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The events of the Ip massacre escalated in the early hours of 14 September 1940, in Ipp, (today Ip, Sălaj County), Northern Transylvania. After two Hungarian soldiers died there in an accidental explosion, rumors spread that they had been killed by Romanians. After another incident the Royal Hungarian Army, influenced by the rumor, indiscriminately massacred around 150 ethnic Romanians in the nearby locations and surrounding areas.

The Le Paradis massacre was a war crime committed by members of the 14th Company, SS Division Totenkopf, under the command of Hauptsturmführer Fritz Knöchlein. It took place on 27 May 1940, during the Battle of France, at a time when troops of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) were attempting to retreat through the Pas-de-Calais region during the Battle of Dunkirk.

Soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Norfolk Regiment, had become isolated from their unit. They occupied and defended a farmhouse against an attack by Waffen-SS forces in the village of Le Paradis. After running out of ammunition, the defenders surrendered to the German troops. The Germans led them across the road to a wall where they were murdered by machine gun fire. Ninety-seven British troops were killed. Two survived, with injuries, and hid until they were captured by German forces several days later.

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The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered.

The massacre was initiated in NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to Joseph Stalin to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps, which was approved by the Soviet Politburo led by Stalin. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be "intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials, and priests". The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state; the murdered included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews including the chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Baruch Steinberg.

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The Częstochowa massacre, also known as the Bloody Monday, was committed by the German Wehrmacht forces beginning on the 4th day of World War II in the Polish city of Częstochowa, between 4 and 6 September 1939. The shootings, beatings and plunder continued for three days in more than a dozen separate locations around the city. Approximately 1,140 Polish civilians (150 of whom were ethnically Jewish), were murdered.

The Seguro Obrero massacre (Spanish: Matanza del Seguro Obrero, lit. 'Workers Insurance's Massacre') occurred on September 5, 1938, and was the Chilean government's response to an attempted coup d'état by the National Socialist Movement of Chile (MNSCh), whose members were known at the time as Nacistas ("Nazis"), with some differences that justified their option for a different name. After a failed coup involving a stand-off and a shootout, about 60 Nacistas who had surrendered after being given assurances, were summarily shot. About twenty others were killed during the fighting.

The Tsuyama massacre (津山事件, Tsuyama jiken) was a revenge spree killing that occurred on 21 May 1938 in the rural village of Kamo close to Tsuyama in Okayama, Empire of Japan.

Mutsuo Toi (都井 睦雄, Toi Mutsuo), a 21-year-old man, killed 30 people, including his grandmother, with a Browning shotgun, katana, and axe, and seriously injured three others before killing himself with the shotgun. It is the deadliest shooting by a lone gunman in Japanese history.

The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking) was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanjing in the Second Sino-Japanese War, by the Imperial Japanese Army. Beginning on December 13, 1937, the massacre lasted for six weeks. The perpetrators also committed other atrocities such as mass rape, looting and arson. This is the most recent mass-scale war crime in Nanjing since the 1864 Battle of Nanjing.

Because of the myriad of factors, death toll estimates vary from 40,000 to over 300,000, with rape cases ranging from 20,000 to over 80,000 cases. However, the most sophisticated and credible scholars in Japan, which include a large number of authoritative academics, support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and its findings, which estimate at least 200,000 casualties and at least 20,000 cases of rape. This number is often compared to the peacetime disasters in China by death toll, especially the more deadly Great Chinese famine (1959–61) and the purges in the Cultural Revolution.

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The Dersim rebellion (Turkish: Dersim İsyanı, Kurdish: Serhildana Dêrsimê) was an Alevi Kurdish uprising against the central government in the Dersim region of eastern Turkey, which includes parts of Tunceli Province, Elazığ Province, and Bingöl Province. The rebellion was led by Seyid Riza, a chieftain of the Abasan tribe. As a result of the Turkish Armed Forces campaign in 1937 and 1938 against the rebellion and the Dersim massacre, sometimes called the Dersim genocide, of civilians, thousands of Alevi Zazas died and many others were internally displaced.

On 23 November 2011, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gave an apology for the Dersim massacre, describing it as "one of the most tragic events of our near history" adding that, whilst some sought to justify it as a legitimate response to events on the ground, it was in reality "an operation which was planned step by step". However, this is viewed with suspicion by some, "who see it as an opportunistic move against the main opposition party, the secular CHP."

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The Ponce massacre was an event that took place on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937, in Ponce, Puerto Rico, when a peaceful civilian march turned into a police shooting in which 19 civilians and two policemen were killed, and more than 200 civilians wounded. None of the civilians were armed and most of the dead were reportedly shot in their backs. The march had been organized by the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party to commemorate the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico by the governing Spanish National Assembly in 1873, and to protest the U.S. government's imprisonment of the Party's leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, on sedition charges.

An investigation led by the United States Commission on Civil Rights put the blame for the massacre squarely on the U.S.-appointed governor of Puerto Rico, Blanton Winship. Further criticism by members of the U.S. Congress led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to remove Whinship as governor in 1939.

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The Paracuellos massacres (Spanish: Matanzas de Paracuellos) were a series of mass killings of civilians and soldiers by the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War that took place before and during the Siege of Madrid during the early stages of the war. The death toll remains a subject of debate and controversy.

The Gondrand massacre was a 1936 Ethiopian attack on Italian workers of the Gondrand company. It was publicized by Fascist Italy in an attempt to justify its ongoing conquest of Ethiopia.

The Ranquil massacre (Spanish: matanza de Ránquil) was a massacre of forestry workers by the Chilean Army in the upper Bio-Bio River in 1934. The upper Bio-Bio region had recently been opened for Chilean and foreign settlers due to the occupation of the Araucania, and huge extensions of former Mapuche land were available. The workers rebelled against the lumber mill administrators, later the Chilean Army was called to restore order. 477 workers, many of them Mapuches, were killed as result. Around 500 prisoners were taken.

The Simele massacre, also known as the "Assyrian affair", was committed by the Kingdom of Iraq led by Bakr Sidqi during a campaign systematically targeting the Assyrians around Simele in August 1933. An estimated 600 to 3,000 Assyrians were killed and more than 60 villages were looted.

La Matanza (Spanish for: "The Massacre") was an ethnocide which was committed by the Salvadoran military government following the suppression of a peasant revolt. The revolt, which began on 22 January 1932 and was organized by Pipil rebels and members of the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCES), killed around 100 people in western El Salvador, however, the ensuing ethnocide committed by the government killed between 10,000 and 40,000 people, most of whom were Pipil peasants.

The Zilan massacre (Kurdish: Komkujiya Zîlanê, Turkish: Zilan Katliamı or Zilan Deresi Katliamı, etc.) was the massacre of thousands of Kurdish civilians by the Turkish Land Forces on the orders of İsmet İnönü in the Zilan Valley of Van Province on 12/13 July 1930, during the Ararat rebellion in Ağrı Province.

The massacre took place to the north of the town of Erciş on Lake Van. It was carried out by the IX Corps of the Third Army under the command of Ferik (Lieutenant General) Salih Omurtak. The number of people killed in the massacre ranges from 4,500 women and elderly to 15,000.

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The Les Cayes massacre, also known as the Marchaterre massacre, was a massacre on 6 December 1929 in Les Cayes perpetrated by United States Marine Corps (USMC) troops against Haitians protesting the United States occupation of Haiti. The massacre was instrumental in placing pressure on the United States to withdraw its occupying forces from Haiti.

At the time of the massacre, the United States had invaded Haiti over fourteen years earlier in 1915, with the USMC occupying the Caribbean nation through a military regime on behalf of American business interests. By October 1929, Haitians grew increasingly angered with American occupation of their nation and protests broke out, resulting with a general strike. Such demonstrations culminated with the Les Cayes massacre, which resulted with international condemnation and later the end of American occupation.

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The 1929 Palestine riots, Buraq Uprising (Arabic: ثورة البراق, Thawrat al-Buraq) or the Events of 1929 (Hebrew: מאורעות תרפ"ט, Meora'ot Tarpat, lit. Events of 5689 Anno Mundi), was a series of demonstrations and riots in late August 1929 in which a longstanding dispute between Muslims and Jews over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem escalated into violence.

The riots took the form, for the most part, of attacks by Arabs on Jews accompanied by destruction of Jewish property. During the week of riots, from 23 to 29 August, 133 Jews were killed by Arabs, and 339 Jews were injured, most of whom were unarmed. There were 116 Arabs killed and at least 232 wounded, mostly by the Mandate police suppressing the riots. Around 20 Arabs were killed by Jewish attackers and indiscriminate British gunfire. After the riots, 174 Arabs and 109 Jews were charged with murder or attempted murder; around 40% of Arabs and 3% of Jews were subsequently convicted. During the riots, 17 Jewish communities were evacuated.

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The Hebron massacre refers to the killing of sixty-seven or sixty-nine Jews on 24 August 1929 in Hebron, then part of Mandatory Palestine, by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The event also left scores seriously wounded or maimed. Jewish homes were pillaged and synagogues were ransacked. Some of the 435 Jews who survived were hidden by local Arab families, although the extent of this phenomenon is debated. Soon after, all Hebron's Jews were evacuated by the British authorities. Many returned in 1931, but almost all were evacuated at the outbreak of the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. The massacre formed part of the 1929 Palestine riots, in which a total of 133 Jews and 110 Arabs were killed, the majority of the latter by British police and military, and brought the centuries-old Jewish presence in Hebron to an end.

The massacre, together with that of Jews in Safed, sent shock waves through Jewish communities in Palestine and around the world. It led to the re-organization and development of the Jewish paramilitary organization, the Haganah, which later became the nucleus of the Israel Defense Forces.

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The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre was the murder of seven members and associates of Chicago's North Side Gang that occurred on Saint Valentine's Day 1929. The men were gathered at a Lincoln Park, Chicago garage on the morning of February 14, 1929. They were lined up against a wall and shot by four unknown assailants, two dressed as police officers. The incident resulted from the struggle to control organized crime in the city during Prohibition between the Irish North Siders, headed by George "Bugs" Moran, and their Italian Chicago Outfit rivals led by Al Capone. The perpetrators have never been conclusively identified, but former members of the Egan's Rats gang working for Capone are suspected of a role, as are members of the Chicago Police Department who allegedly wanted revenge for the killing of a police officer's son.

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