The Midnight Massacre is remembered for being "the worst massacre at a POW camp in U.S. history". A museum was opened at Camp Salina in 2016.
Stalag IX-B (also known as Bad Orb-Wegscheide) was a German World War II prisoner-of-war camp located south-east of the town of Bad Orb in Hesse, Germany on the hill known as Wegscheideküppel.
Briarpatch. The Briarpatch camp, located 33 miles (53 km) northwest of Hanoi, intermittently held U.S. prisoners between 1965 and 1971. Conditions at the Briarpatch were notoriously grim, even by the standards of North Vietnamese prisons. Multiple POWs contracted beriberi at the camp due to severe malnutrition.
During World War II, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (towards Soviet POWs and Western Allied commandos) were notorious for atrocities against prisoners of war.
Indeed, they endured years of not only malnutrition and starvation, disease and general neglect -- resisting all the while -- but also torture, slave labor and other war crimes. Many POWs were murdered outright by their captors. In fact, only a little more than half of them ever saw home again.
Of the 22,376 Australian prisoners of war captured by the Japanese, some 8,031 died while in captivity. After the end of the war, War Crimes Trials were held to investigate reports of atrocities, massacres and other causes of death.
Many of the women and children were held in prison camps in terrible conditions and forced on death marches. Some women were killed on sight and others were raped, beaten, and forced to become sex slaves. Much of the book showcases the words of the people who lived through this period.
The Japanese used many types of physical punishment. Some prisoners were made to hold a heavy stone above their heads for many hours. Others might be forced into small cells with little food or water. Tom Uren described how a young Aboriginal soldier was made to kneel on a piece of bamboo for a number of days.
From 1951, the Chinese tried to improve the treatment of POWs after being alarmed by the excessive death rate. The Chinese recognized the propaganda value of POWs and established permanent POW camps in the far North, close to the Yalu River. The Chinese forces also held indoctrination sessions.
The Germans were hardly the genial hosts, whether you were a POW during World War I or World War II. There was severe punishment for escape attempts, there were meager rations and drafty bunkhouses, and there were irregular deliveries of packages from the Red Cross.
The Mỹ Lai massacre (/ˌmiːˈlaɪ/; Vietnamese: Thảm sát Mỹ Lai [tʰâːm ʂǎːt mǐˀ lāːj] ( listen)) was a war crime committed by the United States on 16 March 1968, involving the mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by the United States Army in Sơn Tịnh district, South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lists 684 POWs returned home alive from the Vietnam War — the majority after the U.S. pulled out of the war in 1973. (The war officially ended April 30, 1975). There are 1,582 Americans still unaccounted for, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
The largest and most famous of 150 military prisons of the Civil War, Camp Sumter, commonly known as Andersonville, was the deadliest landscape of the Civil War. Of the 45,000 Union soldiers imprisoned here, nearly 13,000 died.
The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.
Most prisoners of war (POWs) existed on a very poor diet of rice and vegetables, which led to severe malnutrition. Red Cross parcels were deliberately withheld and prisoners tried to supplement their rations with whatever they could barter or grow themselves.
The most famous POW breakout is the 'Great Escape' in March 1944 from Stalag Luft III, a camp which held Allied aircrew. Plans for a mass escape from the camp began in April 1943, headed by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell.
Though held in many different places, American POWs in North Korea suffered through similarly harsh treatment. They received little to no food or water and were often forced to trek long distances through severe weather. Those who collapsed or could not continue on these marches were killed by guards.
North Vietnamese torture was exceptionally cruel--prison guards bound POWs' arms and legs with tight ropes and then dislocated them, and left men in iron foot stocks for days or weeks. Extreme beatings were common, many times resulting in POW deaths.
In WWII, the U.S. Treated Nazi POWs Better Than Black Troops | Time.
These stereotypes served to conflate Nikkei-Australians with the soldiers in the Japanese military that Australia witnessed during wartime, who were regarded as “subhuman beast[s]” and “vermin” (Saunders 1994, 325–27).
Members of RAAF aircrews, who had bailed out during operations over Germany, occupied Europe or North Africa, also became POWs. Of the 8,000 Australians taken prisoner by the Germans and Italians, 265 died during their captivity.
Japanese plans
In early March 1942, the Japanese had debated what to do now that Japan had so easily gained her objectives. The Navy wanted to invade Australia and deny the country as a base to either America or Britain. The Army felt it did not have the strength to invade and fully occupy so vast a continent.
Miraculously, the nurses all survived the long imprisonment from May 1942 to February 1945, but after liberation, received little recognition as military prisoners of war. But most of the nurses said that they didn't do anything extraordinary, they were just doing their jobs.
Crucifixion was a form of punishment, torture and/or execution that the Japanese military sometimes used against prisoners during the war. Edwards and the others were initially bound at the wrists with fencing wire, suspended from a tree and beaten with a baseball bat.
Chinese prisoners are buried alive by their Japanese captors outside the city of Nanjing.