Americans, Germans, and War Crimes: Converging Narratives from "the Good War"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
All nations participating in World War II were guilty of war crimes, although that recognition is subject to important qualification. German genocide as the supreme wartime offense, Japanese mass murders of Chinese, the slaughter of Polish officers by the Soviet Union—the list is hardly complete, and some would argue for the inclusion of indiscriminate bombing of cities—are distinct from the smaller-scale and more spontaneous atrocities that were commonplace on all sides. The latter were often the products of combat stresses that were universal and independent of either official programs of extermination or of ideologies and perspectives that dehumanized the enemy and encouraged the annihilation of enemy civilians as well as combatants, programs and perspectives especially characteristic of the German war against the Soviet Union. As the historian John W. Dower has shown, the antagonists' mutual perceptions of inhuman “otherness” lent the Pacific war its characteristic savagery. Max Hastings, in discussing the murder of prisoners of war (pows) in Normandy by combatants who generally recognized each other's common humanity, notes that “in the heat of battle, in the wake of seeing comrades die, many men found it intolerable to send prisoners to the rear knowing that they would thus survive the war, while they themselves seemed to have little prospect of doing so. … it is difficult with hindsight to draw a meaningful moral distinction between the behavior of one side and the other on the battlefield.” The Canadian general Chris Vokes, considering a plea for clemency from Kurt Meyer, commander of the Twelfth SS Panzer Division, who had been condemned to death in a postwar trial for the murders of Canadian pows, conceded “there isn't a general or colonel on the Allied side that I know of who hasn't said, ‘Well, this time we don't want any prisoners.’”1
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".