War criminal in the context of "Adolf Eichmann"

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⭐ Core Definition: War criminal

A war crime is a serious violation of the laws and customs applicable in armed conflict, known as international humanitarian law (IHL) and the laws of war, which gives rise to criminal responsibility under international law. Examples of actions committed by combatants in the conduct of war that can give rise to individual criminal responsibility include, but are not limited to: intentionally killing civilians, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military, ordering any attempt to commit mass killings (including genocide or ethnic cleansing), and flouting the requirements of distinction, proportionality and military necessity.

The formal concept of war crimes emerged from countries fighting and the codification of the customary international law that applied to warfare between sovereign states, such as the 1863 Lieber Code of the Union Army in the American Civil War and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 for international war. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the war crime trials of the leaders of the Axis powers established the Nuremberg principles, such as that international criminal law defines what is a war crime. In 1899, the Geneva Conventions legally defined new war crimes and established that states could exercise universal jurisdiction over war criminals. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, international courts extrapolated and defined additional categories of war crimes applicable to a civil war.

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👉 War criminal in the context of Adolf Eichmann

Otto Adolf Eichmann (/ˈkmən/ EYEKH-mən; German pronunciation: [ˈʔɔto ˈʔaːdɔlf ˈʔaɪçman] ; 19 March 1906 – 1 June 1962) was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party, an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a convicted war criminal, and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960, he was tracked down and apprehended by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, and put on trial before the Supreme Court of Israel. The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.

After doing poorly in school, Eichmann briefly worked for his father's mining company in Austria, where the family had moved in 1914. He worked as a travelling oil salesman beginning in 1927, and joined both the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932. He returned to Germany in 1933, where he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, "Security Service"); there he was appointed head of the department responsible for Jewish affairs – especially emigration, which the Nazis encouraged through violence and economic pressure. After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Eichmann and his staff arranged for Jews to be concentrated in ghettos in major cities with the expectation that they would be transported either farther east or overseas. He also drew up plans for a Jewish reservation, first at Nisko in southeast Poland and later in Madagascar, but neither of these plans were carried out.

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War criminal in the context of Potsdam Agreement

The Potsdam Agreement (German: Potsdamer Abkommen) was the agreement among three of the Allies of World War II: the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union after the war ended in Europe that was signed on 1 August 1945 and published the following day. A product of the Potsdam Conference, it concerned the military occupation and reconstruction of Germany, its border, and the entire European Theatre of War territory. It also addressed Germany's demilitarisation, reparations, the prosecution of war criminals and the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from various parts of Europe. France was not invited to the conference but formally remained one of the powers occupying Germany.

Executed as a communiqué, the agreement was not a peace treaty according to international law, although it created accomplished facts. It was superseded by the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany signed on 12 September 1990.

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War criminal in the context of Karl Dönitz

Karl Dönitz (German: [ˈdøːnɪts] ; 16 September 1891 – 24 December 1980) was a German grand admiral and convicted war criminal who, following Adolf Hitler's suicide during the Second World War in April 1945, succeeded him as head of state of Nazi Germany. He held the position until the dissolution of the Flensburg Government following Germany's unconditional surrender to the Allies weeks later. As Supreme Commander of the Navy beginning in 1943, he played a major role in the naval history of the war.

He began his career in the Imperial German Navy before the First World War. In 1918 he was commanding UB-68, and was captured as a prisoner of war by British forces. As commander of UB-68, he attacked a convoy in the Mediterranean while on patrol near Malta. Sinking one ship before the rest of the convoy outran his U-boat, Dönitz began to formulate the concept of U-boats operating in attack groups Rudeltaktik (German for "pack tactic", commonly called a "wolfpack") for greater efficiency, rather than operating independently.

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War criminal in the context of Dachau trials

The Dachau trials, also known as the Dachau Military Tribunal, handled the prosecution of almost every war criminal captured in the U.S. military zones in Allied-occupied Germany and in Allied-occupied Austria, and the prosecutions of military personnel and civilian persons who committed war crimes against the American military and American citizens. The war-crime trials were held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp by military tribunals authorized by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Third Army.

The Nazi war criminals were held and tried at the Dachau concentration camp since the camp had buildings adequate to housing the many personnel required for and involved in the legal proceedings of a war-crimes trial, and since the Dachau prison camp had many jail cells in which to hold the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS officers and soldiers accused of war crimes. The American Military Tribunal for the war-crime trials at Dachau featured the JAG attorney William Denson as the chief prosecutor, and the attorney Lt. Col. Douglas T. Bates Jr., an artillery officer, as the chief defense counsel.

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War criminal in the context of Nobusuke Kishi

Nobusuke Kishi (岸 信介, Kishi Nobusuke; 13 November 1896 – 7 August 1987) was a Japanese bureaucrat and politician who served as prime minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960. He is remembered for his exploitative economic management of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in China in the 1930s, imprisonment as a suspected war criminal following World War II, and provocation of the massive Anpo protests as prime minister, retrospectively receiving the nickname "Monster of the Shōwa era" (昭和の妖怪; Shōwa no yōkai). Kishi was the founder of the Satō–Kishi–Abe dynasty in Japanese politics, with his younger brother Eisaku Satō and his grandson Shinzo Abe both later serving as prime ministers of Japan.

Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Kishi graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1920. He rose through the ranks at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and during the 1930s led the industrial development of Manchukuo, where he exploited Chinese slave labor. Kishi served in the wartime cabinet of Hideki Tōjō as minister of commerce and industry from 1941 to 1943 and vice minister of munitions from 1943 to 1944. At the end of the war in 1945, Kishi was imprisoned as a suspected Class A war criminal, but U.S. occupation authorities did not charge, try, or convict him, and released him in 1948 during the Reverse Course. At the end of the occupation in 1952, Kishi was de-purged, enabling his election to the National Diet in 1953. With overt and covert U.S. support, he consolidated Japanese conservatives against perceived threats from the Japan Socialist Party, and in 1955 was instrumental in forming the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Kishi was thus key in establishing the "1955 System" under which the LDP remains Japan's dominant party.

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War criminal in the context of Karl Eberhard Schöngarth

Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (22 April 1903 – 16 May 1946) was a German lawyer and SS-Brigadeführer in Nazi Germany. He was a war criminal who perpetrated mass murder and genocide in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was originally planned.

After the war, Schöngarth and six others were tried for murdering an American pilot, Americo S. Galle, who was shot down over the Netherlands in November 1944. They were all found guilty. Schöngarth and four others were sentenced to death and executed in 1946.

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War criminal in the context of Horia Sima

Horia Sima (3 July 1906 – 25 May 1993) was a Romanian fascist politician, best known as the second and last leader of the fascist paramilitary movement known as the Iron Guard (also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael). Sima was also the Vice President of the Council of Ministers and de facto co-leader in Ion Antonescu's National Legionary State. Sima had previously served briefly as State Secretary of Education under Gheorghe Tătărescu in 1940, and as a short-lived Minister of Religion and Arts in the government of Ion Gigurtu.

In January 1941, Sima initiated and led the Legionnaires' Rebellion against Conducător Ion Antonescu and the Romanian Army, for which he was sentenced to death, as well as the Bucharest pogrom, the largest and most violent pogrom against Jews in the history of Muntenia. Following the rebellion, Sima escaped to Germany, and later to Spain, where he lived until his death. In 1946, the Romanian People's Tribunals again sentenced Sima to death in absentia as a war criminal.

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War criminal in the context of Apt Pupil (film)

Apt Pupil is a 1998 American thriller film directed by Bryan Singer and starring Ian McKellen and Brad Renfro. It is based on the 1982 novella Apt Pupil by Stephen King. In the 1980s in southern California, high school student Todd Bowden (Renfro) discovers fugitive Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander (McKellen) living in his neighborhood under the pseudonym Arthur Denker. Bowden, obsessed with Nazism and acts of the Holocaust, persuades Dussander to share his stories, and their relationship stirs malice in each of them.

The novella was first published in King's 1982 collection Different Seasons. Producer Richard Kobritz sought to adapt the novella into a film during the 1980s, but two actors he invited to play Dussander died. When filming began in 1987, a loss of financing led to the production being shut down. Forty minutes of usable footage existed, but production was never revived. In 1995, when rights to the novella returned to King, Bryan Singer petitioned King for an opportunity to adapt the novella. With King's support, Singer filmed Apt Pupil with McKellen and Renfro in Altadena, California, in 1997. Singer shortened the novella's storyline, reduced its violence, and changed the ending. Singer called Apt Pupil "a study in cruelty" with Nazism only serving as a vehicle for the capacity of evil.

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