German war crimes

German war crimes
Jewish women and children removed from a bunker by Schutzstaffel (SS) units during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising for deportations to Majdanek or Treblinka extermination camps (1943)
Location	Africa (1904–1908) and Europe
Date	1904–1918 (first phase) 1939–1945 (second phase)
Target	Until 1918 Herero and Nama people Belgian civilians Prisoners of war Until 1945 Jews Romani and Sinti Soviet prisoners of war Poles, Serbs and other Slavs Italian and Polish prisoners of war Political dissidents Disabled people others
Attack type	Genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, starvation, forced labour, genocidal rape, mass looting, kidnapping, human experimentation
Perpetrators	German Empire (1904–1918) Nazi Germany (1939–1945)
Motive	until 1918 German imperialism Germanisation German nationalism until 1945 Nazism Nazi racial policy expansionism Anti-semitism Pan-Germanism Greater Germany Germanisation Anti-Slavic sentiment Anti-Romani sentiment

The governments of the German Empire and Nazi Germany (under Adolf Hitler) ordered, organized, and condoned a substantial number of war crimes, first in the Herero and Namaqua genocide and then in the First and Second World Wars. The most notable of these is the Holocaust, in which millions of European Jewish, Polish, and Romani people were systematically abused, deported, and murdered. Millions of civilians and prisoners of war also died as a result of German abuses, mistreatment, and deliberate starvation policies in those two conflicts. Much of the evidence was deliberately destroyed by the perpetrators, such as in Sonderaktion 1005, in an attempt to conceal their crimes.