October 20, 2007
Reprisals and the Lessons of History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:45 PM EST Today is the anniversary of the Kragujevac massacre in German-occupied Serbia. Over the three days of October 19 to 21, 1941, German troops murdered between 2,300 and 7,000 Serbian men and schoolchildren in reprisal for a partisan attack. This is also the anniverary of the day, three years later, when the Yugoslav partisans, in combination with the Red Army, liberated Belgrade. A few moments ago I posted a blog entry that included mention of the tendency of some World War II GIs to commit reprisal killings. One point of GI reprisal killings was to discourage breaches of the laws of war by making clear that there was a cost to killing prisoners. This may have worked, since there were relatively few German killings of U.S. or British POWs, but it probably didn’t, since significant Russian reprisals did not seem to discourage German massacres of Soviet POWs; relative German restraint against the U.S. may have had some other cause than fear of retaliation. There is some evidence that moderate reprisals sometimes work—for example they do seem to have discouraged official sanction of the Confederate practice of enslaving black American soldiers captured while fighting for the Union. On a sufficiently savage scale, things are no more clear. Reprisal killings may (or may not) work. In the case of Yugoslavia, horrific reprisal killings like the Kragujevac massacre discouraged some partisan groups (for example, the Chetniks led by General Draja Mihailovich) and massively energized others (the ones led by Tito). It would be simpler if savage measures always failed or always succeeded. The evidence points toward less predictable outcomes.
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