9 most inhumane and cruel incident(s) that are cruel and aren't well known in WWII

Here are the incidents that were aren't widely known that are too grim to discuss in a classroom setting

1. Before gas chambers the nazis would line Jews up next to a large hole and shoot them at close range. In order to save bullets they would sometimes tie two Jews together and only shoot one of them. The dead weight would cause both bodies to fall into the hole. The Jew that was still alive would be buried alive while being tied to a dead man

2. The Japanese Unit 731 did some very heinous stuff during the war, e.g. experimenting on living people.

Absolutely this, it's easy to get lost in the atrocities of WW2 and forget that every life is important. However the things being done by Unit 731 were absolutely nightmarish. The truly sad thing is that a lot of the people responsible never faced justice and received pardons for handing over their research

3. chinese POWs and Political prisoners were tie on a pole and testing first flame throwers on people, and after that modified flamethrowers throwing acid or something and other gasses. Also testing and experimenting with grenades of such qualities.

4. Testing biological and chemical weapons on people, vivisection (like an autopsy, but the subject is still alive).

5. Let talks about The command of Oskar Dirlewanger. He commanded a Waffen SS brigade, but what's special about this is that he chose his men from prisons. Poachers aren't that bad of a choice, with tracking etc; but he also took in murderers, rapists, and all-round psychopaths.

He was tasked with supressing partisans. How? By raping and murdering entire towns, quote "with a speciality of 'pacifying' an area by slaughtering every man, woman and child." Most notably during the Warsaw Uprising his unit is credited with the death of 100.000 civilians.

Dirlewanger's leadership "was characterized by continued alcohol abuse, looting, sadistic atrocities, rape, and murder".

He started his "career" serving in a labour camp but would "entertain" himself by extorting ransoms in a nearby ghetto and other activities... Atrocities committed by Dirlewanger included injecting strychnine into young Jewish female prisoners, previously undressed and whipped, to watch them convulse to death in front of him and his friends for entertainment.

6. In the last months of the Second World War, LeMay took command of the main air effort against Japan, turning around its tactics. Instead of the established U.S. policy of daylight, precision bombing, he ripped out the armaments on 325 B-29s and loaded each plane with firebomb clusters. On March 10, 1945 he ordered the bombers out at 5 - 9,000 feet over Tokyo.

The devastation wrought that first night was catastrophic: the raid incinerated more than 16 square miles of the city, killing 100,000 people. According to the official Air Force history of the Second World War, "No other air attack of the war, either in Japan or Europe, was so destructive of life and property." For months LeMay's bombers went out night after night, relentlessly keeping up their fire-bombing campaign, so that by the end of the war, flames had totally or partially consumed 63 Japanese cities, killing half a million people and leaving eight million homeless.

Asked later about the morality of the campaign, LeMay replied: "Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier."

7.   the Bataan Death March, where the Japanese captured some 75,000 American and Filipino troops in the jungles of the Philippines. The ensuing march to a concentration camp 65 miles away, along with the brutality, starvation, disease and summary executions inflicted during and after the march, killed thousands.

Then there's the Rape of Nanking. When the Japanese captured the (then) Chinese capital, they basically let their soldiers have their way with the city for three days. In that time, tens of thousands were raped, tortured, and murdered, seemingly for the crime of being Chinese. This treatment was mirrored in dozens of cities with Chinese populations during the Japanese conquest of China. Singapore in particular had a population of 80,000 Chinese before Japanese occupation, 25,000 to 50,000 of which were killed, and that's just two cities.

8. Then there's the Soviet rape and pillage of of Poland and Eastern Germany during their push towards Berlin. The soldiers of the USSR were driven (intentionally, by their own propaganda) into an intense hatred for the Germans because of their betrayal and subsequent invasion of Russia. When it came time for the Red Army to invade Germany and Poland, Russian soldiers engaged in mass rape and murder as "revenge" for German actions in every city they captured. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but western sources estimate up to 2 million rapes and 635,000 civilian deaths.

That's all without counting the ~125,000 civilians killed in the Battle of Berlin

9. In 1943-44 there were mass killings of around 50-60 thousand Polish civilians, and in smaller numbers Russians, Czechs, Jews and other nations. The UPA, which were basicly Ukrainian nationalists, with the help of local Ukrainians, murdered and tortured old men, women and children in truly horrifying ways, like cutting living people half by saw, nailing living children to doors, or burning clusters of man alive, while Ukraininan women danced to their screams. You can read much more about this, but I warn you it truly is disgusting. It's a shame really, that one of the leader of UPA is revered as national hero in Ukraine.