Prometheus 6

Your question.

If Powell and Levin and McCain can name one modern conflict where our enemies gave POWs treatment in accordance with the GC, I’d be glad to post it right here on my blog. Don’t expect that kind of an update any time soon.

Your answer

Germans must have been tempted to send captured Jewish American soldiers to Auschwitz along with Polish, German, and Dutch Jews and kindred human garbage. But they did not. My father survived because, amazingly, even the Nazis respected the reciprocal agreements on humane treatment of prisoners.

Rebelling against torture and Bush
By Robert Kuttner | September 16, 2006

MY FATHER was a machine gunner with the Army's 28th Infantry Division, which was among the first units to march down the Champs-Elysées after the Allied liberation of Paris . In December 1944, having landed at Normandy and fought across France and Belgium, he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and sent hundreds of miles through northern Germany in an unheated boxcar in the dead of winter to a prison camp at Muhlberg in the east.

My father survived the war not because of the generosity of the Nazis to Jewish soldiers. The Germans must have been tempted to send captured Jewish American soldiers to Auschwitz along with Polish, German, and Dutch Jews and kindred human garbage. But they did not. My father survived because, amazingly, even the Nazis respected the reciprocal agreements on humane treatment of prisoners.

The doctrine was simple: You don't abuse my soldiers when you take them prisoner, and I won't abuse yours. Mostly, despite the multiple atrocities of World War II, the doctrine held.

In many respects, in a brutal era when the Nazis murdered over 6 million civilian Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, socialists, dwarfs, handicapped people, and the mentally ill, and the Allies killed hundreds of thousands of German non combatants in Allied fire-bombings of cities, enemy POWs often fared better than civilians. High-ranking captured German officers sat out the war in the elegant Greenbrier Hotel outside Washington, where they were not tortured.

I thought of my father as I followed Republican Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham bravely resisting the Bush administration's insane doctrine that the United States should become the first signatory government to take exceptions to the Geneva agreements on humane treatment of prisoners.

McCain was not as fortunate as my father. After his plane was shot down, he was tortured by the North Vietnamese, who did not respect the Geneva Conventions, and kept in a hellhole for six years. If anyone has the right to dispute the doctrine of reciprocal, humane prisoner treatment, it is McCain. But instead, McCain reasons, correctly, that if the United States of America, of all nations, grants itself the right to abuse prisoners, not only are our soldiers at greater risk, but our national soul.