War crimes of the Wehrmacht

AB-Aktion
A picture taken secretly by the Polish Underground of Nazi Security Police rounding up Polish intelligentsia at Palmiry near Warsaw in 1940.
Location	Palmiry Forest and other locations in Occupied Poland.
Date	Spring – summer 1940
Target	Polish intellectuals and the upper classes.
Attack type	Massacres
Weapons	Automatic weapons
Deaths	7,000
Perpetrators	Nazi Germany

War crimes of the Wehrmacht were those carried out by the German armed forces during World War II. While the SS (in particular the SS-Totenkopfverbände, Einsatzgruppen and Waffen-SS) of Nazi Germany was the organization most responsible for the genocidal killing of the Holocaust, the regular armed forces represented by the Wehrmacht committed war crimes of their own, particularly on the Eastern Front in the war against the Soviet Union.

The Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War II initially considered whether the Wehrmacht high command structure should be tried. However, the OKW was judged not to be a criminal organization under the legal grounds that because of very poor co-ordination between the German Army, Navy and Air Force high commands, which operated as more or less separate entities during the war, the OKW did not constitute an "organization" as defined by Article 9 of the constitution of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) which conducted the Nuremberg trials.

Had it not been for these legalistic reasons, the OKW would have been judged a "criminal organization" by the IMT. This has often been misconstrued, not the least by German World War Two veterans that the IMT ruled that the OKW was not a "criminal organization" because the Wehrmacht committed no war crimes.

Prior to the developments of the Second World War there was a history of the German Army committing violent acts against civilians in previous conflicts. During a rebellion by the Herero and Nama natives of a German African Colony in 1904, the German Army was tasked to quell the uprising. General Lothar von Trotha, the Commander tasked with eliminating the uprising, remarked "against 'nonhumans' one cannot conduct war "humanely'". This conflict resulted in the death of 66-75 percent of the entire native Herero population and 50 percent of the Nama population. By contrast, the German army lost only 676 soldiers in combat over the course of the conflict.