World War II
After World War II it was claimed by German SS general Gottlob Berger that there was a plan, proposed by the Luftwaffe and approved by Adolf Hitler, to set up special POW camps for captured airmen of the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force in large German cities, to act as human shields against their bombing raids. Berger realised that this would contravene the Geneva Convention and argued that there was not enough barbed wire—as a result this plan was not implemented.
Wehrmacht and later SS forces extensively used Polish civilians as human shield during Warsaw Uprising when attacking the insurgents' positions.
Read more about this topic: Human Shield
Famous quotes containing the words war ii, world and/or war:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“It is necessary to get a lot of men together, for the show of the thing,—otherwise the world will not believe. That is the meaning of committees. But the real work must always be done by one or two men.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.”
—Richard Lovelace (1618–1658)