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 world and/or war:
“The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced: yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The dead have been awakened—shall I sleep?
The world’s at war with tyrants—shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe—and shall I pause to reap?
I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch;
Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear,
Its echo in my heart.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)