“His merry band of guerillas shot unarmed POWs...”
Prisoners are a huge liability. You have to feed them and food is precious. You waste manpower having to guard them. If they escape they will try to kill you or they will get back across their lines and tell where you are hiding and send others to kill you.
War is hell and people die. You must try not to let it be you.
And no one except a real hypocrite would expect them to fight according to the Queensberry rules as their folks were being slaughtered in the tens of thousands, and not only by the Nazis....
Guerillas are not afforded protection by the Geneva protocols, and likewise are not bound by them. Every time a Jew or Lithuanian that killed a Nazi or a Russian, he made the world a better place.
> Prisoners are a huge liability. <
An older friend of the family was with the U.S. Army in Italy during WW II. He told us that during the final drive (in 1945) to the Po River his unit didn’t take any prisoners. It would have slowed them down, and escorting prisoners to the rear drained men away from the front.
Did his unit commit a war crime? You bet. But he made the argument that if his unit slowed down, the neighboring unit could have been outflanked. His commander decided not to take that risk.
I’m not defending that unit’s actions. Just passing along the story.