12 BANNED WW2 PUNISHMENTS So BIZARRE You’ll Think They’re Fake

PART 2:

One of the most common missions of the Strafbat was mine clearance on foot. Literally. Soldiers were forced to walk in a line across minefields to clear them with their own bodies. Every step could be the last. When a mine exploded, the survivors were ordered to keep walking. The field was cleared when the men stopped exploding or when there was no one left to take the next step.

  When they were not clearing mines with their legs, the Strafbat were launched into frontal assaults without preparation, without artillery support, and often without adequate weaponry. They ran toward fortified German positions with old rifles  or even with no weapon at all. The mission was not to win.

 It was to waste enemy ammunition. Disposable Soviet soldiers serving as cannon fodder with the official seal of the state. The numbers are brutal. Between 1942 and 1945, approximately 422,700 Soviet soldiers were sentenced  to penal battalions. The casualty rate was astronomical. Very few survived to tell the tale.

 And those who survived one mission were not released. They were regrouped and sent to the next one. Redemption only came through spilled  blood. And it was almost never the enemy’s blood that counted for command. Many of these men were not criminals. They were soldiers who retreated under overwhelming fire, who questioned an absurd order, or who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 The Soviet machine needed bodies to feed the front lines, and the Shtrafbat were the perfect solution. Punish and kill at the same time without wasting  a single one of their own bullets. War economy taken to its most inhumane level. Dying while advancing was considered redemption. Retreating meant being shot by your own comrades.

The Soviet penal soldier was trapped in a corridor with no exit. The enemy ahead, the death sentence behind. The Soviet Union did not just send men to war, it sent men to die as a form of punishment. The line between soldier and death row inmate ceased to exist in the Red Army. Punishment number three, the Japanese water torture.

 Water is essential for life. The Japanese army turned it into an instrument of forced confession. The torture known as the water cure was applied to Allied prisoners of war with a procedure that required no technology, weapons, or sophisticated equipment. Just water, rope, and time. The simplicity of the method was what made it so terrifying and so easy to apply in any camp across the Pacific.

The victim was immobilized and subjected to a process of controlled and repeated drowning. Water was the central instrument forced into the body until the sensation of death became unbearable. The procedure was interrupted only to begin again, cycle after cycle without any real break.

 The goal was not to kill immediately. It was to keep the victim on the threshold between life and death for as long as possible. Absolute control over suffering. The process was repeated until the victim confessed whatever the interrogators wanted to hear or until the body simply could not take any more. There was no right answer. Confessing meant execution.

 Resisting meant more pain. The water cure did not seek the truth. It sought a justification for the sentence that had already been decided before the first interrogation even began. The torture was the path. The destination was already set. Survivors describe the experience as dying repeatedly without ever being given permission to truly die.

 With each cycle, the body grew weaker and the mind more destroyed. Some confessed to crimes they never committed just to make the procedure stop. The torture did not extract truth. It manufactured guilt to order. And    the manufactured guilt was all the Japanese military tribunals needed to sign the final sentence.

The irony is brutal. The same water that the prisoner begged to drink while wasting away from a thirst in the camp was the same water used to destroy him. What sustains life took life away. The Japanese  did not need chambers, guillotine, or firing squads to break a man. They only needed a bucket.

 The cheapest and oldest method in the world turned into the most efficient tool of psychological and physical destruction. The water cure was not a Japanese invention. Variations have existed for centuries across diverse cultures around the world. But the Imperial Army applied it with systematic efficiency in prisoner camps throughout the Pacific.

 It was documented in detail at the war crimes tribunals after the conflict. Clean, transparent water, essential for any living being, used as the most accessible tool for breaking the will of a human being. Punishment number four. The Nazi gallows for their own soldiers. The regime did not reserve cruelty only for enemies.

 It also reserved it for its own. Emergency military tribunals condemned Germans to hanging for crimes such as desertion,  cowardice, or defeatism. The trial lasted minutes. The sentence  was always the same, and the execution was carried out in public before civilians and comrades so that everyone would see and learn.

The condemned did not just die hanged. They died humiliated. Signs were hung around their necks with phrases like, “I’m a coward.” or “I betrayed my people.” The body was not removed after death. It was left displayed in squares, on lamp posts, and on trees for days, sometimes weeks. Civilians walked past. Children saw.

  The message was clear. Doubting the Reich cost you your life and your dignity, even after death. These tribunals operated with murderous speed. There was no real defense,  no appeal, no time. An officer accused, a judge sentenced, and within hours the soldier was already hanging. It is estimated that more than 15,000 other German soldiers were executed by their own tribunals during  the war.

Nazi Germany killed more of its own soldiers for cowardice than many countries lost in entire battles. Many of these men were not cowards. They were soldiers who were exhausted, wounded, or simply lucid enough to realize the war was lost. Saying out loud that Germany would not win was an automatic death sentence.

 Thinking was permitted, as long as no one heard. The truth became a capital crime, and silence became the only survival strategy inside the very army that was supposed to protect them. The bodies in the squares during the final months of the war tell a story that textbooks prefer to summarize in footnotes. The Reich was crumbling, but the punishment machine was working perfectly.

While cities turned to rubble and the army retreated on all fronts, the tribunals kept condemning and hanging. The last thing to die in Nazi Germany was not the army, it was mercy. Punishment number five, the guillotine of Plötzensee. In Berlin, inside the walls of Plötzensee prison, there was a room with a guillotine.

 It was not used for spies or high-ranking traitors. It was used for ordinary German soldiers convicted of undermining military strength. Do you know what that meant in practice? Saying that was going to lose the war. One sentence was enough to cost you your head, literally. The blade did not forgive words. Plötzensee became an execution factory in the final years of the conflict.

 The guillotine operated almost daily. The condemned were brought to the room, positioned in the machine, and decapitated in seconds. No speech, no ceremony, no hesitation. The body was removed, the blade was cleaned, and the next one entered. German efficiency applied to the systematic murder of its own citizens.

 The bureaucracy of death operating in assembly-line fashion. Many of those executed were young soldiers who made the mistake of talking too much in a letter, in a bar, or among comrades in uniform. Neighbors denounced  neighbors. Colleagues turned in colleagues. The denunciation system turned every conversation into a death risk.

 Expressing doubt about victory was as dangerous as facing a Soviet tank. But with a tank, at least you had the chance to try to run. Plötzensee did not only execute soldiers. Civilians, resistance members, and religious figures passed through the guillotine.  It is estimated that nearly 3,000 people were executed there between 1933 and 1945.

 Each one had a name, a story, and a last sentence that probably no one heard. After the war, Plötzensee became a memorial. The walls still  bear marks. The silence that the regime demanded became, decades later, the silence of reverence from its visitors. When a state decides that the truth is a crime, the guillotine becomes a tool of government.

 The blade did not distinguish the guilty from  the innocent. It obeyed orders written on official letterhead. And the orders were clear. Any voice that did not repeat the official lie should be silenced  forever. Plötzensee was not an ordinary prison. It was a message written in blood and steel for everyone who dared to think for themselves.

Punishment number six.  The Italian decimation. Decimation is a practice that dates back to ancient Rome, when legions that fled from battle were punished with the execution of one in every 10 soldiers, chosen by drawing lots. Sounds like something from 2,000 years ago? The Italian army resurrected this method in World War II.

When a unit failed and the guilty could not be identified, the drawing of lots decided who would live and who would die. The procedure was cold and mechanical. Soldiers formed a line in silence. Numbers were drawn. And for every 10 names, one was pulled out of formation and shot in front of his comrades. No trial, no defense, no chance of appeal.

The soldier could have fought bravely, could have been the best in the unit. None of that mattered. The die fell and a man’s fate was sealed by pure blind chance. The commander of the Italian Third Army left a recorded statement that summarizes the philosophy of this practice. Some, guilty or not, must be executed immediately. Let me read that.

 Guilty or not. The punishment did not require guilt. It required an example. The goal was not to deliver justice. It was to manufacture fear in the rest of the troops. And the fear worked. Soldiers who survived the drawing carried the terror of being next. A soldier’s life had no individual value in the system. It was purest statistics.

One in every 10 was an acceptable calculation to restore discipline. It did not matter who died. What mattered was how many watched death happen before their eyes. The firing squad did not aim at the guilty. It aimed at chance. And chance wore a uniform and had a family waiting at home for a letter that would never come again.

The irony is that decimation rarely improved troop performance. Terrorized soldiers do not fight better. They fight desperately, make more mistakes, and distrust their own commanders. The Italian army tried to use Roman fear to solve modern problems and discovered that murdering innocents does not create courage. It creates resentment.

Rome invented decimation. Modern Italy proved it was still a terrible idea. Punishment number seven. The Soviet blocking detachments. If the Soviet penal battalions were the punishment for those who advanced too slowly, the blocking detachments were the punishment for those who tried to turn back. Positioned behind Soviet lines, these detachments had one single and brutal function: to shoot any Soviet soldier who retreated.

 The enemy was ahead, guaranteed death behind. The bullet did not wait and did not ask questions. Stalin’s Order 227, known as “Not One Step Back”, formalized this practice in July  1942. Blocking detachments were equipped with heavy machine guns and positioned at strategic points behind their own infantry. If a unit retreated under enemy fire, their own countrymen opened fire on them without hesitation.

Soviet loyalty was measured in yards. Every step backward was considered  treason. Imagine the situation. You are a Soviet soldier in a trench. Ahead, German tanks advance while firing. The comrade beside you falls dead. Artillery explodes everything around  you. Instinct screams to run, but behind you, your own comrades aim heavy machine guns in your direction.

 If you advance, you might die. If you retreat, you will certainly die. The choice did not exist. It was only between two ways of dying. The blocking detachments were not an exception or the excess of some isolated commander. They were official state policy with a signed decree. Thousands of soldiers were killed or detained by their own forces.

   Many of those captured retreating were summarily executed or sent to the penal battalions, which was another death sentence. The system created a perfect cycle of punishment where every exit led to another punishment. Stalin did not trust his own soldiers. The blocking detachment was the silent confession of a regime that knew its men would not fight out of conviction.

They would fight only out of fear. And the fear worked. The Red Army advanced upon Berlin not only through courage or patriotism, but because turning back was literally impossible. The Soviet victory was built upon the terror imposed on its own men. Punishment number eight: horizontal collaboration in France.

When France was liberated in 1944, the joy of victory was accompanied by a wave of revenge that no one likes to remember. Approximately 20 Zozos and other French were accused of horizontal collaboration, the crime of having had relationships with German soldiers during the occupation. The punishment did not come from courts.

It came from the streets, and it was as brutal as anything the enemy had done. The ritual was public and methodical. The women had their heads shaved by force in front of crowds that applauded. They were partially stripped, covered in tar, and paraded through the streets like trophies of humiliation. The audience spat, kicked, threw stones, and beat them.

 Some were killed right there on the sidewalks of the newly won freedom. France celebrated liberation by destroying the most vulnerable women of its society. In Chartres, a woman had her forehead branded with a hot iron in the shape of a swastika while carrying her baby in her arms. Reread that. A hot iron on the forehead with a baby in her lap.

The crowd watched and did not intervene. The baby was not German, it was French. The mother was not a soldier, she was a civilian. But none of that mattered to the mob that turned liberation into a license for brutality with no restraint whatsoever. The most revolting part is that many of the women punished were innocent.

 A single accusation from a neighbor, a rival, a vengeful ex-lover was enough. No trial, no evidence, no defense. The accusation was the sentence, and the sentence was immediate.    Women who had worked as maids or translators during the occupation were treated as traitors. Some had not even had contact with Germans.

 The accusation was more powerful than the truth. The irony cuts deep. The men who shaved the heads of these women in public squares were, in many cases, the very same men who had collaborated with the Germans during the occupation, businessmen who profited from Nazi contracts, officials who obeyed Vichy orders without question.

The punishment of horizontal collaboration was, in practice, guilty men punishing innocent women to divert attention from their own cowardice. Photographs from the era show women with shaved heads and empty eyes being pushed through streets packed with spectators. Children watched alongside their parents.

 The humiliation was a family  spectacle. Decades later, French historians began to confront this chapter with honesty. What they called popular justice was, in truth, collective misogyny dressed up as patriotism. France punished the female body for the male sin of defeat. Horizontal collaboration reveals an uncomfortable truth about liberation.

The violence did not end when the Nazis left. It just changed targets. The shaved women carried the stigma for decades. Many fled their cities. Some took their own lives. Their children grew up in shame. Freedom arrived in France in 1944. For 20 zeroed-out women, what arrived was only the right to be humiliated by countrymen instead of enemies.

Punishment number nine, the Japanese hierarchical beating. In the Imperial Army, hierarchy was enforced with fists. Any superior could beat any subordinate for any reason. Not saluting with enough energy was grounds for a punch. A missing button on a shirt justified a beating. Stepping on a newspaper with the emperor’s photograph, immediate and brutal beating.

 Japanese discipline was measured in bruises. The beating was not a deviation in conduct by isolated officers. It was official documented policy. The Japanese military system operated on a chain of violence where each level struck the level below. Generals on colonels, colonels on lieutenants, lieutenants on sergeants, sergeants on privates.

 Brutality flowed down the hierarchical staircase like water. And those at the bottom step absorbed all the violence accumulated above. One documented case describes a sergeant who forced his soldiers to punch each other in formation shouting, “When you hit a man, hit him like you’re trying to say something.” If the punches were deemed too weak, the sergeant beat both of them.

 The soldiers learned quickly that the only way to avoid being beaten was to hit the comrade beside them at full force. The system turned brothers-in-arms into enemies by decree. The goal was to destroy individuality and replace it with blind and absolute obedience. A soldier who was beaten every day without being able to fight back internalized submission as a way of life.

 When he received the order to advance in a suicidal charge, he obeyed without question. The daily beating was psychological training. It molded men who preferred dying in an attack to enduring one more day of humiliation. Cruelty was the curriculum. Japanese veterans who spoke after decades of silence described the training as more traumatic than the combat itself.

Enemies could be understood. They were the other side of the war. But being beaten by your own sergeant, by your own army, by your own country, was a betrayal that fit no logic. The Japanese soldier was destroyed as a person before even reaching the battlefield. The system of internal violence explains, in part,  the Japanese brutality against prisoners of war.

Soldiers who were beaten daily reproduced the violence on the most vulnerable around them. The chain of brutality did not stop at the last soldier in line. It continued on the prisoner, the civilian, the defenseless. The Japanese army did not create warriors. They created victims who became executioners.

  Violence was hereditary within the uniform. Punishment number 10. The torture of prisoners of war. If the Japanese army was brutal with its own soldiers, the treatment given to  prisoners surpassed every limit. Guards forced prisoners to assault each other as a form  of entertainment.

 There were no rules, no scheduled end. The spectacle continued until the guards grew tired of watching. Human dignity was the first target. The body was merely a consequence. And when the entertainment of the assaults was over, there was the sword. Japanese officers used defenseless prisoners for technique demonstrations with katanas.

 The human being bound before them was not recognized as a person. They were disposable training objects.    The executions by blade were treated as routine military exercises. No ceremony, no record, no remorse. The next one was brought in and the cycle began again in silence. Accounts presented at war crimes tribunals document officers who competed against each other to see who could execute more prisoners in less time.

Japanese newspapers of the era went so far as to publish these competitions as if they were sporting events complete with scoreboards. The dehumanization was so complete that the violence became a media spectacle and the public followed along with genuine interest. All were normalized by the press of their own country.

The forced assaults between prisoners served a calculated psychological purpose. By forcing two men to attack each other, the guards broke the solidarity among the prisoners. How do you look into the eyes of a comrade the next day after being forced to assault him? The guilt destroyed from within what the guards could not destroy from without.

 The most efficient torture was the one that turned the victim into an involuntary accomplice in the suffering. Survivors of those camps carried a guilt that no tribunal absolved and no metal compensated. Men forced to assault comrades under threat of death spent decades in absolute silence. The war ended  in 1945.

 For many of them, the psychological torture never ended. Japan officially surrendered. The shame of those men did not.    The visible wounds healed with time. The invisible ones remained open forever. What happened in those camps was not the deviation of isolated guards. It was an organized system with backing from the chain of command.

 Japanese military documents show that brutality against prisoners was expected, tolerated, and encouraged. The Bushido code, distorted by militarism, taught that surrendering was the supreme dishonor. If the Japanese soldier preferred death to surrender, the prisoner who surrendered did not deserve to exist. That was the logic.

Punishment number 11, the British crucifixion. You would expect that an army defending democracy and freedom would never tie its own soldiers to a post as punishment. You would be wrong. The British army practiced what was called field punishment number one. And the generic name hid something that the soldiers themselves nicknamed crucifixion.

It was not a metaphor. It was an almost literal description of what happened to anyone who disobeyed orders. The punished soldier was tied to a post, a wagon wheel, or any fixed structure with his arms spread open and his feet  not touching the ground. He stayed there for up to two hours a day exposed to the sun, the rain, the snow, or whatever nature decided at that moment in full view of all his comrades in uniform.

 The punishment was designed to humiliate as much as to cause physical pain. The body suffered, the dignity suffered far more. The practice could last up to 28 consecutive days. Two hours a day tied to a post with the weight of the body pulling the arms, circulation cut off, and total exposure to the elements. By the end, soldiers had damaged joints, atrophied muscles, and marks that lasted for months.

 All of this applied by the army that claimed to fight for civilization against barbarism. The irony was as cruel as the ropes that bound them. The field punishment was applied for infractions that seemed trivial today. Minor disobedience, being late to formation, drunkenness, or responding to an officer inappropriately. The soldier did not need to commit a serious act to end up on the post.

 It was enough to annoy the wrong superior. And the punishment was public by design. The goal was that every comrade who walked by would see the man tied up and think twice before disobeying any order. British soldiers hated the field punishment with an intensity that rivaled their hatred for the enemy. Letters home described the practice as inhumane and shameful.

 The method was officially abolished in 1923, but accounts suggest that variations persisted during World War II in various theaters of operation. The British crucifixion is the clearest example that the line between allies and enemies blurred when it came to punishment. Nazis hanged in public squares, Soviets shot anyone who retreated, Japanese beat soldiers into total submission, the French shaved women’s heads in the streets, and the British tied their own men to posts like crucifixes in the middle of the field.

The methods varied according to the flag that was raised. The message was absolutely identical in all of them. Your body belongs to the army, not to you. War erased the humanity of every side. Punishment number 12, the execution of Allied pilots. Allied pilots captured by the Japanese faced a fate that went beyond being a prisoner of war.

   There was a policy, not informal, not improvised, but official and documented, of executing captured aviators. For the Japanese command, bombing Japan was a crime punishable by death. It did not matter that they were legitimate combatants. They were criminals, period, no appeal possible. The most brutal case occurred after the Battle of Midway.

 Captured American pilots were tortured to extract military information. When they had nothing more useful to offer, they were tied to kerosene cans filled with water and thrown into the sea for calculated drowning. One of the pilots was wounded with ax blows before being pushed into the water.

 The execution was never enough on its own. It needed to be preceded by maximum suffering. The execution of aviators violated every international convention regarding prisoners of war that existed at the time. Japan had signed the Geneva Convention, but chose to ignore it when it suited command. The argument was that bombing Japanese cities constituted a crime against civilians.

 Therefore, the pilots did not deserve any legal protection. International law existed on paper, but it only applied when it served Japan’s interests. American, British, and Australian pilots who flew over Japanese territory knew that capture was, in many cases, a fate worse than not coming back. Many carried pistols that were not for ground combat.

They were to ensure that capture would never happen. When a pilot prefers death to being captured, you understand the magnitude of the terror that Japanese treatment inspired in every Allied aviator who crossed that sky. After the war, tribunals tried Japanese officers responsible for the execution of aviators.

 Some were sentenced to death, others received light sentences, and many were never even tried. Post-war justice  was as selective as the application of conventions during the conflict. The bombing was impersonal for those who dropped the bombs from above, and deeply personal for those who received them on the ground below.

Punishment number 13, the Bataan Death March. If everything you have heard so so seems impossible to surpass, meet the Bataan Death March. In April 1942, after the surrender of American and Filipino forces, approximately 75,000 American prisoners of war were forced to march over 60 miles under tropical sun without food, without water, without rest.

 What happened on that road is one of the darkest chapters in human history. The march lasted entire days under extreme heat. Prisoners who stopped to rest were bayoneted where they stood. Those who fell from exhaustion were beaten until they got up or decapitated on the roadside. Those who asked for water were punished. In some accounts, guards offered water and then brutally assaulted anyone who accepted.

Thirst was torture. The hope of quenching that thirst was an even crueler and more calculated torture. The numbers are devastating by any measure. It is estimated that 17,000 American prisoners died during the march or in the days immediately following its conclusion. Hunger, dehydration, heatstroke, beatings, bayonet wounds, and decapitations combined to create a walking death machine along 60 miles.

The bodies lay on the road in the sun. Those marching behind walked over their dead comrades. Filipino civilians who tried to give water or food to the prisoners were assaulted or executed by the Japanese guards without any hesitation. The cruelty was not limited to combatants. Any gesture of humanity was treated as punishable insubordination.

 A woman who extended a canteen was struck with a rifle butt. The message was absolute. Compassion was forbidden. The march punished anyone who dared to be human. The survivors who reached the destination camp found conditions as brutal as the march itself. Overcrowding, tropical diseases, permanent hunger, and random executions continued for years.

Many of those who survived the road died in the camps in the following months. The Bataan Death March was just the first chapter of a nightmare that lasted until  1945. Surviving the road did not guarantee surviving the war. Bataan became a worldwide symbol of war crimes. General Homma Masaharu, considered responsible for the march, was tried by a military tribunal and executed in 1946.

 But justice for thousands of victims never came in complete form. Surviving veterans spent decades fighting for recognition and reparation. The March lasted days. The consequences lasted entire lifetimes. For 17 thousand Zeros and ones and families,    no one came home. The Bataan Death March is a reminder that the worst punishment of war was not the bullet, the bomb, or the sharpened blade.

 It was the complete and systematic dehumanization of another human being. When an army decides that a prisoner is not human, any horror  becomes possible and justifiable in the eyes of those who carry it out. Bataan did  not kill 17 thousand Zeros and ones and men with hunger and violence alone.

 It killed them with the decision that those lives were worth nothing. No side came out of this war clean. Those who defended freedom tied soldiers to posts and shaved women’s heads. Those who preached superiority hanged their own men. Those who defended the people shot  their own people. The Japanese used water and swords.

 The Italians used dice. The British used ropes. The French used razors. The instruments changed according to the flag. The dehumanization was identical on every side. World War was not just battles and territories. It was a laboratory of cruelty where every nation tested the limits of what could be done with a human body  under the justification of discipline or security.

The 13 punishments you have just learned about prove a simple truth. When war gives permission, there is no limit. And the uniform was never a guarantee of civilization. It was merely the most convenient disguise that history ever wore.