In your rush to whataboutery (
"how can you criticise my favourite people, look, themuns were worse!") you're rather missing my point (if you must know, I did
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" for Higher English; you also forgot to mention the Holodomor).
Prisoners of war were taken in WW1, civilians weren't
generally murdered en masse, except by their own governments. PW deaths were typically caused by incompetence (failure to prepare, inadequate resources) rather than as a deliberate policy to show no quarter, to work them to death, or to murder them all.
Where the Nazis took the next step was in deciding that humanity and mercy only mattered if you were "one of them", and then applied it to other countries' populations and soldiers. To them, the Laws of War were to be ignored if it suited the local commander; extermination was a matter of policy.
The First World War marked the shift from a 19<sup>th</sup> century, relatively ''ad hoc'' management of prisoners of war, to the 20<sup>th</sup> century’s sophisticated prisoner of war camp systems, with their bureaucratic management, rationalization of the labour use of prisoners, and complex...
encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net