6·25전쟁기 미군의 포로 정책 전개 양상 -전범조사부와 민간정보교육국의 활동을 중심으로- = The POW policies of the US Force during the Korean War - with priority given to the KWC and CI&E -

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Since the Second World War, war crimes have emerged as a major theme in psychological warfare and propaganda. Therefore the US force tried to highlight the war crimes of the Communist army during the Korean War in order to undermine the morality of them. In October 1950, KWC was established to investigate and prosecute the war crimes of the Communist army. The main investigation target of KWC was POWs held at the United Nations Command(UNC) POW camps. KWC organized an informer system in the UNC POW camps and actively performed war criminal investigation activities using prisoners of the war as informer.
The US force also tried to use the prisoners for re-education and psychological warfare against North Korean through systematic educational programs. To do so, they established the CI&E to carry out education programs for POWs in April 1951. In that education programs, many POWs were utilized as a teacher or an assistant in the educational activities.
As a result, the POWs were politically divided on these policies and confronted each other. In July 1951, the POWs who participated in the activities of the KWC and CI&E organized a large anti-communist POWs organization. On the other hand, communist POWs began to organize an underground group and developed its power gradually after February 1951. They resisted against the US force and the POWs who had cooperated with them.
As a result, conflicts between two North Korean POW groups greatly increased after July 1951 when both groups become well-organized. Due to this problem, the informer system of the KWC was abolished in January 1952, and the education programs of the CI&E was also reduced to be performed only on non-repatriated prisoners determined by repatriation screening.