Germany’s Military Manual (1992) states: “The Hague Regulations … prohibit the destruction or seizure of enemy property, ‘unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessity of war’.” 

Germany’s Law Introducing the International Crimes Code (2002) punishes anyone who, in connection with an international or a non-international armed conflict, “unless this is imperatively demanded by the necessities of the armed conflict, … extensively destroys, appropriates or seizes property of the adverse party contrary to international law, such property being in the hands of the perpetrator’s party”. 

In the General Devastation case before a German court in 1947, a German officer who gave the order that on the approach of the Soviet army any valuable machinery in mills appropriated by Germany in occupied territories was to be destroyed was found guilty of a war crime when one of the factories in question was destroyed by fire. The Court stated that “his conduct may be regarded as a war crime in the meaning of Article II(I)(b) of [the 1945 Allied] Control Council Law No. 10. In that paragraph acts of devastation which are not justified by military necessity, are described as war crimes.” 

In 2008, in the Kurdish Refugee case, Germany’s Higher Administrative Court for the Federal Land of Bavaria found that a Kurdish refugee claimant from Turkey was to be excluded from refugee protection inter alia because there were serious reasons for considering that he had committed war crimes during his involvement with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The Court held: “The unlawful and arbitrary destruction of property not justified by military necessity is a war crime according to Art. 8 para. 2 sub-para. a … [no.] iv of the [1998] Rome Statute.”