At the end of the war, in retribution, Partisan bands engaged in massacres of ethnic Germans, primarily in the Province of Vojvodina in present-day Serbia. Villages were wiped out, with the inhabitants either killed or forced into concentration camps, where many died of hunger or disease. As justification for their actions to eliminate the German minority in Yugoslavia, the Partisans applied the principle of collective guilt to the German ethnic group for the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Although these acts of collective punishment could not be characterized as genocide, because “the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such” (partial definition of genocide from the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention of Genocide.) would be difficult to substantiate. Nevertheless, some of their actions appeared to meet the definition of genocide. They were, in any event, clearly crimes against humanity according to the articles of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which defines collective punishment as a war crime.