Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (26 page)

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Authors: Laurence Rees

Later in the same memo Churchill says: ‘I do not see why we should always have all the disadvantages of being the gentleman while they [i.e., the Germans] have all the advantages of being the cad.’
Even though, in the end, Churchill decided that poison gas should not be used, the memo demonstrates conclusively that even one of the most moral and steadfast politicians in British history clearly recognized the reality of the situational ethic.

Part of my initial problem in grasping the central truth of the situational ethic when applied to the perpetrators I encountered was to do with terminology.
I persisted in calling them ‘war criminals’.
And indeed they had committed the most awful crimes.
Yet in conventional terms a ‘criminal’ is someone who operates outside the law — by definition a non-conformist.
But the perpetrators I met who had committed the most appalling crimes were precisely the ones who were most keen to work within the law at the time.
They were normally ambitious, hardworking, conformist, committed individuals, like the Soviet military intelligence officer who, because military bosses said it was ‘right’ to do so, tortured prisoners during interrogation and then shot them, or the Japanese and German soldiers who accepted the rhetoric that their (Chinese and Russians) enemies were ‘subhuman’ and so murdered innocent women and children.

Heinrich Müller, the notorious head of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, was clearly another of these creatures of the situational ethic.
An appraisal by his local Nazi party headquarters in 1937 questioned his deep-rooted commitment to Nazism, saying:

’It must be acknowledged that he proceeded against these [left-wing] movements with great severity....
It is not less clear, however, that Müller, had it been his task, would have proceeded just the same against the right....
With his vast ambition and relentless drive, he would have done everything to gain the appreciation of whoever might happen to be his boss in a given system.’
⁴

So even the local Nazis recognized Müller’s pragmatic approach to his work as a secret policeman.
As long as the Nazis were in control, he would serve them to the best of his ability, but if the communists ever came to power, he would change sides and do his best to persecute the Nazis.
(Fascinatingly, this negative appraisal by his local Nazi party was no bar to Müller’s advancement — clearly Himmler, Müller’s boss, also understood the truth of the situational ethic.
The leader of the SS must have realized that if he were to sack all the opportunistic Nazis he employed, he would not be able to staff the Gestapo.)

What all this led me to was the opposite conclusion to the one I had been expecting to reach — the perpetrators of these terrible acts were not the ‘criminal’ outcasts I had been expecting to meet, but the ambitious achievers at the centre of their societies who wanted to rise in their careers.
It was hardly surprising, therefore, that they seemed ‘normal’ when one met them.

Of course, it is self-evident that not all war criminals fit into this ‘conformist’ mode.
Two of the greatest war criminals of the twentieth century, Hitler and Stalin, were anything but adherents to the ‘situational ethic’ of the time; as young men both were terrorists, and both succeeded in destroying the political systems in which they grew up.
Neither were the immediate followers of these two dictators creatures of the herd — Himmler took part in the infamous Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, and Molotov was a revolutionary Bolshevik in 190S at the age of fifteen.
Such men were not the followers of the situational ethic but the shapers of it.
But, long dead as they were, these were not the kind of war criminals I was encountering on my travels.
The vast majority of those I met were the people who had wanted to fit into the new society created by the revolutionaries — and there was a crowd of them.
Once it was clear, for example, by March 1933 that Hitler was secure in power, there was a massive surge in applications to join the Nazi party — so much so that these new members were known by the none-too-flattering sobriquet ‘March Violets’.

Thankfully, not everyone from the former totalitarian regimes whom I encountered was such a conformist.
I did meet a small number of people who had refused to go along with the system, who had believed they were living in an unjust society and who had fought back.
But, so the paradox continues, they were the very people who were labelled ‘criminal’ by society at the time, and even today they often still exude a principled approach to the world that would brand them ‘awkward’ .
Indeed, they — not the perpetrators I met — are the ones who are most demonstrably different from the rest of contemporary society.
Take the example of the former member of the German communist party I met who returned to Germany once the Nazis were in power, knowing the profound danger he faced, and was then tortured and imprisoned in a concentration camp.
He never gave up his belief in communism, even though he knew that if he did he would receive better treatment.
Or consider the Russian I encountered who had printed leaflets — knowing the terrible risk he was running — protesting at the arrest of his teacher during one of Stalin’s purges.
Arrested and imprisoned in a gulag, he volunteered to serve in a penal battalion during the war.
He cheated the odds and survived — only to be persecuted for the rest of his working life.
Listening to his story, I grew more and more bewildered — what was the point, I asked him, of protesting about the arrest of his teacher in the way he did?
Surely he must have known it would accomplish nothing but his own imprisonment and misery?
As he sat today in his tiny, threadbare Moscow flat, did he not regret what he had done?
He paused and then answered: ‘I don’t regret it at all.
At least I have my self-respect.’

But even ‘resisters’ within corrupt societies can be divided into those truly exceptional human beings who stand out for principle, and those who begin resisting at the moment when it is expedient for them to do so.
It is no accident that the bomb plot against Hitler by senior German army officers was not launched until July 1944, when it was clear that the war was lost.
It was obviously not in the interests of most officers to kill their Führer in the summer of 1940 when the war was going well for Germany.
Equally, as recent research into the French ‘resistance’ has shown, it was not until it was clear the German army was in trouble that the ranks of the resisters swelled.
For much of the war there was very little armed resistance at all.

Thus the final conclusion I reached was that the truly exceptional members of the totalitarian societies I examined were not the war criminals who had sought to please their masters, but either the people who resisted the established (and flourishing) oppressive regime or the people who initially created it.
These were the people who lived at the edges of society and who were prepared to sacrifice themselves for a cause.
But such human beings are rare.
The vast majority just wish to go with the flow — and even if that flow happens to be a corrupt and evil one, then they still go along with it.
There are very many people, today judged ‘criminal’ because they tried to live and prosper in that kind of corrupt society, who at the time thought they were normal, law-abiding, boss-pleasing creatures.
And the question we should all ask ourselves is whether in the same situation we would be among these people?
Maybe one would not have been so careerist as to join the SS (though thousands upon thousands of people wanting to get ahead in Germany did), but how would one have reacted when the Jewish family next door suddenly disappeared?
Would one have started to ask questions or simply have looked the other way?
Of course, in the end none of us will ever know for sure how we would react until — God forbid — we are forced by circumstance to make the decision.
But, statistically, it is clear that only the smallest minority in a successful totalitarian state ever try to resist.
As a German who lived through the Third Reich put it to me when I pressed him on why he chose not to fight back against Hitler: ‘The trouble with the world today is people who haven’t been tested go around making judgements about people who have been tested.’

Thankfully the years since the end of the Second World War have seen an attempt to codify
absolute
standards of human behaviour — something that international law has never effectively done before.
Victory over the cruel regimes in Germany and Japan led to such important initiatives as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, in more recent years, the European Convention on Human Rights.
Such international codification of the proper standards by which human beings should live is the only effective weapon against the vagaries of the situational ethic (though it is significant that it took the international community so very long to agree that torture, slavery, false imprisonment, and discrimination on grounds of race, sex or religion are, under all circumstances, wrong).
But the battle is not yet won — demonstrably, the shifting ethic is still with us.
It was not until the 1960s that institutional racism began to be tackled in Britain and the USA — and some say it still exists today.
And the situational ethic is alive and flourishing in international affairs.
Slobodan Milosovic is charged as a war criminal — but only after he invades Kosovo and the West believes he must be stopped, not when he commits crimes during the war in Bosnia; Saddam Hussein is decreed to be an international war criminal — but only after he invades Kuwait and threatens the West’s oil supply, not when he presides over a conflict rich in war crimes against Iran.
And in China, what of the people involved in the appalling ethnic cleansing of Tibet?
It is unlikely in the extreme that they will ever be brought to the International Court in the Hague to be charged with crimes against humanity.
The world needs to get along with China, and the pragmatic reality is that most Western nations care more about their own economic self-interest than the international enforcement of universal standards of human rights.

If there is one lesson to be learnt from all this, then that lesson is also a warning — human beings take considerably more of their ethical values from the particular system they happen to be in at the time than you would ever have thought possible.

Worrying, isn’t it?

REFERENCES

THE CHINA SOLUTION

1
See p.
19, Edwin P.
Hoyt,
Japan’s War
, Da Capo Press, New York, 1986

2
Hoyt,
Japan’s War
, p.
95

3
Quoted p.
81, Edward J.
Drea,
In the Service of the Emperor
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4
Quoted p.
125, Hoyt,
Japan’sWar

5
See p.
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Japan’s War

6
Quoted p.
38, Iris Chang,
The Rape of Nanking
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7
Quoted p.
10, Timothy Brook (ed.),
Documents on the Rape of Nanking
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8
Quoted pp.
76—7,
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9
Quoted pp.
214-15, Brook (ed.),
Documents on the Rape of Nanking

10 Quoted p.
99, Yuki Tanaka,
Hidden Horrors, Japanese War Crimes in World War
II, Westview Press, 1998

11
Tanaka,
Hidden Horrors
, p.
99

12
See p.
85, Drea,
In the Service of the Emperor

13
See p.
343, Herbert P.
Bix,
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
, Harper Collins, 2000

14
See p.
206, Edward Behr,
Hirohito, Behind the Myth
, Random House, 1989

15
See p.
59, Sheldon H.
Harris,
Factories of Death, Japanese Biological Warfare
,
1932—45, and the American Cover-up
, by Sheldon H.
Harris, Routledge, 1994

DEALING WITH THE WEST