On 23rd February, 1945, this is what Goebbels writes in the German weekly Das Reich:
If the German people were to lay down their weapons, the Soviets would occupy all of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, in addition to most of the Reich itself. A genuine iron curtain (eisener Vorhang) would immediately descend upon all of these territories, which would then form, together with the Soviet Union, a single, vast expanse.
In his final statements, compiled by Bormann874 and published in 1959 (Le testament politique de Hitler,875 Fayard), Hitler assesses his own actions, which, according to historian H. R. Trevor-Roper, clarifies many of his intentions retrospectively.
The Japanese and the Italians
Hitler asserts that the war was ‘imposed’ upon him and that it came about both too early and too late: too early, because it would have taken an additional twenty years to bring to full maturity the generation of officers and diplomats that had been educated in accordance with his own school of thought; yet too late, because the Reich’s adversaries had taken advantage of the time that had elapsed since the Munich Agreement to ‘arm themselves in a superior fashion’ (the war, according to him, should have been launched in September 1938).
He declares that the reason why he chose to wage war against Stalin was, first of all, because the latter was preparing to attack him and, secondly, to compel England to acknowledge Germany’s predominance over the European continent. He expresses his belief that had the English acquired the conviction that there no longer was a power in Europe capable of preventing him from implementing his own policy, they would have agreed to sign a ‘white peace’ with the Reich. He says:
I made up my mind to seal Russia’s fate as soon as I surrendered to the conviction that England would stubbornly refuse to make peace with us. (26th February, 1945)
In order to attain this objective, one had to take the initiative:
The idea of a defensive war against the Russians was simply untenable.
Hitler retained the greatest respect for the Japanese. He stated that the future Germany would have to seek its friends among the Chinese, the Japanese and the Arabs. By contrast, he blamed himself for his own Anglophilia and his ‘illusions’ regarding Latin peoples.
With regard to the English, what he says is that he had underestimated the power which the ‘Jewish domination’ held over them. He declares:
Whatever this war’s outcome, we can prophesy the end of the British Empire, for it has been mortally wounded. The fate of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis on that cursed island of theirs.
He expresses his belief that Italy had actually got in Germany’s way almost everywhere and that it would have been preferable if it had not become involved in the global conflict at all. Furthermore, he specifies that the war against the USSR had been intended to commence in the spring of 1941, so as to end in autumn, and that it was the intervention of the Italian army in Greece, which Germany had not been informed of, that had caused the former to be delayed. Mussolini’s Greek undertaking had been a disaster, for it led to the Yugoslavian about-turn, which then resulted in the establishment of a state of war in the Balkans, a state which the Germans had specifically wanted to avoid. As a result, the British sent a military expedition, and Hitler was compelled to rush to his ally’s aid and was thus robbed of the possibility to implement the Blitzkrieg tactic he had planned against Stalin. Because of this, the German army found itself trapped in the dreadful Russian winter, which marked the beginning of the end. The entire war is thus said to have played out in the space of a few weeks.
Hitler also reproaches the Italians for having prevented him from playing the decolonisation card in the Mediterranean and from practicing a policy of anti-imperialistic alliance with Islam.
Regarding France, he considers his policy to have been completely wrong. He says:
Our duty was to liberate the working class and assist French workers in accomplishing their revolution. We should have jostled the fossil-like bourgeoisie out of the way, a bourgeoisie that is as devoid of a soul as it is of patriotism. […] By not liberating the French proletariat already in 1940, we have failed to do our duty and to recognise our own interests.
The same is true of our failure to liberate the French protégés in overseas regions. The French people would certainly not have held it against us if we had relieved them of the burden of the Empire. In this domain, the people of this country have always manifested more common sense than its alleged elites and are more endowed with the genuine instinct of the nation than the latter. Under both Louis XV and Jules Ferry, the French people rebelled against the absurdity of colonial undertaking. To my knowledge, Napoleon did not become unpopular for having rid himself of Louisiana. What is incredible, by contrast, is the disaffection which his incapable nephew brought upon himself by going to war in Mexico. (15th February, 1945)
Last but not least, Hitler gives a depiction of what will, in his view, become of the world once he is gone:
In the event that the Reich is defeated, and in anticipation of the rise of Asian, African and perhaps even South American nationalisms, only two powers capable of legitimately confronting each other shall remain in the world — the United States and the USSR. The laws of history and geography condemn these two powers to be the adversaries of Europe. Both of these powers will necessarily be driven by the more or less short-term desire to ensure the support of the sole great European people that shall subsist after the war — the German people. I loudly proclaim that under no circumstances must the Germans agree to play the part of a pawn in the American or Russian game.
He then goes on to add:
It is very hard to specify, at this very moment, what could be more pernicious for us on the ideological level — Jew-controlled Americanism or Bolshevism. Under the weight of the events, the Russians may indeed rid themselves completely of Jewish Marxism and henceforth only embody eternal Pan-Slavism876 in its most ferocious and most savage form.
As for the Americans, if they do not succeed in freeing themselves from the yoke of New York Jews, they shall soon decline, without even having attained the age of reason. The fact that they combine such material power with such mental lability is reminiscent of a child stricken with gigantism. One could indeed wonder whether their civilisation is not mushroom-like, destined to come undone just as rapidly as it took shape.
To Shed a Secret Tear
If we are to be vanquished in this war, it is only a total defeat that we could suffer. Indeed, our adversaries have proclaimed their objectives far and wide, thus allowing us to understand that we must harbour no illusions with regard to their intentions. […] This is a most cruel thought. It is with horror that I imagine our Reich being torn apart by the victors, as our populations are left at the mercy of the savage Bolsheviks and the American gangsters and are subjected to their excesses. This prospect does not, however, rob me of my unshakable faith in the future of the German people. The more we are made to suffer, the more resounding the resurrection of the eternal Germany. The specificity of the German soul that allows it to enter a state of lethargy whenever its affirmation threatens the very existence of the nation shall one again be of use to us; but I, personally, would find it unbearable to live in the transitional Germany that would succeed our defeated Third Reich.
Hitler, 2nd April, 1945
Less than a month later, on 30th April, 1945, the fifty-six-year-old Reich chancellor, who had only just got married on the previous day, takes his own life amidst an apocalyptic sort of atmosphere. In his Mémoires de guerre877 (Volume 3: Le salut, 1944–46.878 Plon, 1959), General de Gaulle remarks that ‘it was suicide, not treason, that put an end to his undertaking’. He then adds:
Seduced to its very core, Germany followed its Führer in a single surge, submitting to him all the way to the end — a gun crew member exerting more effort for his leader than any other people had ever done before.
And here is his conclusion:
H
itler’s undertaking, which he upheld without respite, was both superhuman and inhuman. Until the final hours of agony inside his Berlin bunker, he remained undisputed, inflexible and merciless, just as he had been in his glory days. In honour of the sombre grandeur of his struggle and memory, he had chosen never to hesitate, compromise or retreat, for the Titan that strives to lift the world could never falter nor grow soft. Vanquished and crushed, however, he may have reverted to a human state, just to shed a secret tear as everything came to an end.
*
Hitler, an essay by Joachim Fest (2 volumes). Gallimard, 526 and 541 pages respectively.
Adolf Hitler: Legende, Mythos, Wirklichkeit, an essay by Werner Maser. Plon, 510 pages.
***
Werner Maser, who has dedicated himself to the study of National Socialism since 1949, published in 1977 a large dossier on the Nuremberg Trials entitled Nürnberg — Tribunal der Sieger879 (Econ, Düsseldorf). The book was simultaneously released in England through Penguin Books. Two further essays by the same author came out in France: Naissance du Parti national-socialiste allemand880 (Fayard, 1967) and Hitler inédit881 (Albin Michel, 1975).
Regarding Dietrich Eckart, see Alfred Rosenberg’s Dietrich Eckart. Ein Vermächtnis882 (Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachf., Munich, 1937), Margarete Plewnia’s Auf dem Weg zu Hitler. Der “völkische” Publizist Dietrich Eckart883 (Schünemanns Universitätsverlag, Bremen, 1970), and William Gillespie’s Dietrich Eckart (Houston, 1975–76).
*
The Path of Eternity
A Buddhist priest and a professor at the Imperial University, Reverend Shinshō Hanayama was, from 1945 to 1948, the chaplain of the Japanese military leaders condemned by the International Tribunal for the Far East and imprisoned at the Sugamo penitentiary centre. He writes:
In those days, whenever a Japanese person heard someone utter the name of Sugamo, they were overcome with profound sadness. For they all viewed Sugamo (with the gibbets on one side and the prison on the other) as a theatre stage on which the tragedy of life and death, in all of its permanent horror, was regularly performed.
Hanayama initiated the condemned into the principles of Buddhism and supported them in the final moments of their lives. It is his chronicle of the period which he revives, in a most vivid fashion, in La voie de l’éternité.884
The Tokyo Trial
According to the translator, Mr Pierre Pascal, what Hanayama presents in this book, which was published a few years ago in Italy, is an account of ‘the manner in which the defeated awaited their own deaths by penning poetry and alternating various prayers, before finally marching towards an ordeal that would, at long last, allow them to die for their country and, in accordance with their own faith, enable them to exit the world so as to return to it as gods. In their godly form, they would then watch over the fate of their lineage, a lineage that stretched across several millennia’.
In his Wartime Journals (Albin Michel), Charles A. Lindbergh recounts how he discovered, while on a mission to the Pacific in December 1943, that the Japanese men who were taken alive were executed with a bullet to the back of the neck and then decapitated with a dagger. Smoked or marinated in whiskey, the severed heads became an exportation item and were sold in the USA as ‘souvenirs’, he says.
On 9th March, 1945, a major aerial raid against Tokyo leaves more than 200,000 fatal casualties in its wake. Then, in early August, atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a respective death toll of 86,000 and 38,000 victims.
On the 15th of August, the Japanese rise to their feet as they listen to the radio — Emperor Hirohito announces his decision to surrender. The next day, Admiral Onishi eviscerates himself. In a testament calligraphed on silk paper, he writes the following:
Life must be taken seriously. Even in defeat, our youths must be proud of being Japanese. Our children are our country’s treasure.
Following his example, thousands of officers and soldiers commit seppuku (hara-kiri). What would life be worth if it no longer matched its purpose, they ask?
Organised by the Americans on 3rd May, 1946 and 12th November, 1948, the ‘Tokyo Trial’ results in a total of seven Japanese leaders being condemned to death, with an additional eighteen given prison sentences. All in all, 5,000 Japanese men are judged by tribunals established in Japan, Singapore and elsewhere. Around 9,000 of them would be executed.
The charges brought forth by the Allies entail the relinquishment of the old principle guaranteeing the non-retroactivity of laws: Nullum crimen sine lege.885 Some of the accused are reproached for having violated the Portsmouth Treaty of 1905886 and the Japanese-American Agreement of 1908.887
The acts of the ‘Tokyo Trial’ are found in the national archives of Washington and have never been disclosed.
Hanayama had to assist forty men who had been condemned to death. The main ones were Hideki Tojo, the sixty-four-year-old head of the Japanese government from 1941 to 1944; Kōki Hirota, who had acted as prime minister in 1936; Iwane Matsui, the seventy-one-year-old former ambassador to Moscow and the supreme commander in Central China from 1928 to 1938; fifty-seven-year-old Akira Muto, the head of the Operational Office at the War Ministry; sixty-year-old Heitaro Kimura, the supreme commander of the Japanese troops in Burma; Kenji Doihara, nicknamed ‘Lawrence of Manchuria’; and sixty-four-year-old Seishiro Itagaki, the former Minister of War responsible for military operations in Korea, Manchuria and Singapore. They were all hanged.
Whatever side they belonged to, those sentenced to death for political reasons have always had the courage to face the gallows or the rifles that were raised against them. The undaunted serenity displayed by the Japanese leaders has, however, gone beyond anything one could ever have imagined.
Yukio Mishima’s Memory
During their detention, the condemned wrote poems — haikus888 and tankas.889 What supreme luxury it is for one to even-heartedly celebrate the fragility of flowers and the beauty of clouds a mere few hours before plunging into the void. Here is an example of haiku, one by the ineffable Matsuo Bashō:
You must not surmise
When faced with lightning-torn skies
That time in vain flies
On his part, twenty-nine-year-old Captain Kaichi Hirate writes:
And why should I torment myself? The world is no more than a dewdrop upon the surface of a bellflower.
And here are Sergeant Masakatsu Hozumi’s words:
When I cross the yellow current, what I would like to do is to turn the chaplet that I am wearing into a thousand dewdrops upon a thousand blades of grass.
Prior to his death, Iwane Matsui confided in his family:
I have exposed Japan to the shame of defeat. It is thus entirely natural that I should make honourable amends for it with my own life.
Only one of the condemned was executed by firing squad: fifty-five-year-old Colonel Satoshi Oiye, the former commander of the garrison stationed on Negros Island. He writes:
I was able to lead a perfectly happy life. I only blush with shame for not having rendered my Emperor anything but the meagrest services.
On 22nd December, 1948, General Akira Muto declares: ‘My impression of the entire situation is that it concerns someone else, not myself’. In response, his wife uses a tanka:
How I love to hear
the beautiful words spoken
by those unbroken — for a warrior knows no fear
even when his death is near!
Shortly before the Japanese capitulation, Hideki Tojo, who replaced Prince Konoye at the head of the imperial government, visited a doctor so as to have his chest marked with the point corresponding to his heart’s location. On 11th September, 1945, he attempted to commit suicide as he was about to be arrested. The bullet did not end his life. In Sugamo, he was the sole prisoner to move about in shackles. His final poem states:
The sun and the moon are no more
than flickering fireflies,
Next to Amida’s sple
ndour,
lighting the path before my eyes.
‘“War criminals” were the genuine embodiment of Japanese nationalism’, Hanayama states. ‘It was thus natural to suppose that they would die in harmony with the often-quoted words of old: “Seven times shall I reincarnate and seven times shall I offer my lives to the fatherland”’. Indeed, all of them took their leave of life ‘not with love, but with gratitude’ (Nietzsche), undoubtedly whispering the (pass)word ‘ketsubetsu’, which evokes both eternal separation and the courteous exchange of the very same bowl of pure water.
The American authorities refused to tell the families where the bodies had been put. The ashes of the execution victims were scattered to the wind of their native country.
A few months later, the executioner met his own demise through electrocution, having touched a high-voltage cable.
One can only comprehend the Japanese military ethic by connecting it to a certain conception of honour. Quoting a samurai precept, Montherlant once said:
One must, at all times, keep one’s promise, even when the latter has been given to a dog.
As for Spengler, he specified the following:
Honour is a matter of blood, not intelligence. If one needs to ponder its essence, it is because one has none.
During the last war, 4,600 kamikazes, most of whom were married and had children of their own, chose to revive the spirit of the samurai, according to which ‘loyalty is greater than fire’. Their names are inscribed upon the rice paper rolls kept in Kannonji Temple, Tokyo.
At the end of the above-mentioned book, Mr Pierre Pascal evokes the memory of Japanese author Yukio Mishima, who took his own life in public on 25th November, 1970, on the very spot where the Tokyo Trial had previously been held. He did so because he could no longer bear to live in an age when the notion of fatherland had lost all meaning.
Controversies and Viewpoints Page 36
