The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  It would be unfair to this courageous woman to reduce her efforts to a religious impulse. I had no reason to doubt her dedication to finding the truth. And she was politically astute. The fact that she often appeared to enjoy her fame, or, indeed, her notoriety, did not bother me. Her vanity, such as it was, no doubt helped to keep her going in very trying, even dangerous circumstances. But there was, nonetheless, an element of zeal in her which was, if not perhaps religiously inspired, certainly moral. There was a glint in her eyes as she told more and more outrageous stories about her hometown. The first printed text in Passau, dated 1476, showed pictures of the destruction of the synagogue. A gasworks now stood where the Jewish community hall once was. A neighbor had been a guard at Auschwitz. He had hidden a cache of treasures there, gone back to retrieve his treasure, and shot the friend who had helped him when he learned that the friend was a Jew. This story was made into a film, called Abraham’s Gold. I had no reason to doubt Rosmus. She was scrupulous about the truth. But there is a point beyond which the exposure of myths spawns its own legends.

  The story of the swastika breads, for example. Every year members of the far-right DVU (German People’s Union), followed by bands of skinheads, assorted misfits, and resentful old comrades, meet in Passau at the Nibelungen Hall. They rant, they sing songs, they drink beer, and no doubt listen to the old stories again. And possibly some Nazi souvenirs change hands. But as though this weren’t sinister enough, a story went around about loaves of bread baked in the shape of the swastika, which were sold, crisp and warm, on the market square. It was picked up by reporters, who used it to add a piquancy to the image of Passau, this incorrigible town, where Hitler had lived and Eichmann was married. Anja Rosmus was not responsible for spreading this story, which turned out to be untrue. But it was typical of the kinds of myths that grow in dark places.

  Rosmus told me about something else, however, which was undoubtedly true. There had been a small concentration camp outside Passau, a so-called Aussenlager (subsidiary camp) of Mauthausen. It was one of the things nobody had talked about in Passau when Anja Rosmus was growing up, attending the Gymnasium where Himmler’s father once taught Latin. There had been the usual debates in Passau about the proper way to memorialize the war. A decision was made in 1946 to rename the town center in memory of the victims of National Socialism. And a memorial was planned for the same purpose. Neither project came off. Instead, years later, a memorial stone was placed in the Innstadt cemetery. Soldiers were buried there, as well as more direct victims of Nazism. This, said the mayor, was good enough. The site of the camp would have slipped the public memory entirely had not a local branch of the Social Democratic Party decided to sponsor a memorial stone in 1983.

  The place was not easy to find. There was a lake dissected by a large dam. I walked toward it, past a sign which said: “Auf die Dauer hilft nur Power” (“In the long run, only power works”). The only sounds were of birds singing and cows lowing softly in their long wooden sheds (former barracks?). An old man in a blue peaked cap was working near the dam. I asked him whether this dam had been built by prisoners “back then.” He said, “Ja,” and resumed his work. Did he happen to know where the memorial stone was? “No,” he said, without looking up. I was about to give up when I spotted it, almost invisible, hidden behind bushes. A simple gray stone marker was planted in the earth. “For the victims of the subsidiary concentration camp of Mauthausen in Oberilzmühle, 1942–1945,” it said. Under the text were five crosses and the date of the stone, 1983. The letters were designed to resemble runic signs, the ancient and supposedly mystical Teutonic script favored by the Nazis.

  It was an insensitive choice of style, no doubt made by people of goodwill. But archaism of one kind or another is ubiquitous in Germany. The more insecure, the newer a regime or institution, the more it will fabricate tradition. Much of nineteenth-century Germany is marked by phony medievalism. The Nazis in their way continued the practice. And it persisted in the rebuilt façades of postwar German towns. After all, what were a mere twelve years compared with the glories of the Holy Roman Empire, the Teutonic Knights, or baroque and rococo?

  The town hall of Passau actually contains late Gothic remnants, though most of it dates from the nineteenth century. Ferdinand Wagner (1847–1927) painted the inside with murals from the Nibelungen saga. The outside wall facing the Danube has a late Gothic style. I had made an appointment to meet one of Anja Rosmus’s adversaries there. His name was Gottfried Dominik. He ran the tourist office, next door to the town hall.

  Dominik was in his mid-forties. He sported a mustache, and his pink forehead shone through a thinning fringe of blond hair. He wore a Bavarian-style suit with horn buttons. His expression was not unfriendly, but pained, as though he were suffering from indigestion. When agitated, he would turn red.

  As I sat down in front of his desk, Dominik pointed to a framed motto on the wall. It was signed by a German cardinal. “That’s my motto in life,” said Dominik. It read: “Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.” I nodded and asked about Anja Rosmus. His face instantly took on a pained expression, and Dominik began to explain. There were two issues here, he said, the good name of Passau and the personality of Frau Rosmus. Passau lay in a peculiar part of Bavaria. People here were somewhat proud and conservative. And along comes this Frau Rosmus calling Passau a Nazi town, insulting people left and right, and putting on a “perfect one-woman show.” This is very bad for Passau. One should really not be surprised that it caused a great deal of trouble.

  Yes, I said, I could see that. But were Rosmus’s allegations true? Dominik chewed his mustache and opened a brown folder on his desk. He produced a newspaper article about Rosmus and Passau published in the Sunday Times of London. His face flushed as he tapped the article with his index finger. “All lies,” he said, “all lies!” Could he be more specific? “This story about the swastika bread. There never was a swastika bread.” But is that what Rosmus had said? Dominik didn’t exactly know, but he was sure she was behind the article.

  Wishing to avoid the topic of the swastika bread for the moment, I asked Dominik whether he thought Rosmus’s book about Passau during the war was factually true. His agitation subsided and the pained expression returned. That, he said, was difficult for him to answer. The thing is, he himself wasn’t from Passau. His family was. Then he pointed at two glossy photographs on the wall. They were tourist office pictures of Bavarian landscapes. “Look at those,” he said. “The truth is not merely a matter of detail, but of color, of tone.” Then, turning back to the newspaper article, he said: “But these are conscious fabrications, terrible lies that blacken the image of our town. And she adores her international fame, the good girl against the bad city.”

  Perhaps, I ventured, the problem began with the manner in which history was suppressed for so long. No, said Dominik, this was quite untrue. “I always knew a great deal about the past. I met Albert Speer, and I knew Göring’s daughter. Why, I even met Hitler’s secretary. No, I always took an interest in historical things. I read Speer’s memoirs and the Anne Frank book. And my own grandmother was beaten by the Nazis, and my mother had witnessed a death march. You must also realize it was more difficult for us. I am from 1946. Our teachers didn’t tell us much. But for Frau Rosmus’s generation it was quite different. Nothing was suppressed.”

  I told Dominik about my trip to the site of the concentration camp, and asked him whether 1983 had not been a bit late to officially remember the place. He made a jovial gesture with his hand and invited me to go next door for a stein of good local beer. On the way, he said that the camps had been bad, pretty bad, but a lot of nonsense was talked about them too. People are always saying that Dachau was a death camp. “Completely untrue! It was just a labor camp.”

  We drank our beer. The foam stuck to his mustache, making him look old beyond his years. I asked him again about the local camp and the small hidden memorial. Dominik showed signs of distre
ss. “It was difficult,” he admitted, “very difficult. I know what you mean. But let me give you my personal opinion. When you have a crippled arm, you don’t really want to show it around. It was a low point in our history, back then. But it was only twelve years in thousands of years of history. And so people tend to hide it, just as a person with a crippled arm is not likely to wear a short-sleeved shirt.”

  I looked at Dominik’s pink face and his frothy white mustache. He was not a bad man, just a singularly unimaginative one. He was from the same ’68 generation as the radically antifascist intellectuals. But when others were demonstrating or uncovering fascist continuities, or judging their parents, Gottfried Dominik, like many, many others, was an obedient boy, a member of the local Catholic youth association, a conservative out of habit. He didn’t judge his parents. He talked just like them.

  We chatted amicably enough. He asked me what I was working on. I told him about my book. Ah, he said, he had been to Japan once, to Tokyo. But he found it impossible to talk to the people there. They had no understanding of the way the Germans had faced their history. “They saw our honesty toward the past as a weakness, as a loss of face toward former enemies. No, I didn’t understand them at all. What with their emperor staying in power. No, they have a completely different idea about history, a completely different way of dealing with it.”

  HANAOKA

  In the summer of 1945, not long before the end of the war, Yachita Tsuneo was only five years old. But he can still remember the “Hanaoka Incident.” He didn’t know it would be called that, of course. Nor did he know exactly what happened on the night of July 30. But he remembers seeing a crowd of men surrounding Chinese slave workers cowering on their knees in front of the village community hall. There were screams of “Death to the Chinks! Death to the Chinks!” The Chinks, it was said, had killed a Japanese and cannibalized him. Yachita remembers catching a glimpse of bamboo sticks coming down on the naked Chinese, before he was whisked away by his mother. This was not for young children.

  What actually happened was this: On the night of July 30, more than 800 Chinese slave workers in a small town in the northeast of Japan had escaped into the hills. The local militia, mostly farmers and shopkeepers armed with bamboo spears and clubs, helped the police to hunt them down. Rabbit hunting they called it. The Chinese were marched into a yard in front of the village community hall and forced to sit on their knees, hands tied behind their backs, naked from the waist up, for three days and nights, without food or drink. It was the hottest time of the year. Yachita later heard that some Chinese had tried to drink their own urine. About fifty men were tortured to death inside the hall. Some were suspended from the ceiling by their thumbs and beaten. Others had water forced down their throats, after which men would stamp on their stomachs. Schoolboys were told by their teachers to spit on the Chinks. And they were handed sticks to beat them with. In one village, not far from where Yachita saw the prisoners, teenage boys of the local youth association clubbed several Chinese to death.

  The slaves had been brought over from China to Hanaoka, in Akita Prefecture, in 1944. This was not unusual. The Imperial Army was paid to hand over POWs and kidnapped civilians to work as slaves for Japanese corporations. About 40,000 came to Japan during the war. About 7,000 died. A relatively small number, perhaps, compared with the casualties among the 7.8 million foreigners working in Nazi Germany, but the brutality with which the Chinese were treated was bad enough. About 2 million Koreans lived in Japan, but since Korea was formally part of the Japanese empire, and all Koreans were regarded as Japanese subjects, their position was different, if not necessarily better. Nearly half of these resident Koreans were conscript workers, pressed into service during the war, and often maltreated. Statistically, the Hanaoka Incident was a small affair, and it was probably one of many similar “incidents,” but through sheer chance it is the only one whose details are known.

  The Chinese in Hanaoka were made to work for Kajima Gumi, a large construction company under contract to the Dowa Mining Company. They worked in the copper mine. And in midwinter they were ordered to build a dam in the river and redirect the stream. They wore thin rags, even in winter, when Akita is buried in thick snow. They subsisted on a diet of rotten apple skins and one bowl a day of watery rice gruel. On a visit to Hanaoka, an official from the Health Ministry decided their treatment was too soft. “They should be squeezed like a damp towel until not one drop remains,” he said. Of the 986 Chinese, most of them farmers and POWs, only 568 survived the war.

  There had been a vague plan behind the June 30 uprising—to reach American and Australian POWs who were in a small camp nearby. Together they would find their way to the coast, where they would grab a fishing boat to get to Hokkaido, which they thought had already been liberated. If the plan failed, they would drown themselves in the sea. In fact, they got no farther than the hills around the labor camp. A monument erected near the site of the camp long after the war describes the uprising as a blow struck to “protect the dignity of man.” In September 1945, after the Japanese surrender, a court in the city of Akita tried the Chinese survivors and found them guilty of breaching national security by rioting in wartime. They were sentenced to prison for life.

  The Hanaoka Incident would never have become an incident—that is to say, it would have slipped into the same obscurity that cloaks much of the history of slave labor in wartime Japan—if American occupation authorities had not caught employees of Kajima Gumi digging up a mass grave to hide the evidence of their treatment of the Chinese. This led to the only war crimes trial held in Japan against a private corporation. The Chinese prisoners were released from jail in Akita and appeared as witnesses in the trial of their former bosses. Eight local employees of Kajima Gumi were sentenced by the Allied tribunal in Yokohama in 1948, some of them to death by hanging. None of them was very important and all were released in 1956, as was, a few years earlier, the man formally responsible for slave labor during the war, Kishi Nobusuke, who, as we know, went on to become Prime Minister. And Kajima Gumi, now Kajima Kensetsu, is one of the largest construction companies in the world, with huge interests in China.

  A few Chinese survivors of the Incident remained in Japan. One of them committed suicide when Chou Enlai signed an agreement with the Japanese government in 1972 absolving Japan from any responsibility for what happened in the war and so of any obligation to pay compensation to the Chinese victims. And until a few years ago the Chinese government effectively prevented Chinese survivors from making a fuss about it. China needed cheap Japanese loans. Not only were the former victims cut off from Japanese compensation, but in the xenophobic logic of Mao’s China, Chinese who had spent time in Japan during the war were under suspicion anyway. During the Cultural Revolution, the former slave workers were accused of having been Japanese spies. One can only imagine how they were treated by the Red Guards.

  But at least the information was there, albeit mostly in American archives. Much of this information was released in the late 1980s through the Freedom of Information Act. At the same time the few remaining Chinese survivors became freer to travel to Japan and press their claims, if not against the Japanese government, then at least against Kajima Kensetsu. In 1990 a group of four survivors visited Hanaoka for the first time since the war. They could hardly recognize a thing, for all the landmarks were gone. All they had to go on were their memories. They were met in Hanaoka, now a district of the city of Odate, by a handful of Japanese, including two men who had refused, against all odds, to let the memory die. One of them was Yachita Tsuneo.

  Yachita took time off from his job as a trade union organizer to show me around the town. He spoke in the thick accent of the northeast, a clipped brogue, which reflects, so one is told, the cold climate. He dressed casually in the manner of Japanese men who take pride in their independence from corporate life: colorful open-necked shirt, slacks, sports jacket. We had been out drinking the night before at a Korean restaurant, for he wanted me to meet the
Korean couple who owned it and hear their stories about anti-Korean discrimination. They were among the very few Koreans in town. They were his friends. Yachita pointed out several times in the course of the evening that Japanese had treated Koreans and Chinese as subhumans. He remembered a Korean girl in his school whom he and his Japanese classmates hadn’t really regarded as a human being. And this was after the war.

  The area where the Chinese camp used to be still belongs to the Dowa Mining Company. On the dirt road leading to the stone monument that marks the former camp is a sign which reads: “Danger! No Trespassing.” We ignored the sign and saw a Dowa company car following us from a distance. Yachita laughed and said it was always like this. The landscape had a kind of poisonous beauty. The reddish soil was covered with flinty slate the color of green mold. There was a large lake, used by Dowa for dumping toxic materials. There was an orange film on the surface, but when you tossed a stone into the water, black bubbles emerged from the thick slime. The former Chinese camp was at the bottom of this lake.

  Yachita pointed out the main landmarks from a spot at the top of a hill near the location of the old camp. Hanaoka lay in a large flat basin surrounded by snow-topped mountains, which looked from a distance like chocolate cakes dripping with cream. Not only had the towns and villages on the plain changed, but the landscape itself was no longer what it was in 1945. The lake was new. Rivers followed different courses. Hills had disappeared to make way for roads or new buildings, while other hills, of slate and sludge, had been formed. A former lake was now a field of soggy scrub. The town hall had disappeared. The old community hall had been razed in the 1960s and replaced with a dull concrete building on the other side of the yard where the Chinese prisoners had been held. There was a large supermarket where the village shops used to be, and Odate sprawled where once there had been paddy fields.