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Ideologies of Racial Superiority & Purity: Germany, Japan, and Mass Murder in World War II – Transcript
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- Professor Daniel Chirot explains that both German and Japanese atrocities in World War II shared a sense of racial superiority and purity.
- Professor Daniel Chirot notes that the Germans and Japanese held a contempt for potential allies and subjugated occupied populations.
- Professor Daniel Chirot identifies ideological certitude and fear of annihilation by enemies as the remaining shared characteristics.
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Today's speaker is Professor Daniel Chirot. He is the Herbert J. Ellison professor of Russian and Eurasian studies at the University of Washington's Henry M. Jackson School. He has authored books about social change, ethnic and nationalist conflicts, Eastern Europe and tyranny.
He coauthored the book Why Not Kill Them All about Political Mass Murder, which was published in 2010. He was the coauthor of a book called The Shape of the New Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World. His most recent book, which was published just this past spring, is titled, You Say You Want a Revolution, Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences.
All of these were with Princeton University Press. In this most recent book, Professor Chirot examined why so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies. And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve.
Professor Chirot also founded the journal, East European Politics and Societies and has received support from, among others, the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Mellon foundations, as well as from the US State Department. He has consulted for the US government, the Ford Foundation, CARE and other NGOs in Eastern Europe and West Africa.
Dr. Chirot's pre-recorded presentation will be shown in this webinar without captions, and a link will be provided in the chat to a captioned version available on YouTube. We are recording this session, and a video will be posted on the Stroum Center's YouTube channel in the next one to two days. Everyone who registered will receive an email with the link.
So this is a pre-recorded lecture, and it will be about thirty five minutes. We'll take a short three minute break and we’ll have Q&A right afterwards. I always begin with questions from students, but then I look forward to your thoughtful questions. For time management issues, short and to the point questions directly relevant to the lecture topic are more likely to be posed to our speaker.
Please keep that in mind. Apologies in advance if we run out of time to answer your question. All right, let's hear this wonderful lecture. I want to talk about a comparison between the German and Japanese horrors that they inflicted on the territories that they
occupied during World War Two and what this comparison might tell us about other such nightmares that happened, a few before, some later, and about the dangers today, and what we can learn about those from looking at this past.
The most famous book about what the Japanese did during World War two. Is the book by Iris Chang called The Rape of Nanking. The subtitle is The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
Now, what the Japanese did in Nanjing was terrible. In December of 1937, after having met fierce resistance by the Chinese nationalist army in Shanghai, they conquered Nanjing, which was not that far from Shanghai and had been the capital of nationless China for a while.
Nanjing surrendered, and the Japanese came in and committed mass atrocities. They murdered, according to Iris Chang, 300,000 people. That's probably somewhat of an exaggeration. It was at least 100,000, according to census reports made before the war.
And eyewitness reports by Europeans and some Americans who were living in Nanjing, it was probably close to two hundred thousand, might have been somewhat more, somewhat less. That's not really the issue. What they did was, by the international standards of that time, a war crime. They murdered, they tortured, they raped on a mass scale, women, children.
The atrocities were almost unbelievable. And we have pictures of them. I'm not going to put any up. You can find them if you want to. The thing is that this was approved by the high military command of the Japanese military, including by one of their leading generals, who was a prince in the imperial family and other leading generals,
some of whom were prosecuted after the war as war criminals. What the Japanese did in Nanjing was meant to frighten the Chinese into surrendering by showing them what would happen if they continued to resist.
Of course, it didn't work. The Chinese continued to resist and suffered mass casualties until the end of the war in 1945. Now, what the Japanese did in Nanjing was hardly unique. They committed atrocities everywhere that they occupied.
In total, they probably killed about 15 million Chinese, some directly, some by famine, by disease caused by the war. Fifteen million is probably a conservative estimate. They murdered and tortured prisoners of war, Chinese and others.
They conducted terrible biological experiments in something called Unit 731. One of them was to freeze prisoners’ limbs and parts of their bodies while they were alive and then hack them off in order to judge what methods of freezing work best.
And some of the scientists who were involved in that later on after the war used that knowledge to freeze fish for commercial use and made a lot of money. By the way, the Americans found out about this and captured some of the scientists who had been involved in these terrible experiments, a lot of which were designed to produce biological weapons that were then used on the Chinese.
And the Americans wanted that knowledge. And so they didn't prosecute the scientists. They used them and they acquired that knowledge. And in fact, the Americans concealed for a long time the existence of Unit 731. Aside from that, the Chinese used forced labor.
Very cruelly, they forced occupied territories to hand over laborers, many of whom died, probably around three million Indonesians from what was then the occupied Dutch East Indies died that way, and others, not in such huge numbers, but also in substantial numbers from other occupied territories, from Malaya, from the Philippines, and so on.
The Japanese kidnaped women to use as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers, the so-called Comfort Women. Now, when Iris Chang said that this was the forgotten Holocaust of World War Two, did she mean that this was exactly the same as what the Nazis did?
Well, I don't think that's what she really meant because there are some differences. There was one key difference that I'll try to explain. What she meant was that the level of horror, the level of cruelty, the level of outright viciousness was very similar. And indeed it was. I'm well aware of the fact that if one compares the Nazi Holocaust to other such events before or after,
one can be accused of a kind of Holocaust denial, a kind of a soft denial, not not to say it didn't happen, but kind of a hard denial is not put forward by any reputable historian, but a soft denial that says, well, yes, yes.
I mean, the Nazis did this, but others did it, too. And there were a lot of terrible deaths of civilians and outrages during World War Two. And both sides killed a lot of civilians. And so that doesn't negate the fact that what the Nazis did was terrible.
But, yes, that's what people do in war. And I don't believe that. I think that what they did and what the Japanese did went far beyond what the Allies did, though there were terrible things that happened, and I’ll try to explain that. By the way, I don't accept the excuses by some conservatives,
particularly by the conservative German historian Ernst Nolte, that the whole Nazi episode was in part, in large part, a reaction against and fear of Stalinist communism.
I think that the genocide perpetrated against the Jews can't be explained that way unless you believe that communism was itself a Jewish plot. Now, actually, Hitler and many conservatives in Europe did believe that. But this notion is actually complete nonsense.
So to get back to the main point: to similarities, there were four main similarities. One was that both the Germans and the Japanese had a sense of racial superiority.
We are superior, the Aryan-German people, the Japanese people, and we want to remain a pure race and not mix or soil our bloodline by mixing with others. And this racial superiority, therefore, entitles us to rule others and to have our way just because we are superior.
I have to point out that, of course, this was not unique to Germany and Japan in the 1930s and during World War Two, this was a very common attitude by European colonialists, for example, or by White Americans to justify slavery and later racial discrimination, which still exists to this day in the United States.