In August 1942, an internal Sicherheitsdienst (SD) memorandum raised concerns surrounding the media currently circulating in Germany about its Asian ally: “The previous view, that the German soldier is the best in the world, has become somewhat confused by descriptions of the Japanese swimmers who removed mines laid outside Hong Kong, or of the death-defying Japanese pilots who swooped down upon enemy ships with their bombs. This has resulted in something a bit like an inferiority complex. The Japanese look like a kind of ‘Super-Teuton’ [Germane im Quadrat].”Footnote 1 In its anxiety that the German public might be taking the wrong lessons from the incessant drumbeat of positive news coverage around Japan's string of victories in the winter of 1941–1942, this statement speaks to the ambivalent position of the Japanese within Nazi propaganda. On the one hand, these images of Japanese self-sacrificial loyalty to the nation reaffirmed the patterns of behavior and thought commonly valorized in the Nazi regime's captive media. At the same time, the reality that it was the Japanese—and not the Germans themselves—performing these feats of valor raised the comparison that the author found so demoralizing, and potentially even destabilizing. Nevertheless, despite the author's reservations, the conclusion was that this media's benefits outweighed the political risks because of its utility in highlighting the “inner weaknesses of Europe” for those elements of the German public still skeptical of National Socialism.Footnote 2 In effect, the memorandum conceded, images of Japanese heroism could be persuasive as propaganda because they revealed the weakness and corruption endemic to Western modernity by contrast, which in turn affirmed the Nazi regime's decision to stake its future on a utopian “counter-modernity” framed around a synthesis of völkisch cultural authenticity and technological modernism.
Frequently discussed, and even more often misunderstood, the German-Japanese alliance during the Second World War has long been overdue for a critical reappraisal. Recent scholarship on the cultural and ideological dimensions of German-Japanese relations has provided new insight into the vitality and depth of a relationship once dismissed as “hollow,” with much of this scholarship focusing on Nazism—and, to a lesser extent, Japanese fascism—as the underlying ethos informing the structure, content, and limitations of the relationship.Footnote 3 The consensus position of this scholarship, that the Japanese were represented within German propaganda as a politically and culturally sympathetic nation in order to justify a politically expedient and ideologically justifiable alliance, echoes a broader reevaluation of the Axis alliances advanced recently by scholars such as Christian Goeschel, Stefan Ihrig, and Benjamin Martin, among others.Footnote 4 Although this scholarship has offered important insights in highlighting the frequently performative nature of Nazism's transnational entanglements, this framing can potentially occlude the longer historical context in which these relationships developed, as well as the underlying prejudices and preconceptions that made certain claims more tenable than others. In other words, it may explain why the Nazi state would have been invested in producing propaganda about Japan that aligned with its own strategic and ideological interests, but it has a harder time in locating the source of this propaganda's apparent success.Footnote 5
Nazi Germany's positive representations of Japan did not emerge in response to the two states’ signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 or the Tripartite Pact in 1940; indeed, one could credibly argue that Japan's visibility in German media during the 1930s actively undermined the German state's foreign policy agenda in East Asia, given its longstanding—and highly profitable—relationship with republican China.Footnote 6 Neither was the alliance with Japan a product of political pragmatism, as was the case with the patronage of anticolonial activists in Berlin recently analyzed by David Motadel.Footnote 7 To be sure, the emphasis on certain ideas and tropes echoed the political priorities of the Nazi state, but never without a degree of ideological friction. Far from having the luxury of constructing from whole cloth what the German people knew and thought about the Japanese, the Nazi state was obliged to build upon a longer history of cultural fantasies, stereotypes, and projections. Ultimately, what made the German-Japanese alliance, at least within German media, not just viable but successful—arguably much more so than the German-Italian alliance—were the preexisting popular narratives of Japan in Germany that aligned, more or less, with specific elements of Nazi ideology.
Central among these was a critique of Western liberal modernity as soulless and corrupt, which aligned with the claim that Japan had successfully evaded the “trap” of modernization by virtue of its superior cultural values. This positive appraisal of Japanese culture first emerged during the Russo-Japanese War in the German liberal media, and then—after the brief rupture of the First World War—resurfaced in the 1920s, this time on the political right.Footnote 8 Despite some differences in political orientation and emphasis, what connected the rhetoric of the Wilhelmine and late Weimar eras was its shared projection of Japan as an alternative and preferable model of modernity. In this regard, Nazism's subsequent fascination with Japan represented the convergence of several parallel intellectual trajectories in Germany during the early twentieth century, including the growing strength of the völkisch movement and the emergence of geopolitics as one among several “radical countermovements to Western modernity.”Footnote 9 Like Japan's contemporaneous “revolt against the West,” the purpose of this discourse was not to reject modernity per se, but rather to “overcome” it.Footnote 10
Most immediately relevant, however, was the growing influence of a variant of Orientalism unique to central Europe and memorably described by Suzanne Marchand as “furious.”Footnote 11 Rebelling against their predecessors’ Eurocentrism, these intellectuals and iconoclasts offered a new perspective on the Orient that functioned simultaneously as a critique of contemporary Western civilization. Marchand has argued that this strain of neoromantic Orientalism, as reflected in high-profile literary works such as Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha (1922) and in institutions such as Hermann Graf Keyserling's Schule der Weisheit, was at the apex of its cultural influence in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, but that Germany's domestic stabilization in the mid-1920s and the consumption-oriented optimism of the era displaced these cultural critiques before they were sidelined entirely in favor of theories more explicitly aligned with Nazi racial ideology.Footnote 12 The ongoing German fascination with Japan, however, suggests that this may not have been entirely the case and that elements of this discourse continued to remain politically viable throughout the Nazi era. At its core, the prevailing image of Japanese culture in Nazi German—often to the chagrin of the Japanese themselves—was informed by an underlying skepticism toward liberal modernity. Yet whereas earlier intellectuals had looked to the East for “wisdom,” the Nazis were more interested in the Japanese specifically for their purported cultural ideals surrounding honor and sacrifice. It was this narrative, in which Japan functioned as an idealized illiberal counter-modernity, that informed the German fascination with Japan, and which in turn animated the two countries’ eventual alliance.
The Way of the Warrior Is to Be Found in Death
The specter of voluntary death had haunted the German-Japanese relationship since its beginning, first emerging out of the pervasive European fascination with the ritualized form of suicide known as seppuku or harakiri.Footnote 13 One of the first Western firsthand accounts of seppuku was written in 1868 by A. B. Mitford, secretary to the British ambassador, who observed the death of a samurai condemned for his involvement in an attack on foreign personnel stationed in Kobe and wrote a detailed account describing the full ritual.Footnote 14 What is notable about Mitford's account, aside from its “textbook” description of seppuku, are the conflicting emotions expressed by the author; Mitford was simultaneously fascinated by the precision and self-control that seppuku required and repelled by the act itself. Similarly, the first account of the practice by a German, while correctly noting that it was no longer widely practiced in Meiji Japan, marveled at the aesthetic refinement achieved by individual samurai in completing the ritual.Footnote 15 It was this combination of dread and fascination that defined Western associations with the ritual and, by extension, with Japanese culture, well into the early twentieth century; indeed, this was arguably the subtext of the pervasive “yellow peril” (gelbe Gefahr) discourse of the era, which both admonished Europeans to defend themselves and “their most sacred treasures” from an imagined threat emanating from East Asia and acknowledged that such fears were warranted.Footnote 16
Throughout Europe, early accounts of seppuku converged with the contemporaneous Orientalist fascination with Japanese art, inspiring a range of artistic works set in Japan and prominently portraying suicide as central to the logic of Japanese society and culture, including Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885) and Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly (1904).Footnote 17 The cumulative impact of this material both familiarized the European public with these concepts and created an enduring association between suicide and Japanese culture. There is perhaps no more succinct summation of this stereotype than Emile Durkheim's famously dismissive attitude toward both seppuku and Japan itself in his sociological analysis of suicide: “We know how readily the Japanese slit their bellies for the most trivial reasons.”Footnote 18 The irony of Durkheim's statement is that seppuku was rarely performed in Japan at the time he was writing, and even during the Tokugawa era the act had been tightly regulated politically and socially.Footnote 19
Notwithstanding Durkheim's flippant dismissal, seppuku was historically a form of social privilege, an act that both required and reaffirmed personal honor. Institutionalized during the Tokugawa period as the “punishment of choice for the samurai class,” it was an act that both allowed the condemned to redeem his personal honor through proper adherence to the norms of the ritual—as seen in Mitford's account—and served as a form of social policing between the samurai and the nonprivileged orders of Japanese society. As expressed through the symbolic performance of seppuku, honor was predicated on a samurai's willingness to voluntarily die by his own hand. This interdependence of self-reflexive violence and honor is a longstanding trope within Japanese martial culture, most famously but not exclusively represented through the frequently misunderstood ethos of bushido.Footnote 20 Perhaps the best summation of this concept comes from the opening line of Yamamoto Tsunetomo's eighteenth-century treatise on bushido, the Hagakure: “The way of the warrior [bushido] is to be found in death.”Footnote 21 Although this text was not published—or even widely available in Japan—until after the Russo-Japanese War, it is this kind of sentiment that has subsequently defined the prevailing image of bushido for many as a “cult of death.”Footnote 22
Even Nitobe Inazō, whose Bushido: The Soul of Japan reframed Japanese ethics in order to specifically appeal to European sensibilities, devoted a chapter to the problem of suicide. As a Christian convert, Nitobe was particularly sensitive to Western perceptions of practices like seppuku. Hence, while reassuring his readers that he did “not wish to be understood as asserting religious or even moral justification of suicide,” Nitobe did try to make them at least understand how a voluntary death in the Japanese context could be understood as a “question of honor.”Footnote 23 Drawing parallels and connections with Western history, Nitobe suggested that an honorable, even heroic, suicide was not as foreign as it may have initially appeared: “I dare say that many good Christians, if only they were honest enough, will confess the fascination of, if not positive admiration for, the sublime composure with which Cato, Brutus, Petronius, and a host of other ancient worthies terminated their own earthly existence.”Footnote 24 Nitobe never explicitly condoned or endorsed the practice of seppuku, but he did attempt to explicate it within the specific context of bushido. At the same time, Nitobe understood bushido as a moral system without a future; however meaningful it may have been in previous eras, he concluded that it is a necessary casualty of Japanese modernization, destined to be eventually replaced by one of two hegemonic global systems: Christianity or capitalism.Footnote 25 However sympathetically he portrays bushido, Nitobe understood it as a system of ethics irreconcilable with liberal modernity, much in the same way that chivalry had succumbed to obsolescence in late medieval Europe.
In drawing this connection between suicide and the evolution of social norms, Nitobe was echoing Durkheim, who theorized suicide as a manifestation of social dysfunction. Durkheim's theory, which foregrounded social structures rather than individual pathology, offered a secular perspective on the phenomenon in which the moral well-being of a society could be quantified, evaluated, and then subjected to intervention by the state and its agents.Footnote 26 Like many Europeans of his era, Durkheim subscribed to the prevailing Orientalist stereotype surrounding suicide in Japan, which he analyzed via his discussion of “altruistic suicide.” It may be tempting to dismiss Durkheim's concept of “altruistic suicide” as little more than a series of Orientalist tropes, repackaged in his sociological analysis in order to explain the behavior and morality of “inferior” (i.e., non-Western) and premodern societies. Indeed, his single other reference to Japan is a secondhand account of Japanese “fanatics” throwing themselves into the sea or sealing themselves into caves in devotion to their “idols.”Footnote 27 Yet, for Durkheim, “altruistic suicide” also encompasses acts of self-sacrifice by soldiers, which leads him to question whether “altruistic suicide”—carried out in the interest of preserving social well-being—necessarily belongs to a fundamentally different category of behavior than do the suicides carried out under more “individualistic” pretexts. He acknowledged that some of his readers might question whether acts of self-sacrifice should even be considered suicide, or alternatively considered as a subset of “heroic suicide.”Footnote 28 Although Durkheim rejected this distinction as theoretically unsustainable, and as a fundamental misunderstanding of suicide as a sociological phenomenon, he recognized the “sentimental reasons” why individuals would be reluctant to categorize self-sacrifice as a form of suicide. It is precisely this distinction—between the modern, individualistic sociology of suicide and the communitarian-oriented concept of self-sacrifice—that Nazi propaganda would exploit in attempting to explain how suicide, in certain contexts, could be interpreted not as a symptom of social dysfunction but rather as a mechanism by which modernity itself could be redeemed.Footnote 29
Preparation for a Beautiful Death
More than any other single event, the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) redefined Japan's position on the global stage. Not only did Japan's victory secure its position as a rising great power, but its success in building a modern military capable of competing with its European rivals directly challenged the geopolitical status quo.Footnote 30 Observers in Germany watched the war unfold with interest, and not only because Russia's defeat had significant implications for German foreign policy.Footnote 31 What held the attention of the German press was the discipline and resilience of the Japanese military, even to the point of a seemingly pervasive “defiance of death” (Todesverachtung). Yet whereas Durkheim had attributed the sanctioning of suicide in Japan to a form of social dysfunction typical of the non-Western world, by 1905 the German liberal press was beginning to reappraise this position: “It has been expressed that the cause for their defiance of death can be found in the inferior culture of the people, that culture tempers wild battlefield fanaticism. Woe to us, if that were true! For then, culture would be a malady that would condemn all peoples influenced by it to ruin! But this is not so; culture simply converts fanaticism into a purposeful heroic defiance of death.”Footnote 32 No longer was the Japanese tradition of voluntary death evidence of its social underdevelopment; rather, it was precisely these cultural values that enabled them to successfully wage a modern, industrialized war not just as soldiers, but as heroes.
This narrative, which gained purchase among elements of German society increasingly ambivalent about the presumed superiority of Western civilization, was a product of the Meiji state's gambit for recognition as a credible great power. As scholars such as Yoshihisa Matsusaka and Naoko Shimazu have demonstrated, the claim that Japanese soldiers were eager to sacrifice their lives in order to achieve an “honorable war death” was an invention of Japanese state propaganda, and media coverage of Japanese soldiers cheerfully sacrificing themselves for the nation—whether as “human bullets” at Port Arthur or otherwise—was actually more the exception than the rule.Footnote 33 The subtext of this propaganda, however, was still fundamentally the perceived interdependence of honor and voluntary death. Although personal honor had previously been a prerogative of the samurai, hence their exclusive right to a voluntary death, the transformation of the Japanese military into a conscription-based institution necessitated a “democratization” of the concept of honor from one contingent on social status to one premised instead on performative allegiance to the nation, with the ultimate expression of this loyalty being voluntary self-sacrifice. As domestic propaganda, this rhetoric had marginal impact; most Japanese soldiers, unsurprisingly, preferred to return home to their families.Footnote 34 German observers, however, unaware of the context in which this rhetoric was produced and already convinced that the Japanese were uniquely predisposed toward self-sacrifice, took this propaganda at face value as proof that the Japanese had somehow successfully synthesized national culture and technological innovation into a functional alternative to Western liberal modernity.
It was in this context that General Nogi Maresuke, the commander principally responsible for much of the needless bloodshed at Port Arthur, became a recognizable name in the German press, both during the war and then again in September 1912 when he and his wife died by suicide on the day of the Meiji emperor's funeral.Footnote 35 Although many Japanese observers were profoundly uncomfortable with Nogi's suicide, seeing it as an embarrassing relic of Japan's “feudal” past, the German press's response was uniformly sympathetic. The liberal Berliner Tageblatt's coverage of the Meiji emperor's funeral, for example, was overshadowed by a pair of articles on Nogi's life and death, with one solemnly informing its readers that Nogi and his wife had died in adherence to “traditional Japanese custom.”Footnote 36 A longer article in the following issue elaborated on the actual manner of Nogi's death, as well as its cultural significance: “He died as a samurai, as a knight … The manner in which he—the modern general, the master of European military technology—adhered to old tradition in ending his life, will be his legacy to his fellow countrymen: to strive for national greatness through the preservation of the Japanese national spirit along with the application of contemporary West European cultural elements.”Footnote 37 What is perhaps most remarkable about this article is its ambivalence regarding the relative moral value of Eastern and Western culture. Rather than exoticizing Nogi, as would have been the case in mainstream Western Orientalism, the German nationalist media transfigured him into a symbolic avatar for the continued viability of traditional cultural values in an increasingly globalized world.Footnote 38
General Nogi's suicide became a consistent touchstone for representations of Japan within the media of the German far right, regardless of political context; the geopolitician Karl Haushofer had already presented Nogi as a champion for traditional cultural values against the threat of soulless internationalism in his 1913 monograph Dai-Nihon.Footnote 39 In February 1935, however, the Völkischer Beobachter ran a five-part article, “Nogi, the Last Samurai,” by the journalist Roland Strunk that more or less apotheosized Nogi as a National Socialist hero: “He lived and died as an exemplar for a nation whose hasty drive towards modernization could have resulted in ethical and völkisch deformation.”Footnote 40 Strunk's article, one of the earliest full-throated endorsements of Japanese culture to appear in the Nazi party's dedicated media, established the basic narrative of suicide as a culturally redemptive act that was adopted and elaborated upon in later propaganda. Nogi, as the presumptive “last samurai,” symbolized the triumph of völkisch culture against soulless internationalism through an act of self-sacrifice, an image that both resonated with and validated the National Socialist Todeskult.
In its appropriation and radicalization of earlier cultural beliefs around heroic self-sacrifice and voluntary death, the Nazi “death cult” was one particularly extreme manifestation of the broader “brutalization” of German politics during and after the First World War.Footnote 41 As examined by Jay Baird and Sabine Behrenbeck, Nazi ideology mobilized concepts such as martyrdom and redemptive sacrifice, as well as an evolving series of symbolic figures—both mythological and contemporary—in an increasingly elaborate ritualization of national heroism.Footnote 42 Suicide was a difficult concept to reconcile with this rhetoric, both because of its official condemnation by the Christian moral tradition and because of its more recent sociological associations with social and political dysfunction. Attempts during the late Weimar era to imagine a moral defense of voluntary death (Freitod) emerged principally from the political left on the grounds that the act constituted the ultimate expression of individual self-determination; the Nazis, by contrast, categorically rejected the idea that any member of the Volksgemeinschaft had the right to decide how and when to end their life.Footnote 43 For much of its existence, then, the Nazi state's official position on suicide owed a debt to Durkheim's analysis, at least with respect to the demographics of the German Volk it deemed racially “salvageable.”Footnote 44 In its representation of Japanese voluntary death, on the other hand, Nazi propaganda was only too willing to blur its otherwise rigorously policed distinction between self-sacrifice and suicide; spectacles of Japanese self-sacrifice provided an outlet for a more radical version of the Nazi “death cult” to be articulated without alienating the moral sensibilities of the German public, much less its religious institutions. In effect, Japan—by virtue of its idealization vis-à-vis the West—could serve as an existing model for National Socialist visions of a functional Volksgemeinschaft unconstrained by the social barriers impeding the full realization of their cultural revolution in Germany.
Thus, although the National Socialist state may not have invented this association between Japan and heroic self-sacrifice, it did enthusiastically exploit it in defining its own position on concepts such as honor, heroism, and self-sacrifice. One example of this phenomenon is Erwin Bälz's On the Japanese Defiance of Death, an edited collection of essays originally written in 1904 but only published posthumously by Bälz's son in 1936. Bälz occupies a unique position in modern Japan as one of the founding fathers of Western medicine in that country, having been employed as professor of internal medicine at what is now the University of Tokyo and as private physician to the Meiji emperor.Footnote 45 The younger Bälz explained his decision to publish his father's essays as an attempt to explain contemporary “parallels” between the Japanese and the German political systems through the lens of the “problem of the heroic.”Footnote 46 The booklet was thus meant to situate Bälz's observations within the political context of the National Socialist state, lending authority to the Nazi narratives around Japanese culture coalescing during the 1930s.
It was in the work's longest essay, “On the Japanese Martial Spirit and Defiance of Death,” that Bälz unpacked what he understood by the concept “defiance of death” (Todesverachtung), which he represented as the essential character of the Japanese soldier: “Yet defiance of death is not the correct word. It is more a matter of a disregard, of a contempt for one's own life, that comes from a different assessment of the self and that, in the case of war, demands and induces not just a defiance of death, but also a disdain for life.”Footnote 47 Bälz argued that it was only through the cultivation of higher ideals—such as honor and duty—that individuals could transcend the biological law of self-preservation and thus be prepared to sacrifice their lives for a greater cause. In his words: “The entire education, the entire life of the samurai was actually preparation for a beautiful death.”Footnote 48 More to the point, however, Bälz also drew an explicit connection in this essay between the honor of the samurai—as transmitted through stories like Chūshingura—and the behavior of the ordinary, modern Japanese soldier.Footnote 49 This essay established two basic ideas that were subsequently endlessly recycled in Nazi propaganda: that modernization had not abrogated Japan's tradition of self-sacrifice, but instead had transformed it from the exclusive prerogative of the samurai “aristocracy” to the national ethos of Japan, and that this same ethos had been lost during the West's transition to liberal modernity but could be reclaimed.
Given its preoccupation with personal honor and loyalty to the nation, it should not be a surprise that the Schutzstaffel (SS) both eagerly consumed and actively promoted this rhetoric.Footnote 50 The New Year's Day 1942 edition of Das Schwarze Korps was devoted entirely to a discussion of Bälz's work, with all of the participating authors specifically identifying self-sacrifice as the defining characteristic of Japanese heroism.Footnote 51 This was not the first time, however, that Japanese self-sacrifice was featured in a publication associated with the SS. During the final two weeks of December 1941, the SS-Leithefte published in quick succession three articles on recent Japanese military operations in the Pacific or mainland Asia, with each one highlighting an example of the “death-defying” behavior of Japanese servicemen. The first recounted the actions of the Japanese pilots who, during the attack on Pearl Harbor, had purposefully flown their damaged planes into American ships, and the third introduced the story of the so-called “samurai swimmers”—members of the 1936 Olympic squad recruited and trained to manually deactivate naval mines—during the attack on Hong Kong.Footnote 52 Beyond the content of this media, its timing anticipated Japan's utility as “counter-programing” for German morale after Stalingrad, redirecting public attention away from Germany's stalled offensive in the Soviet Union and offering a more optimistic forecast for the military prospects of the Axis alliance in the upcoming year.
Thus, the irony of the SD memorandum discussed previously was that the incidents it highlighted as potentially damaging to morale in August 1942 were only familiar to the German public because they had been deemed newsworthy by the group's own media eight months earlier. Yet these articles were not outliers in the media landscape of Nazi Germany, nor were heroic depictions of Japanese self-sacrifice exclusive to the SS. Beginning in 1937–1938 and intensifying during the war, the Nazi state exploited preexisting associations between Japanese heroism and voluntary death as an integral element of its propaganda surrounding the Japanese alliance. As articulated through a range of propaganda produced in Nazi Germany—by both German and Japanese authors—the key to Japan's successful modernization was its people's willingness to sacrifice themselves on behalf of the nation, regardless whether the act itself was strategic or symbolic.Footnote 53 The Nazi state's preoccupation with death in its coverage of the Pacific War is even more notable when compared with Japanese domestic propaganda, which instead emphasized a decidedly technocratic vision of itself.Footnote 54 Even with this divergence in content, both German and Japanese propaganda agreed on one fundamental point: namely, that Japan offered a uniquely viable model for the project of “overcoming” modernity because, rather than being constrained by the moral and spiritual baggage of liberal modernity, it had successfully synthesized the best elements of both East and West.
Of course, one of the central problems in any discussion of propaganda is the question of reception. In this particular case, an essay contest sponsored by the Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft (DJG) in the spring of 1944 provides an invaluable glimpse at how the German public thought about their alliance with Japan; indeed, that was arguably the point of the whole endeavor, which was organized at the request of the foreign ministry as a way of identifying new “effective opportunities for propaganda.”Footnote 55 Contestants were prompted to discuss what united Germany and Japan in their fight against the United States politically, economically, and culturally, and the submitted pieces clearly reflect the influence of state propaganda in shaping how Germans thought about the Japanese.Footnote 56 Just under half of the submitted essays (205 out of 420 total) were written by a member of the German military, and so it is not surprising that many of them were explicitly framed around the claim that what united Germany and Japan was their shared right to “call themselves martial peoples [Soldatenvölker]… A Volk cannot be raised as true soldiers, if they do not carry the avocation within themselves.”Footnote 57 Several of the surviving essays specifically referenced self-sacrifice as the quality that best exemplified this shared identity, offering parallels between the two countries’ recent history: “That the young Germans storm into death with the song of their Volk on their lips, that the Japanese soldiers allow the ashes of their fallen comrades to participate in the conquest of the enemy fortress … is in each case a distinguishing expression of the ethos of these Völker.”Footnote 58 In effect, the quality that set the Germans and Japanese apart from other militarily advanced states was their supposed willingness to sacrifice themselves on behalf of their respective nations.
Yet as the SD memorandum had revealed, encouraging Germans to draw comparisons between themselves and the Japanese also inevitably raised some potentially uncomfortable questions ideologically. Several of the essays discussed the “death-defying” Japanese pilots in the Pacific, despite the fact that there was no obvious German parallel. Instead, Germany was forced to assume the uncomfortable position of spectator: “When the German Volk hear of a successful sinking by the Japanese air force, which occurs when one or more pilots plunge with their machines onto the enemy's ship … they admire the bravery and the heroic courage of the Japanese Volk …”Footnote 59 Reflecting upon the respective soldierly qualities of the two peoples, one essayist was forced to conclude that “In terms of the wartime surrender of life the sober matter-of-fact readiness for death [Todesbereitschaft] of the Japanese seems to exceed even the German willingness to sacrifice.”Footnote 60 As much as this rhetoric might have undercut claims of German racial superiority, it reaffirmed self-sacrifice as one of the essential values of the Nazi state. To further emphasize this point, one of the consolation prizes awarded by the DJG to participants who failed to win one of the top prizes was a copy of Erwin Bälz's work, On the Japanese Defiance of Death.Footnote 61 Nevertheless, the Nazi state's anxiety that the German public was simply in capable of performing even the most minimal act of self-sacrifice lingered, as seen in a SD report from July 1944 complaining that the German public failed to comprehend the need for restrictions on public services like theaters, cinemas, and restaurants that their Japanese counterparts had willingly accepted as a matter of “life or death.”Footnote 62 It was this reading of the war as an existential crisis for the German nation—a war that it was losing—that informed the media coverage of the most spectacular manifestation of Japanese voluntary death: the kamikaze.
Only the Dead Withdrew from the Fight
On January 30, 1943, General Friedrich Paulus telegrammed Hitler from the besieged city of Stalingrad and the desperate Sixth Army. In his dispatch Paulus reaffirmed his determination to never capitulate, despite the hopelessness of the situation. On that same day in Germany, Hermann Goering addressed the ongoing fighting in Stalingrad in a radio broadcast, in which he compared the Sixth Army to King Leonidas's three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae, a comparison that was remarkable only in its utter lack of subtlety.Footnote 63 Paulus and most of his troops ultimately chose surrender, however, rather than a glorious death in battle or suicide. The German defeat at Stalingrad famously precipitated a major crisis of morale within the German public, which the regime responded to by doubling down with its exhortations to personal sacrifice, most famously in Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels's “total war” speech at the Berlin Sportpalast on February 18.Footnote 64 Yet it was also in this context that the theme of Japanese self-sacrifice assumed central significance within the media landscape of Nazi Germany. In contrast to the politically embarrassing surrender of the Sixth Army, the apparent willingness of the Japanese to die for the sake of their nation provided the German press with a seemingly endless supply of martyred heroes. In effect, the image of Japanese self-sacrifice increasingly served as a cudgel for German morale within German media, with the repeated insistence that the Japanese were not wavering in the face of military setbacks, but rather defying them through acts of heroic and suicidal bravery.
Christian Goeschel has argued that the Nazi state continued to distinguish between suicide (Selbstmord) and self-sacrifice (Selbstaufopferung) for the duration of the war, although he acknowledges that some leaders privately allowed for the possibility of “heroic death” as a third alternative—this was clearly the fate imagined for Paulus and his men in Stalingrad—but this distinction was always more than a question of semantics.Footnote 65 The Nazi objection to the interwar discourse of “voluntary death” had been predicated on the stigma of suicide as selfish; a willingly chosen death for the Volk, on the other hand, was an honorable act, potentially even more honorable than surrender. Although it would have been risky to articulate this point quite so explicitly in the mainstream German media, given the high likelihood of resistance from Germans still loyal to the Christian churches, Japan offered a useful proxy because of the longstanding association in the German popular imagination between Japanese culture and positive images of voluntary death. Moreover, unlike classical images of self-sacrifice like Thermopylae, premised on nostalgia for a long-dead past, the kamikaze offered a credible model for the heroism of voluntary death in a modern, mechanized war. As hope for victory faded and then disappeared, this association culminated in the figure of the kamikaze pilot, which represented the final synthesis of the German neoromantic image of Japanese heroism and the National Socialist state's apocalyptic vision of the Endkampf.
On February 3, the day after Paulus's surrender at Stalingrad, the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung ran a short feature on the “Japanese admiration for the heroes of Stalingrad.”Footnote 66 This kind of feature was not unprecedented—most of the major German dailies had correspondents in Tokyo commenting on the Japanese war effort—yet this article was more explicit in its framing by reporting on Japanese reactions to Stalingrad. Quoting from the prominent national newspaper the Asahi Shinbun, the article offers the Japanese reaction to Stalingrad as a model for how the German public should “read” the event: “The souls of the thousands of German soldiers that sacrificed their lives in Stalingrad have sparked a fire in the hearts of the Volk that cannot be extinguished. These soldiers died on behalf of the Fatherland, because they believed unwaveringly in its final victory.”Footnote 67 Although it is unclear whether the resolute Volk referred to in this quote are the Japanese or the Germans, either interpretation would have forced the German reader to navigate an ideologically tricky comparison: either the Japanese, by interpreting the Germans deaths at Stalingrad as the necessary cost of ultimate victory, have more faith in the German army than do the Germans themselves; or the Japanese, by ascribing this renewed determination to the Germans, have more faith in the loyalty of the Germans to their nation than they had recently demonstrated. Either way, this comparison did not favor the Germans vis-à-vis the seemingly indefatigable Japanese, and that was precisely the point.
Nearly every piece published about Japan in Nazi Germany had reserved some space to consider the entangled concepts of honor and self-reflexive violence; this trend only accelerated as the necessity of self-sacrifice became less hypothetical. The Völkischer Beobachter supplied a graphic example of what this actually entailed in its report on the final defense of Tarawa in December 1943, which ended in the complete loss of the Japanese garrison. According to the article, “No Japanese allowed himself to be captured,” and “The defenders stood resolutely [todentschlossen] at their posts and did not give a single foot's-breadth … Only the dead withdrew from the fight.”Footnote 68 This article was explicit that the example of Tarawa's defenders should be admired and emulated, a point that was reaffirmed through the juxtaposition created between this article and the banner article from the same issue, which claimed that the Allies were having trouble opening a second European front because “the British balk at the sacrifice of their own blood.” This point is worth highlighting in that it not only reaffirmed the positive evaluation of obviously suicidal behavior, but also in the explicit contrast it drew between Japan and the spiritually “bankrupt” West.
The Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944), one of the most strategically significant defeats suffered by the Japanese military during the Pacific War, received ample press coverage in Germany, but the accuracy of reporting was uniformly marginal for several reasons that are important in bear in mind.Footnote 69 Like the German coverage of the Russo-Japanese War, the bulk of this information had been filtered through the Japanese censorship apparatus before it reached German correspondents; in much the same way that the German state had purposefully withheld information about the actual situation in Stalingrad, Japanese military authorities were also less than keen to publicly admit to losses, especially one on the scale of June 1944. As a result, this misinformation was duly repeated in the German press and the battle was presented to the German public as a Japanese victory, with vastly inflated figures for American losses.Footnote 70 Yet even as the Japanese were attempting to camouflage the magnitude of their loss, these reports were again massaged by the German media in order to reinforce the narrative of Japanese infallibility to which it had committed itself. The result, which would only become more egregious during the last year of the war, was a ludicrously distorted image of the Pacific War, wherein the Japanese were seemingly scuttling the entire US Navy at every engagement and yet were still forced, with increasing frequency, to enact heroic “to the last man” defenses on devastated little islands.
The US landing on Saipan on June 15 touched off three weeks of brutal fighting between American forces and a single Japanese division. Although the unwillingness of the Japanese servicemen to surrender had already been demonstrated repeatedly, the final days of fighting on Saipan were especially brutal, culminating in a mass suicide charge by the remaining Japanese soldiers, many of them wounded, and by the unprecedented image of Japanese civilians committing suicide en masse by throwing themselves off the island's northern cliffs.Footnote 71 Initial reports about the fighting on Saipan conceded that a lack of direct information made accurate reporting more difficult, but most concurred that the battle was running in Japan's favor. Wilhelm Schulze, the Tokyo correspondent for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, referred to Saipan as the “most important battle of the East Asian War,” although his analysis of the contemporary situation hinged on secondhand accounts from official Japanese military sources, most of which reported that the American forces had already lost more than half of their initial offensive capabilities against Saipan in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.Footnote 72 All reports on Saipan in the German press published before the confirmation of Japan's defeat placed special emphasis on the high casualties suffered by the American invaders, even going as far as to openly question whether the Americans were deliberately underreporting their own casualties; the blatant cynicism of this reporting is shocking, if not surprising.Footnote 73
Saipan received the most extensive coverage in the German press of any Pacific engagement up to that point, both because of the battle's perceived significance as the “decisive battle” of the war in Asia and because its conclusion seemingly confirmed and amplified existing beliefs about the supposed Japanese preference for death over surrender.Footnote 74 With the final defeat of the remaining Japanese defenders on July 9, however, there was a blackout in communications with the island, which meant that the German press also went suddenly and ominously silent; canny German media consumers might have recalled a similar sequence of events around the disaster at Stalingrad, and probably knew what it portended. A last cluster of articles about Saipan, beginning on July 20, reverted back to the by-now well-established narrative of valiant Japanese self-sacrificial defense; all evoked the image of the wounded Japanese soldiers enacting one final “banzai charge” against the American invaders, and all concurred that Japan was only defeated because of the overwhelming American numerical superiority.Footnote 75 Significantly, this coverage did not comment, however, on the mass civilian suicides; it is unclear whether this information was censored by the Japanese military or by the German media.
For both Germany and Japan, the military setbacks of June 1944 forced the nations’ respective leadership to confront the specter of defeat; in both cases, this forced realization did not weaken resolve, at least within the upper echelons of the state, but rather precipitated a radicalization of both rhetoric and policy. In Japan, this manifested itself through new slogans preparing the Japanese to collectively die “like a shattered jewel” (ichioku gyokusai).Footnote 76 Likewise, German propaganda increasingly centered on the necessity of sacrifice within the context of “total war,” despite—and perhaps even as a result of—the widespread recognition that Germany had already lost the war.Footnote 77 Privately, in the context of this decision by the Nazi state to “sacrifice” Germany itself, Goebbels referred to a possible new tactic in his July 8 diary entry:
Soon our suicide pilots [Todesflieger] will also be deployed. They are currently at the point in their training that one can anticipate that this new weapon will be operational in the next several weeks. The Todesflieger are a bold corps of men that, just like their Japanese counterparts, fling themselves with their planes at the enemy's ships and thus find a certain death … There will surely be in Germany thousands and tens of thousands of those who would enter such a formation if called.Footnote 78
What Goebbels was referring to here was the “self-sacrifice squadron” (Selbstaufopferer [SO]-Staffel), assembled in February 1944 under the command of First Lieutenant Karl-Heinz Lange and intended to mitigate Germany's increasingly severe shortages of machines, fuel, and pilots.Footnote 79 This German program, code-named Leonidas, predated the kamikaze by eight months, although Goebbels clearly saw the Japanese as the original inspiration. To be sure, there had been numerous examples of Japanese pilots choosing to fly into enemy ships, most commonly after sustaining damage to their craft that made successful retreat or rescue unlikely, but this kind of behavior was fundamentally different from what the kamikaze or the Todesflieger were asked to do. Goebbels made an additional reference to this program in an entry from July 16, referring to the bold young men “for whom the Fatherland is worth more than their life.”Footnote 80 This statement again ignored an important distinction between the normal risks associated with being a soldier or pilot, wherein death was one of multiple possible outcomes for a mission, and conscription into an explicitly suicidal operation like the kamikaze, wherein death was the primary objective and the desired outcome of the pilot's training.Footnote 81
The kamikaze operation was launched on October 20, under the command of Vice Admiral Ōnishi Takijirō, as part of the Japanese defense of the Philippines. Officially designated the tokubetsu kōgekitai (Special Attack Forces), and abbreviated in Japan as tokkōtai, the kamikaze represented a functionally different approach to aerial warfare. Simply put, this was because—like the Todesflieger—the organization of the kamikaze was the result of a fundamental lack of resources and tactical options. Given the self-evident material superiority of the Allied forces arrayed against them, the idea of suicide operations, which had been debated by Japan's military leaders since August 1943, became increasingly attractive as a way of retaining an effective advantage. The young pilots, all nominally volunteers, tended to be both better educated and less experienced as pilots than their predecessors had been; many were former university students who had been exempted from earlier rounds of conscription.Footnote 82 Most only received basic flight training, which meant in practice that the attacks were mostly ineffective as military strategy, and the commanding officers had no expectations that the kamikaze would alter the war's trajectory. Instead, the kamikaze are better understood as a psychological weapon, a supposed testament to the superiority of the Japanese fighting spirit over that of its technology-dependent, “dishonorable” opponents.Footnote 83
The German press covered the Philippines campaign and the Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 23–26) assiduously throughout the latter half of October and into November, often noting at the bottom of each article the suspiciously high number of American ships which the Japanese Imperial Navy claimed to have sunk or damaged.Footnote 84 The first mention of the kamikaze by name appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter's November 1 issue, wherein it was reported to the German public that the kamikaze had already successfully sunk eight American ships and damaged an additional nineteen.Footnote 85 An article from November 4 reported that the kamikaze had, in one day, sunk five ships and damaged three more.Footnote 86 On that same day a separate short article provided additional information on the kamikaze pilots, their backgrounds, and their motives. This article was careful to note the difference between the kamikaze and the earlier pilots who had intentionally sacrificed themselves and their aircraft, noting that this new tactic fully mobilized the Japanese soldiers’ “readiness for death” and explaining the significance of the kamikaze as the victory of “human will and spirit” against soulless technology: “Hundreds of living bombs wait for the hour of their victorious death [Siegestod].”Footnote 87 The key word here is Siegestod, which echoed the increasingly apocalyptic mood of the German war effort; by this point death and victory had become inextricably linked together in framing the war effort for public consumption as, quite literally, an existential battle “to the death” between the Axis and the Anglo-American West.
The German press duly reported on the steadily rising number of kamikaze “victories” in the Philippines during the last months of 1944; even without consulting the official American engagement reports, it is hard to view this reporting with anything other than skepticism, especially given the significantly reduced operational capacity of the Japanese Imperial Navy.Footnote 88 This overreporting of Japan's military victories was not a new phenomenon, nor was it likely that many Germans actually believed the reports. One particularly incredulous consumer of this media was the German propaganda minister, who recorded in his diary his skepticism regarding the numbers reported by the Japanese.Footnote 89 In a separate entry Goebbels drily observed that “Certainly their figures of ships sunk must be taken with a grain of salt. They sink battleships and aircraft carriers as if it were an assembly line. If these figures were correct, then the Americans could no longer maintain their position in the Pacific.”Footnote 90 Despite this, Goebbels ultimately concluded that it was better to release the figures, even recommending that the German press increase their coverage of the Japanese military, because it was a useful sign of good faith to an easily offended ally.Footnote 91 Left unsaid, although certainly also a consideration, was the utility of the Japanese model for German public morale.
As a result, from the beginning of December 1944 it was common practice for the German daily press to include an update on the kamikaze, often on the front page. Most of these pieces simply reported on new Japanese “victories,” although a few provided a bit of color commentary about the pilots and their preparations.Footnote 92 The Völkischer Beobachter proudly proclaimed that Leyte had effectively become a “battlefield without wounded,” the implications of which were unmistakable even before the kamikaze were invoked.Footnote 93 A longer piece in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung attempted to contextualize the kamikaze within Japanese culture and its military history.Footnote 94 This article was also one of the few German publications that directly addressed the number of Japanese pilots killed in each mission; although the ratio calculated, in order to bolster the claim that the kamikaze were a cost-efficient tactic, was again based upon a wildly inflated number of American ships sunk or scuttled. Using figures reported by the Japanese press, the Völkischer Beobachter reported that the kamikaze had sunk fifty-six enemy ships between October 25 and December 18, and seriously damaged an additional fifty-three.Footnote 95 The actual figure of Allied ships sunk or irreparably damaged by kamikaze attacks during this period was thirteen.Footnote 96
This steady coverage of the Pacific War fell off dramatically after New Year's 1945. The lack of coverage in the public press should not suggest, however, that information about the Japanese war effort was unavailable in Germany. Joseph Goebbels's diaries, for one, show that the German propaganda minister was kept well informed about the war in East Asia. The entry for March 9 noted that the Japanese public had finally “gradually started to recognize the seriousness of the situation,” and Goebbels expressed the hope that this realization would force the Japanese to “undertake much greater efforts against the enemy than has been hitherto the case.”Footnote 97 He dismissed the accelerated Japanese mobilization of the homefront as basically what Germany had already done “two years earlier,” although he did observe that Germany provided a good cautionary example of mobilization begun “too late.”Footnote 98 He mentioned an aerial attack on Tokyo in the March 11 entry, a likely reference to the devastating firebombing of Tokyo on March 9–10, which leveled nearly sixteen square miles of the city and killed an estimated one hundred thousand.Footnote 99 Goebbels callously, if unsurprisingly, speculated that the Japanese would finally understand how much Germany had been suffering under Allied bombing.Footnote 100
Given his position within the regime, Goebbels had privileged access to accurate information about the status of the Japanese war effort, both domestically and abroad; he noted the noticeable air of “defeatism” among the Japanese in Berlin, even within the embassy, and on April 4 caustically observed that Japanese peace feelers toward the Soviet Union were likely the result of the Japanese having lost “their traditional peace and security.”Footnote 101 Goebbels had never been one of the stronger supporters of the Japanese alliance, but his diary nevertheless reveals how useful he believed Japan to be propagandistically. The distance between the public narrative and the political reality reflects the growing significance of the Japanese example to German morale during the last year of the war, especially given how much effort had been devoted to portraying the Japanese as nigh-invincible.
One of the very last articles appearing in the German press about Japan before the end of the war appeared in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung's April 6 issue; it is only fitting that the article was about the kamikaze. Wilhelm Schulze, in his last dispatch from Tokyo, referenced battles that would undoubtedly have left his readers confused, considering that the German press had not reported on Iwo Jima or on the Allied advances in Burma. Implicitly acknowledging how badly the war was going, Schulze framed the kamikaze as the tactical response to this new reality: “In other words, in Japanese deliberations there are no more strategic retreats or voluntary evacuations. The troops that have been assigned the defense of a sector must hold it, and fight to the last man so that, with their sacrifice, they take as many of the enemy's number with them as possible.”Footnote 102 This article represents, by far, the most starkly objective, and accurate, depiction of the kamikaze's purpose. Even couched within this rhetoric of heroic self-sacrifice, the truth was inescapable; victory was never even mentioned, and it was clear that any “successes” by the kamikaze were strategically meaningless. If it had not been obvious before, this article made it unmistakably clear that defeat for the Japanese was only a matter of time and that the German-Japanese alliance's only remaining raison d’être was to provide context to the collective self-immolation of both regimes’ citizens.
Conclusion
Many of the leading political and military figures of the Nazi regime committed suicide as the war drew to its final conclusion; in addition to Hitler himself, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Walter Model, and Odilo Globocnik are just a few of the high-profile suicides during the last weeks of the war.Footnote 103 To be sure, not all of these individuals were acting out of some ideologically informed motive of heroic self-sacrifice; most were trying to avoid Allied justice or the shame of a less-than-honorable death at the hands of others. If we take a closer look at the situation in Germany at the end of the war, however, what is striking is that these cases represent the leading edge of what was a veritable German “suicide epidemic” over the course of 1945.Footnote 104 As analyzed by Christian Goeschel, ordinary Germans took their lives for any number of different reasons, but the cumulative influence of Nazi propaganda in making suicide “culturally and socially acceptable” cannot be discounted entirely in explaining this phenomenon.Footnote 105 Although the rhetoric surrounding Japanese voluntary death was a single element within this broader propaganda campaign, and so we must be cautious in drawing any direct causal link, it had nevertheless been associated with this shift in social and moral values and so must be considered in any conversation about suicide as a significant phenomenon in defeated Germany.
As Japan confronted the reality of its own defeat in August 1945, there were some high-profile suicides, including the architect of the kamikaze operation, Vice Admiral Ōnishi, who committed seppuku the day after his country's surrender.Footnote 106 There were also several hundred reported suicides in Japan, mostly military officers, but the wave of civilian suicides that so many—both in Japan and the United States—had expected, simply failed to materialize.Footnote 107 Again, there is no simple explanation as to why this was the case, but Barak Kushner offers one theory in his study of Japanese imperial propaganda, namely that the agencies and individuals responsible for Japanese propaganda had mobilized toward the end of the war in “preparing” the Japanese public for defeat, an effort supported by political leaders looking to maintain their positions in the postwar era.Footnote 108 Of course, this was a perfectly sound strategy for these individuals to have pursued and for the Japanese government to have endorsed, and it is precisely this point that reveals the fundamental hollowness of wartime propaganda—whether produced in Japan, Germany, or the United States—claiming that the Japanese were innately more predisposed to voluntary death and self-sacrifice than other peoples. For whatever reason, it was the Germans—not the Japanese—who chose to accept death as the price of defeat.
Of course, truth is not really the point of propaganda. The utility of this rhetoric, from the perspective of the Nazi state, was not so much what it said about contemporary Japan as what it revealed about their own political and ideological priorities: namely, the project to define and construct a utopian New World Order predicated on the synthesis of modern technology and völkisch cultural ideals. Self-sacrifice and suicide figured in this rhetoric as a means to an end, and the preexisting associations between Japanese culture and honorable rituals of self-sacrifice proved uniquely attractive for Nazi propagandists attempting to persuade the German public that such actions were both strategically necessary and morally justifiable. As much as this rhetoric's success pivoted on the fact that much of it was an elaboration on older Orientalist themes, it was also distinctly fascist in its critique of liberal modernity as irreconcilable with authentic national culture. Much more than an “exotic” sideshow of the Second World War, the German-Japanese alliance thus warrants our attention in interrogating continuities between older patterns of transcultural engagement in German-speaking Europe and National Socialism, as well as the ways in which the Nazi regime evaluated and defined itself in its pursuit of death-defying immortality.
