Romania and Hungary bought into fascism and anti-Semitism far more than Italy did. Both of those countries collaborated fairly enthusiastically with the Nazis in carrying out the Holocaust. The conduct of the Baltic countries was also pretty bad in this regard. Mussolini’s fascist government, despite pre-dating Hitler and the Nazis, was nowhere close to the same genocidal ambitions. And even despite being pikers in the barbarity league, the infamous photo of Mussolini and his cohorts hanging upside down in Milan are a pretty good indication of how his subjects felt about him.
I’m tempted to put Italy no worse then the Colonial powers but the fascism thing with willingly working with Germany to out-weigh all of the Colonial issues.
But they just don’t have many atrocities. Treated POWs very well. By most reports, when the Germans took control of North Italy following Italy’s surrender to the allies, the Italians did more than most countries to protect and help their Jewish neighbors, far more then the French in fact.
That would also be my take on it. The discussion just begs for tangential debates relating unrelated things. The Soviets were definitely less evil than the Nazis or Japanese militarists, says who? And on and on, especially when it involves moving back in history. For example there’s no plausible argument IMO that the US was a similar actor to Imperial Japan in the 1930’s-40’s. But the general effect of European exploration then settlement on natives in the America’s? How about the Vikings?
You decide how to rank everything exactly. Leading to, what?
I’m going to need to hear so more about this. Western countries traditionally supported the Japanese government. They were seen as a member of the club.
I think the Nazis were mere pikers compared with Imperial Japan.
Romania, yes. But not Hungary. They did expel a lot of foreign Jews who were living in Hungary, which resulted in them being turned over to Germany. But that was because they were foreign not because they were Jewish. The Hungarian government refused to turn over any Hungarian Jews despite Nazi requests for them to do so. Hungary’s Jewish population was pretty much intact (although they were treated as second-class citizens) until 1944 when Germany decided Hungary was no longer a reliable ally and invaded the country.
Why is that?
For me the Nazis had the systematic genocide of the Jewish people. An industrialized and bureaucratic system of horror. Additionally the Roma people (Gypsies as they were known then), the homosexuals and the incurably ill.
Added to this was there gruesome medical experiments.
The Germans or Wehrmacht was fairly good with the Geneva convention for western POWs but were brutal with eastern POWs. Millions of Soviet POWs died in the German camps. The SS of course was brutal to all POWs, Western or Eastern.
Not often talked about and not as organized was the killing of millions, maybe 10 million Slavic people who the Nazis had decided were sub-human.
I know about the some of the Japanese atrocities. The complete disregard for the Geneva Conventions. Some psychotic treatment of POWs as a living food source in some I hope isolated cases. The Comfort Women (rape), The Rape of Nanking. The Unit 731 bio experiments on humans. All this adds up to a scale of evil that was pretty extreme, but to me it seems less than the Nazis.
You need more than that? If I were a POW, I’d definitely want to be held by the Nazis rather than the Japanese. The latter considered you subhuman to begin with since you were not Japanese, but even more so since you did not have the balls to fight to the death.
EDIT: On a side note, the Bridge over the River Kwai was real and in Thailand even if the story in the book and movie were fiction. In Kanchanaburi province. There is a small but good museum detailing the living hell of the POWs used for slave labor. And this was just one location. Truly gruesome.
By degree though it just seems the Germans were worse in both numbers and systematic evil. If you had to be an Ally POW at all, the only decent treatment was for the Brits & Americans captured by the Italians. Even the Italians were pretty brutal in eastern Europe.
My opinion on the Nazis might be colored by my wife being Jewish and thus my kids technically being Jewish. But I’m pretty sure I’ve always looked at the Nazis as the definition of evil. It just doesn’t get worse. I know the Japanese and Soviets were extremely brutal, but I just don’t see how either tops the Nazis.
At least the Nazis did treat some POWs (sort of) decently.
Look, I don’t want anyone to think that I think the Nazis were a walk in the park. I just think the Japanese cranked it up to 11.
Fair enough, I would use the same terminology about the Nazis. In fact originally I did. We’re talking about truly horrible regimes.
Me too. I’ve read a fair amount of Japanese history from the point of view of the Japanese, and I’ve never heard anything like this.
Imperial Japan, starting in 1894, was aggressively becoming a colonial power itself. They took Korea in 1910. They fought Russia and China, and in the 30’s began occupying chunks of China, because they could. To suppose that they made war against the US because they were afraid of being colonized seems laughable.
To me, the difference between Japan and Germany is that Germany had institutionalized the destruction of a particular people-the Jews (and others but one people is enough for my point). Both Japan and Germany committed unthinkable atrocities, but Germany actually went after a particular people with the avowed intention of killing them all. Left to their own, Germany would have continued to the last person. Japan, at least as far as I understand history, didn’t have that goal. They killed and massacred millions of people, but their goal was not to destroy any group. Koreans suffered terribly, but as far as I know it was never Japan’s intent to kill every last Korean. So for that reason alone, Germany drops down a notch compared to Japan. Both Germany and Japan had horrible Governments made much worse by the public support of their respective people. But Germany occupies a special place as the worst of the worst. Even Mao and Stalin didn’t set a goal of destroying a people just because of who they are. They killed millions but did so to solve problems that were not based on the existence of the the population group. The Cossacks or Tartars would not have suffered like they did if they happened to live somewhere else or weren’t considered a threat. The Jews were doomed in Germany simply because they were Jews. That makes Germany unique.
This is like debating the difference between Jim Jones and Charles Manson. They were both fucked up, full stop, as far as I’m concerned. They need to be just both considered examples of what should not be allowed to happen.
So we actually got 1 Japan is innocent vote. I would enjoy hearing the reasoning on this.
I agree somewhat with that. The contrast between Nazi intention to ‘rid’ society of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the incurably ill, etc. and deaths caused by the Japanese in a medieval style war of conquest in China is clear, I agree. The Japanese effort in China was aimed at no particular group, nor the existence of the Chinese people, but getting China to accept Japanese dominance. The Japanese directly killed few people in Korea actually. Korea in 1905-10 didn’t have the means or will to resist being absorbed into the Japanese Empire. It was absorbed, and military resistance within the country was almost non-existent through 1945. Koreans died more frequently due to unequal treatment, especially as the Pacific War led to highly difficult conditions, but there wasn’t any particular Japanese aim to kill Koreans, just to rule them.
However I don’t think that argument is as strong differentiating the Nazis from various Communist regimes which killed large numbers of people ‘for who they were’ in a class or political sense. They also wanted to eliminate groups, just classes usually. And in some cases ‘inherently politically unreliable’ ethnic groups. Or the elites of a nationalities they wanted to dominate (the Soviets targeting the elite of Poland as exemplified by the officer corps of the Polish Army, Katyn Massacre). Whereas, the Nazi’s didn’t in their own view want to eliminate the groups they did ‘just because of who they were’ but because of things that were bad about those groups for society, in their warped view. Not 100% the same, but I don’t think different enough by itself to make the Nazi’s a category of one.
What makes the Nazi’s unique from a Western POV IMO is that they adopted these ideas and did these things in a modern Western society. Russia is not really Western in important historical ways, Japan and China just aren’t. If we take the position that it’s chauvinistic, backward looking, exclusionary etc. to expect more from Western societies then I’m not sure there’s a really good reason to totally single out the Nazi’s. They’d still be high on any list of bad to be sure, but I think clear top billing relies on a sense of Western identity and therefore particular horror that the Nazis did those things and were also Western. Or else, it can tend to rely on saying some victims are more important or innocent than others.
Maybe so, but still…different objectives, but equal brutality. Why did Japan’s imperial ambitions for China require them to bomb an American base in Hawaii? The suffering they caused went way beyond China. What did their desire to rule China have to do with their horrific treatment of American, British, Australian, Filipino POWs?
It’s like Germany’s outlook was “Jewish lives are worthless” and Japan’s outlook was “all lives are worthless.” You know which of those is less evil? NEITHER. They’re both equally fucked up. You can’t just be “a little bit of a mass murderer,” you either are or you aren’t.
With all that being said, Japan’s conduct in WWII is really a blip on the long term timescale. I don’t think it is at all a reflection of something inherent in their culture. They may have been sequestered from the rest of the world for a long time, and it may be a very insular country, and they may indeed collectively hold outsiders in disdain, but there’s still a large stretch from that to the shit they did in the war. The fact is, for most of their history they basically left everyone else alone. The Japan of WWII was not the same Japan of 50 years prior or 50 years after.
I’ll have to find it but a few years ago somebody here posted excerpts from some Communist “real” history of World War 2 book as written by Western sympathizers, and its version of World War 2 was utterly bizarre. Basically Nationalist China wanted war against Imperial Japan so they could invade and take Korea. The United States wanted complete domination of the Pacific so they tried to sabotage Japanese industry and when that didn’t work tried as many false flags as possible in order to let them easily invade and occupy Japan. Both countries decided to collaborate to crush and occupy Japan between the two.
And the major powers in Europe and America generally approved of these actions. Sure there were disagreements with Japan over specific issues. But in the same way there were disagreements with England or Russia or Germany. Japan was seen as a fellow colonial power not a potential colony.
The attitudes towards Japan changed in the thirties. But only because Japan was becoming more aggressive in seeking territory, like Germany and Italy were.
The whole point is under the assumption that only Japan’s conduct of the war in China, and treatment of occupied peoples’ elsewhere during the Pacific War (in some not all cases) would even raise the possibility of putting WWII Japan and Germany in the same category.
The Pearl Harbor attack certainly would not. That was just war, and with a clear war aim, breaking the Anglo-US-Dutch oil embargo.
The Japanese treatment of Western Allied prisoners in WWII would have been a serious stain on the country’s reputation even if that’s all there was to complain about, and especially in contrast to their generally correct treatment of Russian POW’s in 1904-05 and German ones in 1914. But the scale there was minuscule compared to death in China, or that caused by Germany overall. Assuming these comparisons or rankings of badness have any meaning (and I’m not 100% sure they do) then body counts matter, no way around it. Japanese treatment of Western POW’s was bad but would not put it in contention for direct comparison to the Nazi’s if that had been the only or main problem.
Also deadly Japanese mistreatment of POW’s often had a serious element of unpreparedness or incompetence, though mixed with limited regard for life and various cases of just murdering people for no real reason. Holding prisoners of the Philippine Army in deadly conditions of disease and lack of supply for some months after the initial Dec 1941-May 1942 campaign is an example. Eventually the Japanese mainly just paroled the Philippine Army rather than have the rest of them die. There was some consideration for life, even though part of an attempt to pacify the country for long term rule. But it’s still hard to compare that to rounding up and killing whole groups or classes of people to accomplish a warped social engineering goal.
That’s separate from later large scale Japanese atrocities v civilians in the occupied Philippines in the 1944-45 campaign which looked more like Japanese behavior in China. Although, similar things didn’t happen as much in Burma, Indonesia or Indochina where the Japanese abused some people (as for example who signed up as ‘paid’ laborers) but by and large were not that poorly thought of even as of 1945 by the local populations: they had still kicked out the European colonialists, on the plus side, from the local POV.
Mass death in China is central IMO to plausibly elevating Japanese crimes to the level of the Nazi’s.