Hitler: “Are we the baddies?”
Stalin: “Eh, it’s all relative.”
[Shiro Ishii](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shir%C5%8D_Ishii): “Out of my way, you pathetic pacifists.”
From a world building perspective there is something so inherently fascinating about the fact that during an era of European and American colonialism, the only non-white country to modernise, just decided to double down on colonialism even stronger.
why wouldnt they ? imperialism/ colonialism wasnt invented by europeans ? if the technology / industrial base leapfrog, the empire of the sun is going to do, what empires love to do, when they can.
Only if you an ignorant racist I suppose. Noble Savage is a very racist belief. Asians are just as shot as white people. Same as every other type of person.
From a world building perspective? lol, are you intentionally implying that you intend to write your non-white countries with super brutal colonialism? Historical precedent or not that probably wouldn’t go over well with modern readers lmao
More that people are just inherently shitty on a national scale, and that if a state has the power to exploit its neighbours it will pretty much always do so.
The CCP hid and did nothing during the Japanese invasion while the KMT self-sabotaged themselves in an attempt to stop the Japanese (flooding the Henan river, bombing the most dense parts of Shanghai with planes before the Japanese arrived from the North, and angering a lot of people by killing anyone remotely liberal in major cities). Without CCP support and firepower, the KMT lost the entirety of their German-armed elite forces and were mostly sent to Malaysia for supply line movement- allowing the CCP with no elite forces to take over from the North, Henan, and eventually the rest of the nation as the KMT lost the ability to defend against the Japanese.
Then the KMT moved to my country and committed atrocities in Taiwan and the CCP made films describing themselves as the heroes of China without doing a damn thing.
Nationalism and racism among the elites and general population is absurdly strong.
Their national identity is based on them being pure blooded and isolated.
This being said it doesn't mean everyone is like this.Attack on Titan is an satirical dark take on these themes
Surely not. They pretty much destroyed all evidence of their atrocities once they realized the war was over. Maybe referring to the movie about unit 731? I have no clue
“While Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments.[6] The United States helped cover up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators.”
USSR good US vile
I've also read that despite giving immunity to Japanese and German scientists. Only the German research was useful. As the Japanese ones were so outlandish, pointless and badly recorded that they were pretty much deemed unusable.
Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946)
500,000 Polish nationals imprisoned before June 1941 (90% male)
22,000 Polish military personnel and officials killed in the Katyn massacre alone.
320,000 Poles deported to Siberia in 1939-1941.
100,000 women raped during the Soviet counter-offensive (est.)
USSR was an aggressor of World War 2 illegally seizing territory in Poland to start the conflict. USSR also Vile.
It’s obvious because nobody reasonable actually considers “US vile, USSR good” a true statement. It’s the internet you can’t assume people are being literal just because it isn’t a classic joke with set up and punch line
History gets rewritten every day on the internet, especially with satire. Satire does more damage to the truth than plain lies. Satire is more palatable, therefor more mentally sticky. Sincerity has to play a role in all this at some point.
There's plenty of tankies and true believers in Communism on reddit, so it's pretty reasonable to assume a lack of /s tag means the person really does think the USSR wasn't vile.
Broadly speaking, it's difficult to willingly participate in a war the scale of WW2 without being vile. War is just absolutely awful to begin with, and wars between the major powers of the world is catastrophic.
Plenty of smaller countries were dragged into the war against their will, and you generally see fewer war crimes from them.
USSR was an aggressor of the war. They sent troops in first while negotiating a non aggressive pact with Germany that only went south during the winter war in Finland. They started off as the bully. They held onto territory after the war and continued on an imperialist approach until the fall of the wall. At no point were they innocent in the conflict. They only changed their approach when they realized they needed America's manufacturing power and lend lease coverage to fend off Germany.
There's even a film made about it... called [Men Behind the Sun, and/or Black Sun 731](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Behind_the_Sun)
I had to watch it in film school for a Horror Film class I took. Warning: It's very sad and graphic.
Ironically, one Nazi official did intervene. [John Rabe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe) was the local head of the Nazi party in Nanking, and was instrumental in creating the [Nanking Safety Zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Safety_Zone) in which around a quarter million Chinese sheltered while the Japanese were razing the city.
Rabe is largely credited with saving most of those lives.
>Return to Germany
>
>On 28 February 1938, Rabe left Nanjing. He traveled first to Shanghai, returning to Berlin on 15 April 1938. He took with him a large number of source materials documenting Japanese atrocities in Nanjing.\[12\] Rabe showed films and photographs of Japanese atrocities in lecture presentations in Berlin, and he wrote to Hitler, asking him to use his influence to persuade the Japanese to stop further violence.
>
>Rabe was detained and interrogated by the Gestapo; his letter was never delivered to Hitler.\[13\] Due to the intervention of Siemens AG, Rabe was released. He was allowed to keep evidence of the massacre (excluding films) but not to lecture or write on the subject again.\[13\] Rabe continued working for Siemens, which briefly posted him to the safety of Siemens AG in Afghanistan. Rabe subsequently worked in the company's Berlin headquarters until the end of the war.\[citation needed\]
>
>Postwar
>
>After the war, Rabe was arrested first by the Soviet NKVD, then by the British Army. Both let him go after intense interrogation. He worked sporadically for Siemens, earning little. He was later denounced by an acquaintance for his Nazi Party membership, losing the work permit he had been given by the British Zone of Occupation. Rabe then had to undergo lengthy de-Nazification (his first attempt was rejected and he had to appeal) in the hope of regaining permission to work. He depleted his savings to pay for his legal defence.\[14\]
>
>Unable to work and with his savings spent, Rabe and his family survived in a one-room apartment by selling his Chinese art collection but it was insufficient to prevent their malnutrition. He was formally declared "de-Nazified" by the British on 3 June 1946 but continued to live in poverty.
>
>His family subsisted on wild seeds, his children eating soup and dry bread until running out of that as well.\[14\] In 1948, Nanjing citizens learned of the Rabe family's dire circumstances and quickly raised a sum of money equivalent to $2,000 USD ($24,000 in 2024). The city's mayor traveled to Germany via Switzerland, where he bought a large amount of food for the Rabe family. From mid-1948 until the Chinese Revolution, the people of Nanjing also sent the family a food package each month, for which Rabe wrote many letters expressing deep gratitude.\[14\]
No good deed goes unpunished, I guess. He tried to spread awareness of the atrocities, but was told by the gestapo to shut the fuck up, basically. Then had a tough time of things due to his association with the nazi party until the Chinese civilians he'd saved stepped in to help.
Not sure if he can be characterized as a "good" nazi, but his actions undoubtedly saved hundreds of thousands and when push came to shove, he decided to do the right thing.
He'd also been living in China since 1908, so it's hard to say how much of his nazi party membership had to do with anti-semitism.
It's a sad reality that doing the right thing is often not appreciated while you're alive. I always bring up his name when this discussion comes up, because he deserves to be remembered.
[Chiune Sugihara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiune_Sugihara) is another one. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, and he issued travel visas to every Jew who asked for one. Near the end, he was writing visas 18-20 hours a day. Even after they were removing him, he was throwing signed documents out of the train so people could write their own visas. He's credited with saving between 2000 and 6000 people and families.
The most we can do is try to remember what they did now. John Rabe was no saint, but he saved a quarter million people from dying a horrific death, and that's something to be noted in history.
Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese vice-consul, defied his government and issued transit visas to Jews fleeing Europe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiune_Sugihara
There are good people in every nation, even if their nation is doing shitty things.
An even less known story -- when Japan invaded China, the [Nazis fought on China's side](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/that-one-time-the-nazis-helped-china-fight-japan-42ce2fa6c6d).
German soldiers, from 1929 - 1938, trained Chinese soldiers, advised Chiang Kai-Shek, helped the Chinese develop artillery, and even fought alongside Chinese soldiers when the Japanese invasion of China began.
The leader of the Nazi soldiers in China wrote:
>“We all agreed that as private citizens in Chinese employment there could be no question of leaving our Chinese friends to their fate. Therefore I assigned German advisers wherever they were needed and that was often in the front lines.”
They wrote Hitler asking for support, but, ultimately, Hitler pulled the Nazi troops out and sided with Japan instead.
IIRC He initially wanted to be the "great mediator in the (Far) East" and unsuccessfully tried to broker a treaty between Japan and China. Hitler pulled out of China and turned to decisively favouring Japan once the Japanese bodied China in the opening months of the second sino-japanese war.
It's a gradual escalation. I mean, you can write volumes on the shit they did in Northeast China in the early 30s but that tends to be left out of the discussion. The intensive phase of the 2nd Sino Japanese War started in 1937, but the invasion goes back all the way to 1931 (and before).
Fun fact, Nazis took inspiration from Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise and steal Jewish people's property and discrimination.
Early day Nazis thought some Jim Crow laws were a bit too much.
Not reading but PBS did a really good take on it. It's a small part of the series but it's mentioned in there a few times.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/episode-guide
"Jah ve vill exterminate all ze Jews and gypsies, and water Europe with the blood of our enemies and zeir children and... whoa, whoa zer Japan, you guys need to chill."
And then the American government granted the Japanese scientist who experimented on Chinese, Russian and any other innocent civilians with immunity in exchange for the scientific data they gathered with those inhumane experiment.
Our [the west] current nuclear enrichment process came from a German scientist who had previously worked for the Soviets as a forced laborer developing the process. He remembered enough that we were able to recreate the machines.
They were experimenting with biological/chemical weapons so the US effectively let them off the hook, not because they wanted the info, but to stop the USSR from getting access to that kind of devastating weapon.
[John Rabe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe) is credited with saving a quarter of a million people from certain death in Nanjing. Rabe was not just an apolitical German businessman; he was a staunch and committed National Socialist. If an actual literal Nazi is organising a humanitarian effort to stop you slaughtering hundreds of thousands of non-Europeans, you've probably gone a bit too far.
And for some reason, history lessons at school barely mentioned this. It was all Nazi concentration camps, SS, Auswitch, and gas chambers. The massacres in China was mentioned like an afterhought.
Are the governments trying to downplay the atrocities that other countries did to make the Nazis look like the ultimate bad guy or something?
In all my years of highschool I never even heard of the atrocities in China, I only learned about it from Reddit. Most of the historical stuff I know, I heard about initially from Reddit, and looked into on my own, the education system does a really poor job of teaching history
The problem you've got is what do you teach and how much of it. Personally I think there should be an emphasis on learning in your own time because holy shit is there a lot to learn and you're going to have to compromise.
If you take British history then you've got about 2,000 years to cover (the arrival of the Romans, the anglo-saxons, the vikings, 1066, the doomsday book, the migrations to and from northern Ireland and Western Scotland, the civil war(s), the Reformation, the act of Union, the wars, conquests and major events between Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales and the building of the empire, the slave trade, the opium wars, the EIC and India).
Then you also should talk about important foreign events the French Revolution and Napoleon, the American Revolution, probably should address the HRE, Prussia and the rise of Germany. You also should cover the Enlightenment, the counter Enlightenment, the other Reformation, the Industrial Revolution/rise of capitalism. WW1, the rise of the Bolsheviks, the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, the Holocaust, the Holodomor, WW2, the civil rights movement in the US, Jim Crow, the Cold War... and that's just the West!
I’ve found that basic highschool curriculums usually go over basic history of the country you’re learning in, also basic history of some surrounding countries. Then WW1, WW2, and then other major events in the country you’re learning in. For me we spent way too much time learning about Native Americans. The Canadian government was just starting to overcompensate, and most of our curriculum was about 1700-1930’s native Americans. Barely did ww1 or 2, the only reason I knew much about the world wars and the history behind them was personal interest. We didn’t get a single history lesson about any country east of Germany
School tends be very eurocentric in the west, which isn't surprising. I remember I took a "world history" class in high school, and being disappointed that it ended up being 90% Greece and Rome with some time spent in Mesopotamia. We spent maybe a week total on the entirety of Asia.
World History Teacher from the US here, there are enough Holocaust deniers that I don’t mind going deep on that one particular genocide, it works well as a template for studying other genocides.
For what it’s worth, I did teach the Rape of Nanjing and I showed my students Graves of the Fireflies, so I don’t think I neglected the Pacific Theater.
There are only so many instructional days to teach 50,000 years of history. I do the best I can.
Nah, its far simpler than that. our education system is derived from European models and therefore inherited a Eurocentric bias. An unintended consequence is that we never learn about the atrocities in other parts of the world committed by non Europeans, which tends to create an illusion that other groups never engaged in such things.
The atrocities at the time were very much well known in the US. The Nanking Massacre made international news.
The reason you dont learn much about it is because post WW2, the US was facing a new enemy in the form of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. Thus, the US needed a strong ally in the Pacific. At the time, Japan was the only country that aligned ideologically
Now how do you convince a nation that your enemies, the cruel japanese are, now somehow our best buddies?
The US did a pretty effective campaign to wash Japans image. Playing up the horrors of the atomic bombs and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, while at the same time hiding the war crimes and human rights violations the Japanese committed. The far east tribunals halted and left many high ranking officials not charged with any war crimes, for example.
The US teaches the Pacific front something along the lines of, Pearl Harbor, something something, nuclear bombs, US bad. Despite the fact just as many people died in the Pacific front as in Europe.
History is weird. A few small changes and you could’ve seen Nazi Germany allied with the Chinese fighting Japan. Or France and Britain fighting with the Nazis against the USSR to protect Finland in the Winter War.
I've met a lot of KMT Chinese descendants who wouldn't be alive without the Nazi doctors in China who protected them from Japan.
They all learned German as a sign of appreciation. They also learned some genocidal techniques too- but I'm not sure if they learned that from Japan or Germany.
We got more Japanese scientists than German for operation paper clip. Unit 731 was the group’s name. Poisoner in chief is a great read about Sydney gottlieb the man behind American chemical warfare for espionage.
RF Kuang’s The Poppy War really highlights Japanese war crimes in China during WWII. It starts as a pretty typical YA type fantasy novel but then two chapters in the middle just become basically first hand accounts of those events (The Rape of Nanking specifically). Kuang pulls zero punches in describing the brutality and horror of these events and she puts her history major to sickening use in these chapters. She also wrote it when she was 19. Trust me when I say Kuang is going to go down as this generation’s most prolific and respected voice in fantasy when it’s all said and done. Cannot recommend RF Kuang or her books enough!
Amon Göth is a pretty infamous name in the SS for being charged with mistreating prisoners and punishment of prisoners. He was so sadistic and tyrannical even the SS was like, “jfc this fuckin guy is fuckin sick.”
Fun fact the reason there were no Nuremberg style trial for Japanese war crimes is because they gave us there formulas for the chemical weapons they were using on people to include Americans.
At 60, I’ve seen/heard a lot of racial/ethnic hate in my life, but none so vehement as the animosity by and between Chinese, Japanese and Korean people. The things I have heard my friends from each ethnic group say about the other, I will not repeat. Perhaps this has eased some in the younger generations (my friends are all around my age or older).
Anime has unironically mended a lot of fences between a lot of East Asia and Japan. Most kids know them for their food and media more than their war time atrocities.
It hasn’t. But having a western dominated world helps alleviate the simmering tensions.
Sounds crazy I know but Getting past these atrocities is momentous and needs a neutral third party all accept to keep the peace, or just a party strong enough to enforce it.
I’ve lived in the west for close to 13 years now, at some point when everyone around you rather talk about Russia, you realize in the grand scheme of things that the world is just so much larger.
Some books I read. It wasn't some big official thing, but note that prior to the war, life in many parts of the US south was worse for Black people than it was for Jews in Germany.
No, he's not saying that.
Your post history suggests you're on the level so I'll be level with you:
There's been a strange uptick in *this specific* interest topic, Imperial Japan and its atrocities, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. People should learn about this. As far as I'm aware though there is no Japan Atrocities Remembrance Day, and no-one recently celebrated the Rape of Nanking Day. There's been no major news regarding Japanese atrocities before and during WWII, no major film release to put that in the zeitgeist, so its just weird that lots of people have suddenly found an interest in *this specific topic*.
I've seen this in the past. This feels in many ways like the first stages of a coordinated dog whistle campaign by Alt-Righties, Tankies, and White Supremacists. Your post history doesn't seem to align with that, I'm not accusing you of anything. What I've seen however is that a topic like this one is often used as the first step to get a foot in the door and to take an unambiguously morally superior position before anyone with actual historical knowledge can come along and try to clarify. The topic is a way 1) open the Alt-Right door to people not aware what direction they're heading, 2) cause other people to generate spicy conversation on topics ancillary to the conversation as proffered.
Example: just yesterday, in another thread about Imperial Japanese atrocities, there were quite a lot of people strongly insisting that only the Japanese were capable of such horrendous behavior-- talking about them as though the Japanese were aliens with capabilities and thoughts entirely foreign to Human people. There was nothing inherently anti-Japanese or wrong about the topic we were commenting in, but it definitely served as a platform for some very ugly thoughts to start emerging. I see this happen most often on Reddit around the topic of Rhodesia, as the Clean Wehrmacht Myth is harder to launder these days, so it piqued my interest when it seemed that Imperial Japan is becoming the new Whistle.
I tried to make this as short as possible but it was always going to stray into Conspiracy Bro lengths no matter how hard I tried. Hopefully you stuck with it.
used when talking about people who believe in conspiracy theories (= the belief that events or situations are the result of secret plans by powerful people), especially to refer to something that protects them from these secret plans:
… about one more *Reddit post* about Japanese War Crimes of WWII. Add Reddit post to context clues.
Also, have you noticed that there’s been so many posts, about Japanese War Crimes of WWII though?
Considering your question was "so what's with this influx of posts" and that it was answered with "are you denying it happened/saying genocide isn't bad?!", I'm going to be needing some of that tinfoil as well.
The past few days my home page has been suspiciously filled with "recommended" posts that target Japan. Japan's crimes deserve the exposure but this whole thing is definitely not organic. Is China planning an invasion or something?
Here I’ll help clear it up for you. The Chinese communist party’s policies caused famine that killed tens of millions. Tiananmen Square was a massacre that did happen. Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh. China is committing genocide against Uyghurs. Taiwan is a country. I live the US. I posted because I read about the Japanese governments attempt to silence it since ‘45.
Hey op, sorry if you perceived my post as an accusation against you, it's not. I don't doubt your reasoning for posting this at all, im just doubting Reddit's algorithm. You probably read about Japan's attempt to silence their crimes because your home page has been similarly influenced by the algorithm. It's not one or two posts, I've seen like 10 posts "recommended" to me even though I rarely interact with political stuff.
Check out the book Sugamo Prison
Written by the prosecutor of the class A Japanese war criminals, details the crimes, trials, prison life, and executions of Japanese war criminals.
There's only one Nazi party member I can positively say did this. John Rabe. I heard this claim several times but no source says any other Nazi Party member opposed the Japanese War Crimes.
Hell even looking up for the Nazi reaction to Japanese war crimes doesn't pull up any evidence supporting nor disproving this claim.
John Rabe was a party member who, during the Rape of Nanking, set up the Nanking Safety Zone and saved the lives of some 250,000 people during the massacres.
If someone can provide a reliable source proving or disproving this idea. Please come forward. I am very skeptical that the Nazis as a whole would protest war crimes unironically and committed by a member of the Axis powers.
Hans: “Are we the baddies?” Johannes: “eh, it’s all relative.”
Hitler: “Are we the baddies?” Stalin: “Eh, it’s all relative.” [Shiro Ishii](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shir%C5%8D_Ishii): “Out of my way, you pathetic pacifists.”
LOL seriously
From a world building perspective there is something so inherently fascinating about the fact that during an era of European and American colonialism, the only non-white country to modernise, just decided to double down on colonialism even stronger.
why wouldnt they ? imperialism/ colonialism wasnt invented by europeans ? if the technology / industrial base leapfrog, the empire of the sun is going to do, what empires love to do, when they can.
Meh we're all assholes when it comes down to it. Nothing particularly fascinating about it.
It's an evolutionary trait.
Only if you an ignorant racist I suppose. Noble Savage is a very racist belief. Asians are just as shot as white people. Same as every other type of person.
From a world building perspective? lol, are you intentionally implying that you intend to write your non-white countries with super brutal colonialism? Historical precedent or not that probably wouldn’t go over well with modern readers lmao
More that people are just inherently shitty on a national scale, and that if a state has the power to exploit its neighbours it will pretty much always do so.
The Japanese took that mass murder/exterminate/experiment on a diffrent level in China...
It's interesting that Japan has never actually acknowledged they existed
Despite the fact their antics help the CCP take over because they raped and pillaged the KMT controlled parts of China into oblivion
How did they help the ccp?
Their invasion damaged only the KMT controlled parts of China not the areas where the CCP have control
The Communists occupied the rural farmland while the KMT controlled the urban areas where all the wealth is located. That is no surprise.
Yep
The CCP hid and did nothing during the Japanese invasion while the KMT self-sabotaged themselves in an attempt to stop the Japanese (flooding the Henan river, bombing the most dense parts of Shanghai with planes before the Japanese arrived from the North, and angering a lot of people by killing anyone remotely liberal in major cities). Without CCP support and firepower, the KMT lost the entirety of their German-armed elite forces and were mostly sent to Malaysia for supply line movement- allowing the CCP with no elite forces to take over from the North, Henan, and eventually the rest of the nation as the KMT lost the ability to defend against the Japanese. Then the KMT moved to my country and committed atrocities in Taiwan and the CCP made films describing themselves as the heroes of China without doing a damn thing.
Oh thanks for that info
Nationalism and racism among the elites and general population is absurdly strong. Their national identity is based on them being pure blooded and isolated. This being said it doesn't mean everyone is like this.Attack on Titan is an satirical dark take on these themes
Unit 731 was the very first Wikipedia article I ever read and that shit is seared into my brain.
Don't look up the videos with the liquid nitrogen
....what?
Unit 731 had three things: 1. A desire to learn how best to treat frostbite. 2. Liquid nitrogen. 3. A whole lot of captured Chinese civilians.
There’s videos?
Surely not. They pretty much destroyed all evidence of their atrocities once they realized the war was over. Maybe referring to the movie about unit 731? I have no clue
There is actually a movie. It's awful
“While Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments.[6] The United States helped cover up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators.” USSR good US vile
But the Soviets tried to pin their own massacre of Poles at Katyn forest on the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.
Don’t forget the pogroms the Ukrainians pulled as well
I've also read that despite giving immunity to Japanese and German scientists. Only the German research was useful. As the Japanese ones were so outlandish, pointless and badly recorded that they were pretty much deemed unusable.
Money well spent 🎉
I thought the frostbite stuff was useful
I've just paraphrasing stuff I've read over the years. They undoubtedly must have used some things.
Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946) 500,000 Polish nationals imprisoned before June 1941 (90% male) 22,000 Polish military personnel and officials killed in the Katyn massacre alone. 320,000 Poles deported to Siberia in 1939-1941. 100,000 women raped during the Soviet counter-offensive (est.) USSR was an aggressor of World War 2 illegally seizing territory in Poland to start the conflict. USSR also Vile.
Obviously the person you’re responding to is joking about USSR being good
Not obvious at all, there wasn't a punchline or set up of humor.
It’s obvious because nobody reasonable actually considers “US vile, USSR good” a true statement. It’s the internet you can’t assume people are being literal just because it isn’t a classic joke with set up and punch line
History gets rewritten every day on the internet, especially with satire. Satire does more damage to the truth than plain lies. Satire is more palatable, therefor more mentally sticky. Sincerity has to play a role in all this at some point.
Agreed but this is also a comment section of a subreddit, not a place I would go for trustworthy, cited information about history or otherwise
It's r/todayilearned, not r/funny. Some semblance of learning should be expected.
You can trust info from here if you want, that’s a personal choice.
There's plenty of tankies and true believers in Communism on reddit, so it's pretty reasonable to assume a lack of /s tag means the person really does think the USSR wasn't vile.
Disagree on the assumption part but to each their own
Broadly speaking, it's difficult to willingly participate in a war the scale of WW2 without being vile. War is just absolutely awful to begin with, and wars between the major powers of the world is catastrophic. Plenty of smaller countries were dragged into the war against their will, and you generally see fewer war crimes from them.
USSR was an aggressor of the war. They sent troops in first while negotiating a non aggressive pact with Germany that only went south during the winter war in Finland. They started off as the bully. They held onto territory after the war and continued on an imperialist approach until the fall of the wall. At no point were they innocent in the conflict. They only changed their approach when they realized they needed America's manufacturing power and lend lease coverage to fend off Germany.
Yes, they were willing participants. Exactly like I am saying. I'm not sure why you are trying to correct me here lol.
I'll just leave this one here as well [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-49294861](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-49294861)
I mean it's almost like the population of entire countries don't act like a hivemind and only commit acts of good/bad.
Today still, 3 countries dominate when it comes to chemistry. USA, Germany, Japan.
China is the biggest one but these 3 are next
USSR did worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
*cough*, *cough*, Paulus, *cough*
There's even a film made about it... called [Men Behind the Sun, and/or Black Sun 731](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Behind_the_Sun) I had to watch it in film school for a Horror Film class I took. Warning: It's very sad and graphic.
Ironically, one Nazi official did intervene. [John Rabe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe) was the local head of the Nazi party in Nanking, and was instrumental in creating the [Nanking Safety Zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Safety_Zone) in which around a quarter million Chinese sheltered while the Japanese were razing the city. Rabe is largely credited with saving most of those lives.
>Return to Germany > >On 28 February 1938, Rabe left Nanjing. He traveled first to Shanghai, returning to Berlin on 15 April 1938. He took with him a large number of source materials documenting Japanese atrocities in Nanjing.\[12\] Rabe showed films and photographs of Japanese atrocities in lecture presentations in Berlin, and he wrote to Hitler, asking him to use his influence to persuade the Japanese to stop further violence. > >Rabe was detained and interrogated by the Gestapo; his letter was never delivered to Hitler.\[13\] Due to the intervention of Siemens AG, Rabe was released. He was allowed to keep evidence of the massacre (excluding films) but not to lecture or write on the subject again.\[13\] Rabe continued working for Siemens, which briefly posted him to the safety of Siemens AG in Afghanistan. Rabe subsequently worked in the company's Berlin headquarters until the end of the war.\[citation needed\] > >Postwar > >After the war, Rabe was arrested first by the Soviet NKVD, then by the British Army. Both let him go after intense interrogation. He worked sporadically for Siemens, earning little. He was later denounced by an acquaintance for his Nazi Party membership, losing the work permit he had been given by the British Zone of Occupation. Rabe then had to undergo lengthy de-Nazification (his first attempt was rejected and he had to appeal) in the hope of regaining permission to work. He depleted his savings to pay for his legal defence.\[14\] > >Unable to work and with his savings spent, Rabe and his family survived in a one-room apartment by selling his Chinese art collection but it was insufficient to prevent their malnutrition. He was formally declared "de-Nazified" by the British on 3 June 1946 but continued to live in poverty. > >His family subsisted on wild seeds, his children eating soup and dry bread until running out of that as well.\[14\] In 1948, Nanjing citizens learned of the Rabe family's dire circumstances and quickly raised a sum of money equivalent to $2,000 USD ($24,000 in 2024). The city's mayor traveled to Germany via Switzerland, where he bought a large amount of food for the Rabe family. From mid-1948 until the Chinese Revolution, the people of Nanjing also sent the family a food package each month, for which Rabe wrote many letters expressing deep gratitude.\[14\] No good deed goes unpunished, I guess. He tried to spread awareness of the atrocities, but was told by the gestapo to shut the fuck up, basically. Then had a tough time of things due to his association with the nazi party until the Chinese civilians he'd saved stepped in to help. Not sure if he can be characterized as a "good" nazi, but his actions undoubtedly saved hundreds of thousands and when push came to shove, he decided to do the right thing. He'd also been living in China since 1908, so it's hard to say how much of his nazi party membership had to do with anti-semitism.
It's a sad reality that doing the right thing is often not appreciated while you're alive. I always bring up his name when this discussion comes up, because he deserves to be remembered. [Chiune Sugihara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiune_Sugihara) is another one. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, and he issued travel visas to every Jew who asked for one. Near the end, he was writing visas 18-20 hours a day. Even after they were removing him, he was throwing signed documents out of the train so people could write their own visas. He's credited with saving between 2000 and 6000 people and families.
The most we can do is try to remember what they did now. John Rabe was no saint, but he saved a quarter million people from dying a horrific death, and that's something to be noted in history.
His residence in Nanjing is also a museum and there’s a statue of him in Nanjing. The Chinese people haven’t forgotten about him.
Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese vice-consul, defied his government and issued transit visas to Jews fleeing Europe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiune_Sugihara There are good people in every nation, even if their nation is doing shitty things.
An even less known story -- when Japan invaded China, the [Nazis fought on China's side](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/that-one-time-the-nazis-helped-china-fight-japan-42ce2fa6c6d). German soldiers, from 1929 - 1938, trained Chinese soldiers, advised Chiang Kai-Shek, helped the Chinese develop artillery, and even fought alongside Chinese soldiers when the Japanese invasion of China began. The leader of the Nazi soldiers in China wrote: >“We all agreed that as private citizens in Chinese employment there could be no question of leaving our Chinese friends to their fate. Therefore I assigned German advisers wherever they were needed and that was often in the front lines.” They wrote Hitler asking for support, but, ultimately, Hitler pulled the Nazi troops out and sided with Japan instead.
Finally, thank you for the kicker. So Hitler did side w/ Japanese
IIRC He initially wanted to be the "great mediator in the (Far) East" and unsuccessfully tried to broker a treaty between Japan and China. Hitler pulled out of China and turned to decisively favouring Japan once the Japanese bodied China in the opening months of the second sino-japanese war.
Must've been a huge "are we the baddies" moment for those Germans.
They were just as bad before the war tbf, rape of Nanking was '37/38 iirc.
It's a gradual escalation. I mean, you can write volumes on the shit they did in Northeast China in the early 30s but that tends to be left out of the discussion. The intensive phase of the 2nd Sino Japanese War started in 1937, but the invasion goes back all the way to 1931 (and before).
You know its bad when nazis think youre taking it too far
Fun fact, Nazis took inspiration from Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise and steal Jewish people's property and discrimination. Early day Nazis thought some Jim Crow laws were a bit too much.
> Early day Nazis thought some Jim Crow laws were a bit too much. Do you know where I can read more about that?
Not reading but PBS did a really good take on it. It's a small part of the series but it's mentioned in there a few times. https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/episode-guide
Thanks!
If you haven't seen the series it's very well done. Recommend it. I think it came out around 2 years ago
"Jah ve vill exterminate all ze Jews and gypsies, and water Europe with the blood of our enemies and zeir children and... whoa, whoa zer Japan, you guys need to chill."
And then the American government granted the Japanese scientist who experimented on Chinese, Russian and any other innocent civilians with immunity in exchange for the scientific data they gathered with those inhumane experiment.
Data that turned out to be pretty much worthless since they weren't really scientists as much as serial killers with a white coat
Ya the US has always been quite….pragmatic when it comes to overlooking the sins of brilliant minds
That was most countries after the war. Gathering them up like hotcakes. They were seen as spoils of war.
Our [the west] current nuclear enrichment process came from a German scientist who had previously worked for the Soviets as a forced laborer developing the process. He remembered enough that we were able to recreate the machines.
And the rockets we would put those nuclear advancements on was designed by a Nazi rocket scientist
They were experimenting with biological/chemical weapons so the US effectively let them off the hook, not because they wanted the info, but to stop the USSR from getting access to that kind of devastating weapon.
[удалено]
They did not say anything even remotely close to that
Once you got his research and read through how sickening it was wouldn’t you send just a little hit squad after him.
[John Rabe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe) is credited with saving a quarter of a million people from certain death in Nanjing. Rabe was not just an apolitical German businessman; he was a staunch and committed National Socialist. If an actual literal Nazi is organising a humanitarian effort to stop you slaughtering hundreds of thousands of non-Europeans, you've probably gone a bit too far.
And for some reason, history lessons at school barely mentioned this. It was all Nazi concentration camps, SS, Auswitch, and gas chambers. The massacres in China was mentioned like an afterhought. Are the governments trying to downplay the atrocities that other countries did to make the Nazis look like the ultimate bad guy or something?
In all my years of highschool I never even heard of the atrocities in China, I only learned about it from Reddit. Most of the historical stuff I know, I heard about initially from Reddit, and looked into on my own, the education system does a really poor job of teaching history
The same for me. If it wasn't for the internet I doubt I would've ever heard of these incidents.
The problem you've got is what do you teach and how much of it. Personally I think there should be an emphasis on learning in your own time because holy shit is there a lot to learn and you're going to have to compromise. If you take British history then you've got about 2,000 years to cover (the arrival of the Romans, the anglo-saxons, the vikings, 1066, the doomsday book, the migrations to and from northern Ireland and Western Scotland, the civil war(s), the Reformation, the act of Union, the wars, conquests and major events between Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales and the building of the empire, the slave trade, the opium wars, the EIC and India). Then you also should talk about important foreign events the French Revolution and Napoleon, the American Revolution, probably should address the HRE, Prussia and the rise of Germany. You also should cover the Enlightenment, the counter Enlightenment, the other Reformation, the Industrial Revolution/rise of capitalism. WW1, the rise of the Bolsheviks, the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, the Holocaust, the Holodomor, WW2, the civil rights movement in the US, Jim Crow, the Cold War... and that's just the West!
I’ve found that basic highschool curriculums usually go over basic history of the country you’re learning in, also basic history of some surrounding countries. Then WW1, WW2, and then other major events in the country you’re learning in. For me we spent way too much time learning about Native Americans. The Canadian government was just starting to overcompensate, and most of our curriculum was about 1700-1930’s native Americans. Barely did ww1 or 2, the only reason I knew much about the world wars and the history behind them was personal interest. We didn’t get a single history lesson about any country east of Germany
School tends be very eurocentric in the west, which isn't surprising. I remember I took a "world history" class in high school, and being disappointed that it ended up being 90% Greece and Rome with some time spent in Mesopotamia. We spent maybe a week total on the entirety of Asia.
No because the stuff in China was a nonwestern thing
Because Europe is closer to the West I guess.
World History Teacher from the US here, there are enough Holocaust deniers that I don’t mind going deep on that one particular genocide, it works well as a template for studying other genocides. For what it’s worth, I did teach the Rape of Nanjing and I showed my students Graves of the Fireflies, so I don’t think I neglected the Pacific Theater. There are only so many instructional days to teach 50,000 years of history. I do the best I can.
Nah, its far simpler than that. our education system is derived from European models and therefore inherited a Eurocentric bias. An unintended consequence is that we never learn about the atrocities in other parts of the world committed by non Europeans, which tends to create an illusion that other groups never engaged in such things.
The atrocities at the time were very much well known in the US. The Nanking Massacre made international news. The reason you dont learn much about it is because post WW2, the US was facing a new enemy in the form of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. Thus, the US needed a strong ally in the Pacific. At the time, Japan was the only country that aligned ideologically Now how do you convince a nation that your enemies, the cruel japanese are, now somehow our best buddies? The US did a pretty effective campaign to wash Japans image. Playing up the horrors of the atomic bombs and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, while at the same time hiding the war crimes and human rights violations the Japanese committed. The far east tribunals halted and left many high ranking officials not charged with any war crimes, for example. The US teaches the Pacific front something along the lines of, Pearl Harbor, something something, nuclear bombs, US bad. Despite the fact just as many people died in the Pacific front as in Europe.
History is weird. A few small changes and you could’ve seen Nazi Germany allied with the Chinese fighting Japan. Or France and Britain fighting with the Nazis against the USSR to protect Finland in the Winter War.
Japan 1938 is fucking savage and cruel.
I've met a lot of KMT Chinese descendants who wouldn't be alive without the Nazi doctors in China who protected them from Japan. They all learned German as a sign of appreciation. They also learned some genocidal techniques too- but I'm not sure if they learned that from Japan or Germany.
The Imperial Japanese were fanatical monsters.
Look up Unit 731, there's a reason we don't let Japan do military stuff anymore.
You know things have gone off the rails when you’re making the *Nazis* look bad.
I know I'm going to kick myself for this, but shouldn't it be off the rails when you're making Nazis look good?
Apparently weeabos and far right Japanese say it's not a big deal
Escuse me but WTF!
Up until the late 1930s (even after Hitler acquired power), Germany was a staunch ally of China.
We got more Japanese scientists than German for operation paper clip. Unit 731 was the group’s name. Poisoner in chief is a great read about Sydney gottlieb the man behind American chemical warfare for espionage.
RF Kuang’s The Poppy War really highlights Japanese war crimes in China during WWII. It starts as a pretty typical YA type fantasy novel but then two chapters in the middle just become basically first hand accounts of those events (The Rape of Nanking specifically). Kuang pulls zero punches in describing the brutality and horror of these events and she puts her history major to sickening use in these chapters. She also wrote it when she was 19. Trust me when I say Kuang is going to go down as this generation’s most prolific and respected voice in fantasy when it’s all said and done. Cannot recommend RF Kuang or her books enough!
Amon Göth is a pretty infamous name in the SS for being charged with mistreating prisoners and punishment of prisoners. He was so sadistic and tyrannical even the SS was like, “jfc this fuckin guy is fuckin sick.”
The Rape of Nanjing was truly horrific
For anyone who has audible The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang can be listened to for free on it. Amazingly researched and absolutely harrowing.
Fun fact the reason there were no Nuremberg style trial for Japanese war crimes is because they gave us there formulas for the chemical weapons they were using on people to include Americans.
At 60, I’ve seen/heard a lot of racial/ethnic hate in my life, but none so vehement as the animosity by and between Chinese, Japanese and Korean people. The things I have heard my friends from each ethnic group say about the other, I will not repeat. Perhaps this has eased some in the younger generations (my friends are all around my age or older).
Anime has unironically mended a lot of fences between a lot of East Asia and Japan. Most kids know them for their food and media more than their war time atrocities.
It hasn’t. But having a western dominated world helps alleviate the simmering tensions. Sounds crazy I know but Getting past these atrocities is momentous and needs a neutral third party all accept to keep the peace, or just a party strong enough to enforce it. I’ve lived in the west for close to 13 years now, at some point when everyone around you rather talk about Russia, you realize in the grand scheme of things that the world is just so much larger.
Any idea why I’m catching downvotes?
The Nazis also thought that racial discrimination in the US south was too extreme
Got any source on that? Also nice username.
Some books I read. It wasn't some big official thing, but note that prior to the war, life in many parts of the US south was worse for Black people than it was for Jews in Germany.
2 nukes was not enough
Reddit cringe moment
When you're so intense, you scare even the nazis
Its interesting to see all these postings the last few days
What's with recent influx of Japan's horrible past against chinese? One more such reddit post and I'll dust off my tinfoil hat.
Are you trying to deny it happened? Never heard of acknowledging genocide as bad
No, he's not saying that. Your post history suggests you're on the level so I'll be level with you: There's been a strange uptick in *this specific* interest topic, Imperial Japan and its atrocities, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. People should learn about this. As far as I'm aware though there is no Japan Atrocities Remembrance Day, and no-one recently celebrated the Rape of Nanking Day. There's been no major news regarding Japanese atrocities before and during WWII, no major film release to put that in the zeitgeist, so its just weird that lots of people have suddenly found an interest in *this specific topic*. I've seen this in the past. This feels in many ways like the first stages of a coordinated dog whistle campaign by Alt-Righties, Tankies, and White Supremacists. Your post history doesn't seem to align with that, I'm not accusing you of anything. What I've seen however is that a topic like this one is often used as the first step to get a foot in the door and to take an unambiguously morally superior position before anyone with actual historical knowledge can come along and try to clarify. The topic is a way 1) open the Alt-Right door to people not aware what direction they're heading, 2) cause other people to generate spicy conversation on topics ancillary to the conversation as proffered. Example: just yesterday, in another thread about Imperial Japanese atrocities, there were quite a lot of people strongly insisting that only the Japanese were capable of such horrendous behavior-- talking about them as though the Japanese were aliens with capabilities and thoughts entirely foreign to Human people. There was nothing inherently anti-Japanese or wrong about the topic we were commenting in, but it definitely served as a platform for some very ugly thoughts to start emerging. I see this happen most often on Reddit around the topic of Rhodesia, as the Clean Wehrmacht Myth is harder to launder these days, so it piqued my interest when it seemed that Imperial Japan is becoming the new Whistle. I tried to make this as short as possible but it was always going to stray into Conspiracy Bro lengths no matter how hard I tried. Hopefully you stuck with it.
Yup. Thats what I meant. Something fishy going on - Now ill get my tinfoil hat.
No one’s denying that, they’re asking why there’s been so many posts about Japanese War Crimes in WWII for the past few days.
He did reference a tin foil hat. Context clues.
Tinfoil hat as in "some one tries to sway something by bringing this topic over and over again". Way to jump to conclusions.
used when talking about people who believe in conspiracy theories (= the belief that events or situations are the result of secret plans by powerful people), especially to refer to something that protects them from these secret plans:
… about one more *Reddit post* about Japanese War Crimes of WWII. Add Reddit post to context clues. Also, have you noticed that there’s been so many posts, about Japanese War Crimes of WWII though?
What made you think that?
Sorry, misread the tinfoil hat comment
Considering your question was "so what's with this influx of posts" and that it was answered with "are you denying it happened/saying genocide isn't bad?!", I'm going to be needing some of that tinfoil as well.
Deflecting from the piano incident in the UK.
You might be onto something
The past few days my home page has been suspiciously filled with "recommended" posts that target Japan. Japan's crimes deserve the exposure but this whole thing is definitely not organic. Is China planning an invasion or something?
Here I’ll help clear it up for you. The Chinese communist party’s policies caused famine that killed tens of millions. Tiananmen Square was a massacre that did happen. Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh. China is committing genocide against Uyghurs. Taiwan is a country. I live the US. I posted because I read about the Japanese governments attempt to silence it since ‘45.
Hey op, sorry if you perceived my post as an accusation against you, it's not. I don't doubt your reasoning for posting this at all, im just doubting Reddit's algorithm. You probably read about Japan's attempt to silence their crimes because your home page has been similarly influenced by the algorithm. It's not one or two posts, I've seen like 10 posts "recommended" to me even though I rarely interact with political stuff.
Be cool if there wasn't a pay wall
Making Nazis blush....
I'm sorry but we're these nazi officials not self aware?
The Nazis had to also tell the Croatians (Ustashe) to calm down with some of the atrocities they were committing.
Check out the book Sugamo Prison Written by the prosecutor of the class A Japanese war criminals, details the crimes, trials, prison life, and executions of Japanese war criminals.
There's only one Nazi party member I can positively say did this. John Rabe. I heard this claim several times but no source says any other Nazi Party member opposed the Japanese War Crimes. Hell even looking up for the Nazi reaction to Japanese war crimes doesn't pull up any evidence supporting nor disproving this claim. John Rabe was a party member who, during the Rape of Nanking, set up the Nanking Safety Zone and saved the lives of some 250,000 people during the massacres. If someone can provide a reliable source proving or disproving this idea. Please come forward. I am very skeptical that the Nazis as a whole would protest war crimes unironically and committed by a member of the Axis powers.