I always liked the way he responded when asked (many years later) why he did it. Paraphrased, it was along the lines of "It was so obviously the right thing to do, but it would have been nearly impossible to push through the bureaucracy, so I just went ahead and did it myself." He did something so profoundly good that we are compelled to wish we could live up to such an example, and the reason he did it? He didn't really have one. It just never occurred to him not to do it. Which is as good a definition of "hero" as you're likely to run across. "Righteous among nations" indeed.
Mine too. It's quite a surprise to see him show up on HN. Such a simple deed with such huge significance. It reminds me to think about what I might be able to do that could end up being life-changing for others someday.
It's a shame that he lost his career over it. I'm glad to see him finally getting the recognition he deserves.
What a great man he is, When a niche site like this gets multiple accounts from people whose lives were positively impacted by him especially on a slow day(HN visits are low during weekends).
> John Rabe was an ordinary German businessman in China when the Japanese invaded Nanking in 1937. Nearly 70 years later, a memorial was dedicated to the "Good German" who saved thousands of Chinese lives.
Maybe Schindler was an ass, I don't know the guy personally. He did save a lot of lives, so. And I can tell you he is not used to whitewash Germany as a whole. It is a well established fact, that German population was either passive or supportive. That's the reason why people like Schindler stand out so much.
More importantly, IMHO, Schindler also made a wide-eyed conscious choice to put his life in danger to help strangers.
Lots of heroes are assholes. Real life isn't a Disney movie or a war propaganda reel. I hope we're capable of appreciating their bravery (and at least statistical self-sacrifice) without blindly praising their every deed.
Because one guy saving 100s if not thousands is more noteworthy than the thousands of people who saved ten each. The underground networks that smuggled people during the third reich is documented, but many of the active people were jews and did not want to talk about that time. I've seen dairies about the time showing up now, hidden away by traumatized grandparents who didn't want anything to do with Germany.
I really don't know how you can see Germany as whitewashing the Holocaust. It is pretty evident that they ensure every generation knows the horrors that were caused. Although I can understand why the modern generation might get annoyed at the sense they are supposed to take ownership of something they can't change.
This is a great and unheard story, and truly inspiring. When I heard a "Japanese Schindler" I was expecting a Japanese person saving Chinese people during the Nanking and other massacres. Are there any examples of Japanese people going against the Japanese govt to save innocent Chinese people?
The opportunity to help others at 1000x leverage is already here for all of us.
The most cost-effective [0] charities are a thousand times more effective at helping people as regular charities. For example, for ~$0.5 you can cure a child of parasitic worms in their stomach. For ~$3 you can protect someone form malaria for ~4 years.
You can join thousands of others who choose to give at least 10% of their income to the mot cost-effective charities they can find [1]
And join the Effective Altruism movement to be involved in helping others effectively [2]
Also importantly, validate annually that the charity you chose is still on the list. Too many charities scale, and frankly become poor at efficiency and distribution. A shocking number of larger charities are effectively marketing, and subcontract to smaller organizations.
Every now and again, the opportunity comes by you to tick a box that determines how your country treats them, an act which can make a difference while costing you nothing and incurring no personal risk.
There is a lot of free, cheap and easy things... It is not interesting to point them out.
Accomodating and feeding people are among the most expensive things that exist. Refugees are very expensive for societies that take them in!
Unfortunately your wishful thinking does not match reality. I know everything could be so nice, but in reality you will steal, when you have nothing/little putting those around you at risk.
Russia did not have a plan to exterminate them, you are thinking from a Nazi POV. They were probably just interested in not having them in Russia because of the religion.
Sorry, but this is a very naive point of view.
The Nazi solution was to kill as many of everything as fast they can, the t4 programme and hands on killings were already daily business.
The only thing holding the Nazis back was a functional USSR, as soon they anticipated the fall of Moscow, the termination camps have been built in no time.
They also maintained many concentration camps long before the decisive conference at Wannsee.
The systematic killings started in June 41.
The construction and initial glassings via gas vans started before the Wannsee conference, they couldn't wait long enough to get started.
Hitler stated as early as 1922 to a journalist that his first and foremost task will be the annihilation of Jews.
He simply had to keep a bit of international reputation and was not sure if the army and other lackeys would be ready to commit mass genocide on civilians.
After the cowardly operation Barbarossa, there were no doubts any more.
There are no ifs or whatever about this, the German population will forever be marked as the biggest suckers in mankind for allowing this man to power and have him and his rich buddies stay in power.
There were heroic people who had seen the painting on the wall and died for the cause, then there were the complicit, active clogs in the machine and the most cowardly, the "neutral/passive" parts of the population who accepted the state of affairs and hoped it might either away without consequences for them.
And then there's people like you, to this day believing the Jewish solution would have seriously been a peaceful relocation, which would have killed many as well.
Ask yourself in which of the 3 aforementioned groups you would most likely be.
I upvoted you, simply because you state facts. Frankly, while we know a majority either supported or at least accepted Nazi policy, condemning all Germans from back the day is a tad harsh. Simply, because people back then didn't have much of a choice after 1933.
And Nazi propaganda was quite effective. I have more of an issue with the fact, that denazification wasn't even half as thorough as it should have been. A combination of national denial / shame and Cold War realities had people like Fillbinger make distinguished careers after the war. Despite being a hard core Nazi judge he rose to prime minister of Baden-Württemberg. But I guess, that was the best possible outcome after all.
Thanks for the upvote, you do have a valid point, most of the opposition was shut down one way or another.
My main issue with the German population was them not seeing on what the economy was based back then and the many saying "we did not know". This simply does not pass the sniffing test.
I agree, as usual with conflict riddled nations, the state apparatus is never entirely changed, many got off without any consequences whatsoever, the ones who paid were soldiers and the whole of eastern Germany and all places which were invaded and plundered by the USSR.
I share the exact same view as you , just worded differently.
I had both sides of "we did not know" in my family. On the one side of my grandparents you had my grandmother being warned of by SS to stop leaving food on her employers door step, on the other side you had "we didn't know, nobody did and was hard for us as well". My conclusion, and took really long to get there, is that it was easy to fall for Nazi propaganda. Even grandma one did like the Bund Deutscher Mädel a lot. I even get why you would end up fighting, because to a degree you did defend your home. I think that, if you bought to much into it, once the full gravity hit after the war, a loy of people just preferred to push it all away. Facing that you served and sacrificed that much for a regime that evil is hard to swallow. And I agree, the full scope of the Holocaust, and not the fate of jews and others, came as a nasty surprise to a lot of people.
All that was made easier by the cold war. All of a sudden the western allies agreed that the Communists were the real enemy. So in a way, you fought the right war. At least you could tell yourself that lie without too much push back.
I think that this is also the reason why people like Schindler and all the others were sidelined the way they were. They showed everyone the lies they were telling themselves.
This is a very insightful post. I had family which suffered from both the fascists and the communists and even royalists to a degree.
Where I am sceptical about the German "did not know" is, all these soldiers who went on invasions, they had families and surely some reported about the matters.
In the east European countries and the south, soldiers did report home and speak to families.
This includes the operators of the death camps, which might have been told to keep quiet, but the boots on ground soldiers surely were more communicative. I could be wrong.
War is a horrible thing, not sure how to prevent it or what post war measurements other than education and relative wealth can prevent it.
It is even more sad if one considers how Hitler came to be, all the way from what basically was family feuds leading to WW1 etc.
Germany simply had the manpower, engineering and resources to do it, it could have been some other country as well.
People often handwave away what doesn't fit in their world view. So if you lived in Germany during those times and heard whispers about the genocide your first thought would be: "But in the news papers it's nowhere to be found! How can it be true? That's probably an exaggeration or a single occurence" (or whatever else pops in your mind at first thought). And because you as a mere citizen don't have a lot of leverage you would probably leave it at that and simply try to live and survive. I think there's a lot about group psychology to be learnt by our horrible past (I'm German) and I think these lessons are helpful for every human being. Especially now with the rise of populists in the last years worldwide (and the atrocities against the Uighurs).
Sadly these lessons are bot fully capitalized on. E.g. the German Armed forces are, in theory, best poised to serve a show case army for democracy and human rights. After all, we have the Nazis and East Germany as a military tradition on top of being a core NATO member. Instead of using that past to build a solid pro-democracy basis, the German Armed forces just declared both, the Wehrmacht and NVA (GDRs army) to be not part of current Bundeswehr tradition. Going so far as to remove exhibits from their internal museums. Such a missed opportunity, and it wont do anything against right wing ideology in the Bundeswehr. That so seems to be a lost cause. I remember one Air Force Lt.-Col. during a recruiting event saying, I paraphrase here, " if you show up here with an Antifa badge, maybe you shouldn't be here". I was quite shocked, hearing a senior German officer in 2018 having a problem with people being anti-fascist.
So was the Madagascar Plan really on the table or not. Please answer only that, is this complete misinformation because my internet filter bubble got distorted by some weird searches years ago? Or do the records genuinely exist and compete with our understanding of the outcome.
From my understanding: It existed, and the German apparatus acted as if it did. Turning Madagascar into a SS-run concentration camp as planned would have been genocide too, so it arguably doesn't matter all that much. Similar to some of the other "Jewish reservations" that had happened previously, e.g. Lublin-Nisko: It turns out if you cram many thousands people into an area without infrastructure, shoot everyone who tries to leave and add some forced labor, survival rates are not good. Who at what point considered mass deaths to be the point of the exercise vs just a (tolerable or welcomed) side-effect boils down to an aspect of the functionalism/intentionalism debate.
Well the Nazi government had a bit of a selective modus operandi when it came to procedures.
They didn't widely announce t4, even the gassings were just delegated by Hitler and the implementation was left to the command chain.
What they wanted known, they made known, the less popular projects were delegated verbally.
There have been many, many more diplomatic lies, from other governments out of fear of Germany, it is pretty incredible. For example how the Romanians communicated the Germans are there to train their forces, the reality was protection of gas resources.
Or the very sad story how Hungary was coerced to attack former Yugoslavia by means of acrobatics with the truth only days after signing a forever friendship and brotherhood treaty, it was so bad then prime minister Teleki commutes suicide over it.
In his suicide note, Teleki wrote in part: We broke our word, – out of cowardice […] The nation feels it, and we have thrown away its honor.
The Nazi Germany diplomatic communications were far from honest and this man called it by the name.
I always remember how the British considered Hitler's appeasement as a big mistake, they had a hunch.
Hitler also ordered every occupied nation to be free of Jews with little time given for the task and implementation of it up to the occupied puppet governments.
It does not matter if the Madagascar plan existed, what matters is what really happened.
The Madagascar plan was broadcast just like any other Nazi propaganda, which was riddled with lies.
> Sorry, but this is a very naive point of view. The Nazi solution was to kill as many of everything as fast they can, the t4 programme and hands on killings were already daily business. The only thing holding the Nazis back was a functional USSR, as soon they anticipated the fall of Moscow, the termination camps have been built in no time.
Sorry, but that's a very naive and quite wrong point of view.
The Wannsee conference, where it was actually decided to mass murder industrially the Jews was in January 1942, and happened then because they saw they won't have a quick victory against the USSR; otherwise it would have waited after that. Before the conference, there were small scale proofs of concept by local eager commanders, nothing more.
As was already established in the article, the USSR didn't care about Jews, why would they be holding back the Nazis? Nothing was stopping them from industrially murdering all Jews deported to the General Government in 1941, yet they didn't. The policy then was murder through torture, overwork and hunger.
It was rather that Germany thought they can do whatever they want once they believed Moscow is about to fall. I agree the Soviets did not care much more for Jews than Nazi Germany, hell, they even have been kinda allied or not entirely hostile to eachother at some time, like the Poland split.
I believe early in WW2, Japan had a treaty with Russia.
So Japan did not torpedo US Liberty ships headed to Russia, and various other surprising things. (Japan obeyed international treaties to the letter, but did not follow any human rights conventions.)
Of course, at the end of WW2, Russia turned their vast army and artillery eastward, and annihiliated the Japanese army.
I think we will never know what the reasoning behind the two bombs really was. I could imagine that after using large scale carpet and fire bombing against civilian targets, a nuclear bomb with a similar effect doesn't make much of a difference.
> They were more afraid of the red army than 2 nuclear bombings...
Not according to them[1]:
"More than ever before, the historical record confirms what those soldiers knew in their gut: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hideous as they were, shortened the war that Japan had begun and saved an immensity of lives. Far from considering itself essentially defeated, the Japanese military was preparing for an Allied assault with a massive buildup in the south. It was only the shock of the atomic blasts that enabled Japanese leaders who wanted to stop the fighting to successfully press for a surrender.
"'We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war,' Kido Koichi, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, later recalled. Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief Cabinet secretary, called the bomb 'a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war.'"
The ships headed to Russia were Russian flagged. They were the reason US submarines had to be very careful in their target selection in certain waters. Thunder Below has a lot of commentary on the subject.
The Soviets would have needed friends if the Allies accepted German's surrender then immediately took control of the German military to destroy the USSR, and Japan was in a natural position to be that friend.
Stalin only agreed to break the non-aggression pact once it became clear that no invasion from the west was coming, which was fairly late in the war (Yalta).
it is interesting to note that at no point during the war both sides fought simultaneously against the other side. E.g., the USSR was on Germany's side during the battle of Britain (supplying fuel for german bombers). The Japan non-aggression pact was kept until after the defeat of Germany. The many European countries that fought on both sides along the course of the war, etc.
Actually the Soviets already defeated the Germans. 80% of German forces were on the Eastern front and Russia was cutting through them like a hot knife through butter before d-day even occurred. They took Berlin despite the German high command basically trying to give it to the Western allies. The turning point of WW2 was Stalingrad, not D-day.
One could also make the case for the Germans failure to take Moscow to be the turning point, followed by the US entry into the war. After that it was just a question of when the Axis would be crushed by the Allies industrial capacity. Not if.
Aristides de Sousa Mendes, was a portuguese diplomat in Bordeux France.
He against explicit orders granted 30k visas of which 10k were jews.
His diplomatic career was terminated. He was shunned back in Portugal, died in debt, feed by a Jewish soup kitchen.
Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer characterized Sousa Mendes' deed as "perhaps the largest rescue action by a single individual during the Holocaust."
In his own words:
“From now on I’m giving everyone visas, there will be no more nationalities, races or religion. I cannot allow all you people to die...”
> Sugihara was then asked to resign by the foreign office. The official line was downsizing, though many, including his wife Yukiko, believe it was because of what happened in Lithuania.
It's important to note that, unlike Germany, Japan has never really admitted or apologized for what they did. See this shocking video by historian Mark Felton about what you can find today in a Japanese museum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngzesh6eN14
The Nazis were on a mission to annihilate the Jews, so in relative term they killed many, but in absolute terms the Japanese probably victimized a lot more people. It's just that there were a lot of Chinese people to victimize, so the magnitude of the crime is less apparent.
Their cruelty was even worse in some ways, as it was officially sanctioned and encouraged by their institutions as such. The Nazis, while they did not hide their hate for the Jews, went to some lengths to hide what they were actually doing to them -- which is probably how the German population could claim to not know what was going on. (To quote Speer: "I didn't know, I could have known, I should have known." He's been vilified but I haven't seen anything to paint him as a liar as far as this is concerned.)
Put simply, the Germans are ashamed of that past, even the Nazis had shown some signs that they knew it was shameful, but the Japanese have never demonstrated any shame.
Maybe he did, but the deniability was indeed plausible. And I'm aware that many doubt his sincerity, and it's perfectly reasonable to do so. That being said, I find his explanation not just plausible as well but more useful as an explanation. People chose not to see or believe what was too inconvenient. See cognitive dissonance. That explains how the Nazis got them to do what they did. Note that I'm not saying that they were ignorant of every crime, just that they were spared the undeniable knowledge of the most offensive ones, making it easier to support or at least fail to oppose the régime. Deporting the Jews was bad enough, and that was done in plain sight, but not quite as unpalatable as their mass murder.
The point here is that Japanese soldiers were massively trained to perform horrible things. They mistreated prisoners of war, civilians, anyone, everywhere, and new recruits were forced to perform horrors as part of their induction. Germans on the other hand respected the rules of war in the West (though certainly not in the East) for instance, except obviously for the SS. They were certainly keen to appear legit in that respect. The Japanese were not, ever.
> In the letter to Jeanty, written on December 23 1971, Speer wrote: "There is no doubt - I was present as Himmler announced on October 6 1943 that all Jews would be killed".
Not much plausible deniability there. He lied at the time to avoid being executed.
(To quote Speer: "I didn't know, I could have known, I should have known." He's been vilified but I haven't seen anything to paint him as a liar as far as this is concerned.)
Read Gitta Sereny's "Albert Speer, his battle with the truth". It's a thick book, but fascinating. She casts serious doubt on Speer's assertion that he didn't know about the death camps, or that Jews were systematically being exterminated.
> However I think you're grossly building up Germans as ignorant goodmen.
That's not at all what I'm saying, if you mean Germans during WW2. However if we're talking about today, it's certainly the case that Germans are unequivocal about their past while Japanese people as a whole are not.
