Among those convicted was Martin Bormann, who was tried in his absence and sentenced to death. Hermann Goring, the Head of the Luftwaffe and several sections of the SS, also received the death sentence, but he committed suicide the night before he was due to be executed. Others sentenced to death were: Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Minister of Foreign Affairs; Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior and architect of Nazi race laws; Hans Frank, Head of the Poland under its occupation; Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Wehrmacht; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking SS officer to survive the war; and Julius Streicher, editor of the weekly newspaper, Der Sturmer, which had incited hatred and murder of the Jews.
Among those who received a life sentence was Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy. Hess later died in Spandau Prison at the age of 93, apparently having committed suicide. (However, some believe he was murdered, questioning the motivation and ability of a 93-year-old to hang by an electrical extension cord from the ceiling.) Since his death, Hess has become a cult figure in Neo-Nazi circles and is regarded with reverence by many contemporary anti-Semites.
Trials of former Nazi officials continued in Nuremberg for the next two years, generating an enormous amount of discussion and controversy. The aim of the trials, besides bringing the culprits to justice, was to ensure that mass genocide of the kind that took place in the Third Reich would never happen again – but sadly, that did not turn out to be the case. However, the Nuremberg trials did bring the hideous crimes of the Nazi war leaders to light, ensuring that they could never become war heroes or martyrs in their country and helped to establish racial tolerance and democracy in modern-day Germany.
Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal
The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, formally known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) was modelled on the Nuremburg Trials and was convened on 3 May, 1946. The aim was to bring prominent figures in the Japanese government to justice after the defeat of Japan in the World War II. In many people’s view, Japan’s aggressive stance during the war, and its inhumane treatment of prisoners of war and civilians, were comparable with the behaviour of the Nazis during the war, and in some cases worse. For this reason, it was felt by the Allies that the Japanese leaders should pay for what they had done, rather than continue to hold office once the war was over.
The Japanese leaders were tried for a variety of crimes, including starting and waging the war (Class A), committing war crimes (Class B), and committing ‘crimes against humanity’ (Class C). The trials were more controversial than those at Nuremberg; as many commentators pointed out, the Allied powers themselves had, during their history, all been guilty of such crimes themselves, and it was only because they had won the war that they were in a position to accuse the losers. (For example, the Soviet Union was not the subject of an investigation, even though the abuses of Japanese prisoners of war there had been appalling.) The Japanese, moreover, argued that they had not been signatory to the Geneva Convention, which specified the proper treatment of prisoners of war and civilians, and that therefore they had broken no international law. Moreover, they pointed to the fact that the Allies themselves were not on trial for some of the worst episodes of the conflict, such as the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which killed millions of civilians in the most horrifying way and caused lasting sickness and disease in the population as well as untold ecological damage.
However, despite the criticisms, the Tokyo trials went ahead. The Japanese emperor, Hirohito, was not tried, but major figures in his government were charged, including the foreign minister, Baron Hirota Koki, the war minister, General Itagaki Seishiro, and the commander of the Burma Expeditionary Force, General Kimura Heitaro.
The Japanese military had the reputation of being extremely cruel to prisoners of war, and this was indeed borne out by the trial. Japanese military culture was such that soldiers were expected to be unquestioningly obedient to their superiors and to be completely without mercy to their enemies. Since the days of the samurai, Japanese citizens had been taught to be loyal to the emperor, and the Japanese government and people saw it as Japan’s right to expand its power and enlarge its empire. Moreover, the Japanese religion, Shinto, which had been adopted as the state religion in the late 19th century, had further reinforced this ideal of obedience to the emperor, who was held to be divine, a descendent of the sun goddess Amaterasu.
However, this general cultural influence alone could not explain the sadistic acts of barbarism that took place during World War II in Japan and its occupied territories. What emerged was that during the 1930s, a military dictatorship had taken control in Japan whose reign of terror was similar, in many ways, to that of the Nazis. Japan’s secret police, the Kempeitai, ruled the country by fear, while military personnel were required to beat their subordinates for any perceived failure. The further down the ranks the beatings went, the more severe they got, so that during the war, the prisoners taken captive in the camps received the worst treatment of all.
In such a harsh, militaristic climate, it was hardly surprising that, when Japan joined the Axis powers, their forces would commit dreadful atrocities. However, no one was prepared for the scale of their barbarism, and just as at Nuremberg, the courts were shocked by survivors’ accounts of what had gone on the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Besides everyday ill-treatment, such as starvation, there were many instances of murder, torture and rape that went unpunished by senior officers. In addition, the Japanese conducted experiments on the prisoners of war, as had the Germans. In one instance, at Unit 731, victims were taken outside in freezing weather, stripped and soaked in water until they had frozen solid. Their arms were amputated, and then their legs. This, apparently, was so that doctors could discover how frostbite affects the human body. Afterwards, the torso was used for other experiments, including researching the effects of diseases such as plague.
The cruelty of such experiments was hardly credible, but there were also other horror stories: of vivisection without anaesthetic on prisoners, and of using them to test for biological and chemical weapons such as poison gas. There were also many tales of torture, which was used on a daily basis to gather military intelligence. After their ordeal, the torture victims were often executed.
As well as this, the Japanese forced thousands of civilian women into prostitution. They set up military brothels in occupied countries and forced local women to become sex slaves, or ‘comfort women’ as they were more politely known. In this way, women from the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and China became prostitutes in a system that was authorized by the Japanese military officials. However, some commentators allege that this system was not as abusive as it looked, and that many of the women agreed to become prostitutes voluntarily. Whatever the truth, it seems that around 200,000 women became ‘comfort women’ during the period of World War II.