World War II Archives - Not Even Past

Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII

When I visited Rosy Galván Yamanaka’s home in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, she had a bowl of Mexican-style udon prepared for me. I sat down in her dining room and listened as she told me stories of her grandfather, José Ángel Yamanaka, a Japanese migrant who arrived in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like many other Japanese migrants, Yamanaka arrived to work in the coal mines of Coahuila. Eventually, he settled in Piedras Negras. This city on the Texas-Mexico border is not just a place with a community of Japanese Mexicans, it is also a border town currently witnessing the arrival of large groups of Honduran, Venezuelan, and other migrants. Though not apparent at first, the overlooked histories of Japanese communities in Mexico and Texas during WWII and the stories of migrants at the border today highlight similar experiences of exclusion, criminalization, and violence.

Rosy (on the right) pictured with her mother (center) and younger brother (left) during a visit to her grandfather’s home in Monclova, Coahuila. — *Rosy (on the right) is pictured with her mother (center) and younger brother (left) during a visit to her grandfather’s home in Monclova, Coahuila. Courtesy of Rosy Galván Yamanaka.*

After recalling she possessed a few photographs of her family from 1942 to 1945, Galván Yamanaka began telling me how her grandfather had relocated to Monclova, Coahuila, during the war. Her grandfather had moved south to Monclova after Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho ordered all Japanese living near the border to relocate to Mexico City and Guadalajara. The Yamanaka family was separated for three years, but they were fortunate to be in the same state. Other Japanese Mexican families were not able to visit their relatives due to costs and long distances. Galván Yamanaka is aware that her grandfather was forced to leave Piedras Negras and relocate to Monclova during the war because she was born in 1941, at the start of the war. She carries these stories of the war time years because of the time she spent with her grandfather and older family members and she believes it is her duty to share them with the younger generations in her family.

Japanese Mexican memories of WWII are often obscured. Some Japanese-Mexican families do not know what happened to their family members during the war. For many, it took years to discover why their families were forcibly separated by the Mexican state regardless of their Japanese relatives’ citizenship. These memories of war then remain within each Japanese Mexican family. Some Japanese Mexican families do not know about the discrimination faced by their relatives and that they were forced to leave their homes. In fact, most Mexicans are unaware of this part of Mexican history.

In January 1942, President Ávila Camacho ordered all Japanese migrants and Japanese-Mexican communities near the Pacific coast and the U.S.-Mexico border to relocate to central Mexico. The Mexican government gave Japanese Mexicans 24 hours to evacuate and move to Guadalajara and Mexico City. The government also stopped accepting naturalization applications from Japanese migrants and prevented Japanese nationals and Japanese Mexicans from collecting funds from banks or making any money exchanges.^[1]

The government’s response to the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941 targeted Japanese communities near the U.S.-Mexico border and the Pacific Coast, as these (and other) communities were marked as a “threat” to both the U.S. and Mexico.[2] Japanese Mexicans were responsible for organizing their own travel to Central Mexico and reporting their relocation to the government. Unlike some countries in Latin America, the Mexican government did not work with the U.S. government to deport its Japanese communities to camps in the U.S.^[3]

The stories of Japanese incarceration in the U.S. and the forced removal of Japanese Mexicans are often not told together, obscuring the ways both the Mexican and American governments were complicit in the racialization and criminalization of Japanese communities during the war.[4] By telling transborder stories of WWII, we learn Mexican intelligence agencies, along with the FBI, the Border Patrol, Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), and local law enforcement in the Texas-Mexico border, were part of the relocation, removal, and policing of Japanese nationals and Japanese families from the border region. These narratives not only include northern Mexico and Texas in histories of Japanese exclusion and policing during the first half of the twentieth century, but they also illustrate how collaborations between agencies and officials in the U.S. and Mexico have long affected immigrant communities at the border.

For instance, the Crystal City camp in Texas, which opened in 1942, was located 50 miles east of Eagle Pass-Piedras Negras. It was used to hold Japanese Americans, Japanese Latin Americans, and other incarcerees of Italian and German descent. This camp was operated by Border Patrol and INS agents. Still, this history of Japanese incarceration is not often remembered within the histories of criminalization and exclusion in South Texas and the U.S.-Mexico border region. The presence of this Japanese incarceration camp in South Texas, like the displacement of Japanese Mexican communities in northern Mexico, is also not part of the regional communities’ memories. Both cases uncover hidden narratives of surveillance and policing of Japanese communities at the border that began decades prior to WWII.[5] These histories also reflect a longer history of family separation as families of Japanese Americans, Japanese Mexicans, and Japanese Latin Americans were split from their families and forced to move across state and national borders.

*“Behind Barbed Wire” poster for the Japanese American National Museum’s Day of Remembrance in 2019. Courtesy of the JAMN (https://www.janm.org*).

Today, artists and community organizations are highlighting the convergence of past and present forms of incarceration and policing through their work. This drawing by Japanese-American artist Elyse Imoto illustrates the similar criminalization and violence experienced by Japanese communities during the war and of Mexican, Central American, Haitian, Venezuelan, and other migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years.[6] The juxtaposition of one child in black and white and another in color marks a past and a present. One child is painted in black and white and resembles a young Japanese-American girl held during the period of Japanese incarceration in the 1940s. The second child pictured on the right is depicted in color and resembles a young Mexican or Central American child at the U.S.-Mexico border in the present. The background includes a watchtower, buildings that were typically found in incarceration camps, and a “United States Port of Entry” sign with figures that resemble armed Border Patrol agents.

Migrant detention has been on the rise since 2016, and as of August 2022, there have been 372 cases of family separation since 2021.[7] Cases of family separation at the border are a result of policies that criminally convict migrants and separate any parents or adults crossing with children. One might not immediately think the conditions and treatment of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border today are related to the treatment of Japanese communities and their forced removal during the war. However, those incarcerated in the Crystal City camp and Japanese Mexicans living in the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas were forced to relocate and leave their families and communities behind. The history of Japanese displacement during WWII is seen as distant from the Texas-Mexico border and not related to larger histories of incarceration and violence in the region. Yet, the migrant experiences in South Texas are part of a continuous normalization of violence that is deemed acceptable by the state through its language and policies for “national security” or against possible “threats” or “criminals.” Japanese incarceration near the Texas-Mexico border and the current state policies related to migration and citizenship at the U.S.-Mexico border are part of a process of exclusion that developed as a result of racialized immigration and enforcement policies of the twentieth century.

Tsuru solidarity banner — *Courtesy of Tsuru for Solidarity (https://tsuruforsolidarity.org*)

In the U.S., groups like Tsuru for Solidarity are trying to change this by sharing their experiences and the stories of family separation during WWII to #StopRepeatingHistory.[8] Tsuru for Solidarity is a project that is made up of Japanese American and Japanese Latin American social justice advocates and their allies, and the group leads campaigns across the U.S. to educate the public on the history of Japanese incarceration and build solidarities with other groups that are targeted by racist immigration policies. Some of the participants are members of Japanese families that were incarcerated during the war or descendants of former incarcerees. They lead campaigns outside of immigrant detention centers across the U.S. to protest conditions in these centers and policies like family separation.

The history of Japanese incarceration, forced removal, and family separation during the war on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border illustrate the legacies of violence that have longer ties to anti-Asian exclusion in the late 19^th century. The legacy of these policies reverberates into the present with the criminalization and incarceration of migrants and asylum seekers on the U.S.-Mexico border. Descendants of Japanese families and community activists in the U.S. and Mexico are sharing their memories within their families and communities, thus making sure these stories are not forgotten.

Lucero Estrella is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University, and she is currently a Visiting Research Affiliate at the Institute for Historical Studies (IHS) at UT Austin. Her dissertation is a study of the histories of Japanese migration and community formation in Texas and northeastern Mexico across the 20th century. Her dissertation examines how Japanese mining and farming communities in Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Texas are critical to histories of race, migration, and empire. Using oral histories with Japanese communities on both sides of the border and sources from state and local archives in Mexico, Japan, and the U.S., her work illustrates how Japanese Americans and Japanese Mexicans, and the national and global forces that structured their lives, shaped the histories of Mexico, Japan, Texas, and the U.S.-Mexico border region.

[1] María Elena Ota Mishima, Siete migraciones japonesas en México 1890-1978. (México: El Colegio de México, 1982), 97.

[2] The surveillance of Japanese communities in northern Mexico was not new, and U.S. surveillance of Japanese settlements in Mexico between the 1920s and the 1940s were fueled by U.S. state anxieties over the expansion of Japanese empire and fear of “yellow peril.” See the works of scholars Eiichiro Azuma, Jerry Garcia, and Sergio Hernández Galindo for more: Sergio Hernandez Galindo, La guerra contra los japoneses en Mexico durante la segunda guerra mundial: Kiso Tsuru y Masao Imuro, migrantes vigilados, First edition. (Mexico City: Itaca), 2011; Jerry Garcia. Looking like the Enemy: Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897-1945. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014; Azuma, Eiichiro. “Japanese Immigrant Settler Colonialism in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands and the U.S. Racial-Imperialist Politics of the Hemispheric “Yellow Peril”.” Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 2 (2014).

[3] Countries like Peru, Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Venezuela worked with the U.S. to forcibly deport and incarcerate Japanese Latin Americans in camps in the U.S. Some Japanese living in Mexico, such as high-level officials, diplomats, and a small number of Japanese nationals and Japanese-Mexicans living near the border were incarcerated in the U.S. For more on Japanese incarceration in Mexico see Selfa A. Chew, Uprooting Community: Japanese Mexicans, World War II, and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2015).

[4] Scholars have debated the use of “internment” and “incarceration” among other words like “detention” and “confinement.” Densho, a Japanese American non-profit organization based in Seattle, “encourage the use of “incarceration,” except in the specific case of Japanese Americans detained by the Army or DOJ.” Historian Connie Chiang notes that incarceration conveys the lack of freedom faced by those of Japanese ancestry and I use “incarceration” for this reason. See “Terminology – Densho: Japanese American Incarceration and Japanese Internment.” Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project. https://densho.org/terminology/#incarceration; Connie Y. Chiang. Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration. (Oxford University Press. 2018).

[5] Concerns over Japanese and other Asian migrants bypassing immigration restrictions and crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to enter the U.S. extended across the border into Northern Mexico and were fueled by a transborder Yellow Peril. These concerns were not only about unauthorized Japanese immigration into the U.S. but also about large Japanese colonies forming in Mexico and Japanese purchasing large concessions in Mexico. See Eiichiro Azuma, “Japanese Immigrant Settler Colonialism in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands and the U.S. Racial-Imperialist Politics of the Hemispheric ‘Yellow Peril,’” Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 2 (2014): 255–76.

[6] This drawing by Imoto was used as the poster for the Japanese American National Museum’s Day of Remembrance in 2019. This was used as the cover to their program as well as the image used to promote the in-person event hosted at JANM in Los Angeles.

[7] “Biden is Still Separating Migrant Kids from Their Families.” Texas Observer. November 21, 2022. https://www.texasobserver.org/the-biden-administration-is-still-separating-kids-from-their-families/.

[8] For more on Tsuru for Solidarity and their campaigns and efforts see: https://tsuruforsolidarity.org.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Wars of Oppenheimer

It’s a three-hour, ultra-big-screen, deeply-researched box office mega-hit about… J. Robert Oppenheimer, project manager. Leslie Groves, the manager’s manager. Kitty Oppenheimer, the manager’s kids’ manager. Lewis Strauss, the wanna-be manager. Harry Truman, the buck-stops-here manager. James Byrnes, President Truman’s manager. The scientists of the Manhattan Project were thoroughly unmanageable. The bomb? It was everybody’s fault, and nobody’s in particular. Nuclear war by committee. It’s Oppenheimer: Destroyer of Responsibility.

Director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan isn’t wrong. The essence of the Manhattan Project, several characters remind us, was compartmentalization. The less any one project member knew about how to make an atom bomb, the less he or she could reveal to an enemy — especially a Soviet, an enemy of the Allied variety.

One of the movie’s smartest choices is to place the story of mankind’s first nuclear weapon in its ideological context. It excels at depicting the intellectual context, the scientific rivalries, and the egos surrounding the bomb. It deals tolerably well with the political context, the way World War II‘s messy wrap-up determined how the bomb was used. But where Oppenheimer sets itself apart from most other movies on the topic is in its depiction of the bomb as a turning point in the debate over communism: a debate that had raged for years and would only intensify as the nuclear era began.

"Little Boy," the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Around a third of the movie takes place many years after the bomb, when Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) security clearance is under review and his occasional colleague Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) is seeking Senate confirmation to join President Eisenhower’s cabinet. If this sounds obscure and more “inside baseball” than a gripping thriller, it is, and Nolan leans into its wonkiness with the confidence of a director who answers to no one. Unlike the rest of the movie, these flash-forward scenes are shot in black and white, a palette that cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema uses beautifully. Nolan, who is known for trippy time-bending films like Interstellar and Tenet, collapses about a decade’s worth of bureaucratic infighting into an interwoven, frenetic, emotional, and at times corny parallel movie that he grafts onto his more conventional biopic.

It is in this seemingly tacked-on portion of the film that the theme of communism vs. anti-communism stakes out its central position. The postwar rift between “the free world” of liberal capitalism and the opposing world of the communist bloc was dangerous because, after the bombs reached a certain strength, either side could have started the war to end all wars as well as terminating all known life. However, because that hasn’t yet happened (as of the publication of this article), Nolan has to illustrate the tension indirectly. While a McCarthy-era committee grills Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) about their prewar communist sympathies, the bitter and conniving Strauss faces a divided U.S. Senate and a rebellion of atomic scientists.

The end result is two clear camps, Strauss’ and Oppenheimer’s. And in their pride and addiction to power, both ramp up pressure until the other is destroyed. Excessive makeup and monologuing from Strauss and unearned heroics from the Oppenheimers notwithstanding, this petty skirmish after the war is key to the movie’s message.

Oppenheimer reminds us that, if we seek the origins of the Second World War in the First, the people who lived it had a more recent and more relevant frame of reference: the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). This was the first major trial by combat between fascism on the one hand and communism and republican democracy on the other. It was the romantic struggle that drew in Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, and Casablanca‘s Rick Blaine. It was the proving ground for foreign, notably American, idealists who risked their lives or at least sent money to ensure that freedom – in the left-wing sense of progressive thinking and non-traditional living – would not go quietly into the night as Europe’s balance of power tilted sharply to the right.

Lewis Strauss during his tenure as the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
Source: Library of Congress

Oppenheimer and his family and friends sent money through the robust international organization of the Communist Party. Nolan shows Oppenheimer as politically naive but stubbornly loyal to his communist girlfriend Jean (Florence Pugh) and fellow-traveling best friend Chevalier (Jefferson Hall). He also shows Oppenheimer’s support for unionizing and integrating academia, two supposed vectors for communist infiltration.

Nolan details how Oppenheimer’s politics made him a difficult pick to keep the U.S. military’s highest secret. Matt Damon’s character, General Leslie Groves, is a show-stealer as a buttoned-up, blunt-talking Pentagon man — the Pentagon man, since he was the one who built it — who forms a surprisingly close relationship with the Bhagavad Gita-quoting egghead he chooses for the job. Casey Affleck appears in one indelible scene as a hardened anti-communist who sees through Oppenheimer’s prevarications about his past. Nolan also shows how Oppenheimer and the scientists he recruited, a team that included a number of left-leaning academics and Jewish scientists, reacted to the realization that the atomic bombs would fall not on the Germans whose bomb program they’d been racing, but on a largely defeated Japan. Though the movie chooses not to show Japan at all, a scene in which Oppenheimer visualizes his Los Alamos team with Hiroshima- and Nagasaki-style burns is one of the film’s most powerful moments.

Oppenheimer dodges a real discussion of the surrender of Japan, about which whole movies have been devoted (see, for example, Japan’s Longest Day by Kihachi Okamoto). It mentions the Potsdam Conference, where Truman (Gary Oldman, in another instance of too much makeup) received Groves’s news about the successful Trinity Test, but viewers must read on their own about the conference’s significance for Japan’s surrender planning. He shows Byrnes (Pat Skipper), Truman’s Secretary of State and “Assistant President,” but conveys nothing about how the bomb changed Byrnes’ and, therefore, Truman’s thinking about the Soviet role vis a vis Japan. Relevant but outside the film’s scope are discussions about nuclear science in postwar Japan and the long shadow Hiroshima and Nagasaki cast over Japanese politics and art. These are directions the movie could have gone, but for Nolan the atomic bomb is not about Japan.

By the same token, the people who made the bomb are not defined by it. Oppenheimer emerges from the movie as an intellectual on par with the likes of Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) and Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). He butts heads, always with the greatest professional respect, with Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Ernest Lawrence, and Werner Heisenberg, all brilliantly cast and sharply written. They all feel as though they could star in their own movies with the bomb as a mere footnote. The birth of nuclear weapons, it seems, was an almost accidental consequence of their combined genius. Their governments weaponized them, Nolan’s film tells us, and most of them had the good grace to feel uneasy about it.

Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Nolan’s is not a reductive kind of hero worship; these (almost) household-name scientists do, amazingly, feel like real people, and none are more flawed than Oppenheimer himself. The research that Nolan did to get these men right is obvious, and his Oppenheimer, like the real one, says that he feels blood on his hands and anxiety about the planet’s future. Yet equally obvious is the fact that Nolan sees the bomb-builders as visionaries, and if they felt they had no choice but to beat Hitler to the bomb, if they declined to take responsibility for what happened in Japan, then Nolan will go no further down those roads than they. What happened happened, now on to the Cold War.

Oppenheimer is Nolan’s second visit to World War II after 2017’s Dunkirk, and hopefully, it will not be his last. His understanding of the era — its mindsets, its cadences — is remarkable, and his handling of very big and very different personalities within the era is impressive. The film is his best-looking to date. There are beats that don’t work and paths not taken that deserved a closer look, but complex themes come through clearly and speak well of Nolan’s skills as a historian. Oppenheimer‘s success with audiences is a good thing well deserved.

But don’t miss Barbie, either.

David A. Conrad received his Ph.D. from UT Austin in 2016 and published his first book, Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan, in 2022. He is currently working on a second book, which will also focus on postwar Japan. David lived in Japan’s Miyagi prefecture for three years and can’t wait to go back to his home away from home.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter Judson (2016)

By Jonathan Parker

This excellent work by historian Pieter Judson shows how the Hapsburg empire was a modernizing force that sustained a complex but often mutually beneficial relationship with the various nationalist movements within its borders. To support this argument, Judson synthesizes an impressive number of existing works on narrower topics into a cohesive narrative history of the empire from the late eighteenth century until its demise at the end of World War I. Judson claims that the empire was hardly doomed prior to 1914, arguing against long-standing nationalist histories of the empire’s inevitable collapse. While The Habsburg Empire is not without its flaws, it will surely remain required reading for anyone interested not only in the empire itself, but more broadly in the history of state-building, modernization, and nationalism in the nineteenth century.

The Habsburg Empire is not intended to be a blow-by-blow account. Instead, it tries to build an updated framework for thinking about the empire over its final century. Judson achieves this by borrowing from works on peasant life and the lives of oil workers in Galicia, on Slavic nationalist movements in what would later become Yugoslavia, and on industrialization and its consequences in Bohemia, Moravia, Lower and Upper Austria, and Silesia. He also draws on the complex political history of Vienna and Budapest, as the nature of the Habsburg state was debated, negotiated, and repeatedly hammered out over the course of an entire century. Consequently, Judson covers a lot of ground while touching on a limited number of key issues.

The discussion of industrialization is a good example. Despite the leadership’s conservative commitment to monarchy and its rejection of the French Revolution in the decades between the Napoleonic Wars and the 1848 revolutions, the empire underwent dramatic economic and social change. The imperial government was deeply suspicious of any potentially revolutionary or democratic activity, and yet it was also strapped for cash and resources. New technologies and techniques, including the building of railroads and capitalist institutions, encouraged not only economic growth, but also a kind of civil society as private middle-class and noble actors sought to address problems the government could not or would not face. As Judson argues, this period was not one of economic stagnation that laid the groundwork for so-called “East European backwardness,” but rather one in which subjects and citizens took an active role in social and economic change. In other words, this period of political conservatism saw grassroots development of democratic institutions and market forces. This point meshes with Judson’s broader argument that Habsburg imperial citizens took an active role in government and society, and that the empire held intrinsic value as a vehicle, rather than an obstacle, for public improvement.

The Hofburg, 1897 (via DPLA)

How then does Judson explain the final collapse of the empire, if it really was not doomed long before the First World War? In his final chapter, Judson argues that the imperial state lost a great deal of its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens during the war. Prior to the war there had been a sense in many quarters that the empire essentially served its citizens, and that even nationalists and Marxists could promote their agendas through its institutions. However, shortly after the war began, martial law was declared and many democratic governmental organs were suspended along with citizens’ rights by conservative, anti-democratic forces in the military. Combined with shortages of food and other essentials as well as catastrophic tactical failures on the battlefield (which virtually wiped out the empire’s entire corps of professional soldiers within the first months), these actions severely undermined faith in the empire’s ability to provide for its people. Even though democratic rule of law was restored half-way through the war, the damage had already been done. Nationalist organizations were then able to capitalize on the situation by organizing welfare relief, vastly improving their own legitimacy in citizens’ eyes and in contrast to an apparently failing state. Judson goes further and claims that the “doomed long ago” narrative was promoted by nationalists and arch-conservative imperialists alike, one in order to legitimize the post-war order of nation-states, and the other to put the blame for the empire’s sudden collapse on someone else. With this book, Judson offers a corrective.

In The Habsburg Empire: A New History, Pieter Judson has set a standard for general histories of the empire and produced a framework with which future specialist monographs can productively engage. This eminently readable book will be appreciated by students and scholars of European history as well as the general reading public.

More By Jonathan Parker:

The Refugees of ’68: The U.S. Response to Czechoslovak Refugees during Prague Spring

Historical Perspectives on Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness (2011)

Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan. By Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018)

In her first book, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci enters a longstanding conversation surrounding twentieth-century eugenics projects. Contraceptive Diplomacy adopts a transpacific approach to reproductive politics, focusing on joint Japanese-American efforts to curb population growth and maintain strong national bodies. Takeuchi-Demirci grounds her analysis in two women central to the movement: Margaret Sanger and Ishimoto Shizue. As she traces Japanese-American relations and birth control activism throughout the century, Takeuchi-Demirci finds that state governments’ racial fears and desire for international dominance eclipsed Sanger’s and Shizue’s feminist goals. Rather than provide women more control over their own reproduction, Japan and the United States harnessed eugenics discourse to demonstrate their cultural and scientific advances and reduce “undesirable” populations.

Takeuchi-Demirci begins by highlighting Sanger’s trip to Japan following World War I. Already infamous in the United States for her birth control activism, Sanger’s decision to move her work abroad allowed her to escape the frustrations she experienced in her domestic efforts. The Japanese government saw in Sanger’s call a way to resolve a host of social problems by limiting the population, while an active women’s movement, well aware of her work, welcomed Sanger as a fellow woman dedicated to reproductive rights. Moving from the post World War I moment to the tense years leading up to the Second World War, Takeuchi-Demirci shows that Sanger and Shizue maintained a connection throughout the conflict, albeit with tensions, and reframed birth control as a way to obtain international peace by balancing the world order. Anti-Japanese feelings in the United States ultimately inspired an immigration ban. Fearing “The Yellow Peril,” the U.S. government became concerned that Japanese migrants, who supposedly reproduced at alarming rates, would overrun the white population. The U.S. government also blamed Japan’s “aggressive” imperialism on Japanese women’s robust fecundity. Around the same time, Sanger began to temper her radicalism and joined forces with eugenicists interested in population control. Despite the fact that these men wanted to promote reproduction in white women while reducing it among non-white, Sanger nevertheless saw the alliance as an opportunity to promote birth control as a benefit for women.

In U.S. occupied Japan after World War II, caution about population control following the Nazi genocide did not prevent the U.S. from promoting birth control behind the scenes or from claiming that these efforts were indigenous-led. In particular, Takeuchi-Demirci argues, the United States hoped reducing the population and enhancing its quality would defend against communist infiltration. When birth rates did in fact decline, the U.S. envisioned replicating their approach throughout Asia. Takeuchi-Demirci shows how the Japanese continued these efforts and linked them to “New Japan,” the empire’s more modern, progressive successor. Sanger participated in these activities by pushing to develop new birth control technologies using Eastern countries, and people, as a testing ground. Japan hesitantly accepted this offer, but insisted on leading the project to mitigate any Western exploitation. The Japanese eventually lost interest in the population control movement as birth rates continued to fall, to the distress of the United States, which remained intent on preventing communism’s spread through modified populations.

Ishimoto Shizuko in 1922 (via Wiki Commons)

Contraceptive Diplomacy travels uncharted territory by investigating transpacific attempts to bolster state power through a combination of birth control and eugenics. Takeuchi-Demirci’s work reminds us that U.S. eugenics projects did not exist in isolation, but on the world stage during a century fraught with international conflict. In working together to promote population control, Japan and the United States actually competed to demonstrate their cultural and scientific superiority. Feminist-led initiatives became, as Takeuchi-Demirci calls it, “a tool for patriarchal control and world domination” (210). Born in an anti-imperialist and socialist climate during the first World War, birth control traveled in imperialistic ways to facilitate international diplomacy. Takeuchi-Demirci shows the different ways discourses can be manipulated to serve dominant desires, and how even those who initially resisted this co-option, such as Sanger, become complicit. While the argument that eugenics served state goals is not particularly new, Takeuchi-Demirci does shed light on previously ignored Japanese-American projects. Her work makes this scholarly oversight appear all the more glaring given Sanger’s extensive involvement with the Japanese government and women’s groups.

Not all of Takeuchi-Demirci’s goals are achieved, however. Her stated intention to trace her narrative through Sanger and Schizue does not materialize; in fact, Schizue seems confined to the first few chapters, before disappearing as Sanger steals the show. While the women’s understated presence may make sense in light of the state’s tightening control over birth control, Sanger’s continued appearance seems to privilege the Western activist. Nevertheless, Takeuchi-Demirci’s has produced a fine book, as well as a relevant one. Her epilogue notes continuing twenty-first century eugenics projects and renewed fears about non-white reproduction outstripping that of whites (one thinks, for example, of United States anxiety over supposed Mexican “anchor babies.”) Contraceptive Diplomacy will appeal to a wide variety of readers, including those interested in international relations, twentieth-century United States or Japanese history, gender history, and the history of medicine.

Kellianne King is a graduate student pursuing a dual-title in History and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her areas of interest include nineteenth and twentieth century United States history as well as the history of medicine and psychiatry.

Notes from the Field
The “Knock Knock Who Is There” Moment for Japan
Racing the Enemy

Inching Towards War: Military Preparedness in the 1930s

The 1936 National Democratic Convention in Philadelphia was a coronation of sorts for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who faced little serious opposition in his pursuit of a second nomination. The convention program was full of articles and photographs that talked up the president’s programs and achievements during his first term. However a closer look at the working drafts found in the program printer’s archive, stored on campus at UT Austin’s Briscoe Center, shows that the administration grappled with presenting the political issues of the day to the public. Of particular note are essay drafts related to America’s role in the world, and specifically how Roosevelt sought to justify military investment to a skeptical public.

The printer’s archive includes original artwork, photographs, advertisements and party leader biographies from the 1936 convention program. In addition, it boasts a set of fully annotated typed essays written by Roosevelt’s Cabinet members and other officials. Those essays—including entries for the State and Treasury departments, the National Park Service, and the Works Progress Administration—comprise the bulk of the program’s content.

The program represented a chance for the Roosevelt administration to project its philosophy, policies, and achievements upon both the convention and the upcoming general election. The essays’ many edits point to the ways that Roosevelt’s ideas and activities were deeply contested at the time within the Roosevelt administration, the Democratic Party, and the wider American public during the 1930s.

George Dern, United States Secretary of War from 1933-19336 (via Wikipedia)

George Dern’s essay is more annotated than most. The former governor of Utah was Roosevelt’s secretary of war from 1933 until his death shortly after the convention. Like the staunch anti-war campaigner, U.S. Senator Gerald Nye, Dern was a western progressive. His essay reflects this, emphasizing that American foreign policy “contemplates no aggressive action: it is entirely defensive. We are a peace-loving people.” And yet, unlike Nye, Dern advocated for upgrading the military’s capabilities to create a force – neither “dangerously small” nor “menacingly large” — that could respond rapidly in a crisis. Treading lightly, Dern remains pointed in his criticism of the Republican controlled Congresses of the 1920s, accusing them of underfunding the Army, which left it lacking in both equipment and personnel: “The President and the [now Democratic] Congress have taken steps to remedy at least in part this serious defect.” However, he is quick to add that America remains “considerably behind the armies of other countries.”

It’s a point that Dern reiterates again and again, but, intriguingly, Roosevelt’s communication strategists omitted many of these assessments. Whole paragraphs alluding to America’s unpreparedness for war are crossed out, including references to needing more soldiers and rifles and the Army being “very much smaller than that of any of the nations of comparable importance.” Roosevelt operatives—aware that the president’s internationalist leanings were stronger than those of the American public as a whole—were as keen as Dern to stress the practical rather than idealistic reasons for military investment. However, they appear to have thought Dern went too far and risked making America appear weak. In a world stalked by Hitler and Stalin, during a decade that had witnessed Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, that would be an understandable concern. In any case, Dern’s essay employs another motif to broker consensus for military investment: the Army as an agent of social and economic progress.

Essay by Dern with edits (via the Dolph Briscoe Center)

Dern states that the Army had been a “vital creative force that is closely identified with the growth and progress of our country.” Not only was it instrumental in pioneering preventative medicine and radio transmission, it was Army engineers who had “surveyed the routes of the early canals and the first railroads.” In addition to placing the Army within America’s glorious, trailblazing past, Dern emphasizes its nonmilitary achievements in the present. He highlights the Army’s work in disaster response and flood mitigation, as well as in training, equipping, and feeding members of the Civilian Conservation Corps. which employed nearly 3 million unemployed American youths in a variety of conservation programs such as trail maintenance and tree planting during its nine-year existence. Dern’s point was to show that the Army could “serve the people as well in the exigencies of peace as in the travails of war.” This was aimed at cultivating consent for an enhanced and enlarged military during a period when the public remained on the fence about internationalism and the prospect of upgrading America’s role in world affairs.

Dern was succeeded as secretary of war by Harry Hines Wooding, who continued his predecessor’s cautious modernization. Likewise, Roosevelt’s internationalism remained tempered, and domestic issues still dominated. However, events were to evolve rapidly. America’s perceived lack of response to Nazi aggression from 1938 on drew national and international criticism. After Paris fell to Hitler in 1940, the United States quietly pivoted toward Britain, as it had in World War I, supplying materials and later armaments in the war against Germany. Wooding was forced to resign and was replaced with Henry Stimson, who echoed Roosevelt’s now-increasingly hawkish tone and practice.

Sections concerning military nixed in this draft (via Dolph Briscoe Center)

Congress, however, remained divided even as late as the fall of 1941. Efforts to dilute the neutrality acts of the previous decade were successful, but the legislative opposition, led by Nye and others, was vociferous. Indeed, an extension to the military draft in August 1941 (from one to two and a half years) passed in the House by only one vote — that of Speaker Sam Rayburn from Texas. (Rayburn is pictured behind Roosevelt, right). But the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan in December proved to be the tipping point, outraging American public opinion and leading to a swift congressional declaration of war. Even Nye voted aye. Germany, Japan’s ally, declared war on America in the days following. The United States was now at war both in the Pacific and the Atlantic. As in 1917, policy had edged forward but then seemed to turn on a dime. More than 16 million Americans went on to serve in World War II. Partially, gradually, emphatically, intervention had prevailed over isolation.

Dagmar Lieblova, Survivor

Dagmar Lieblova, Czech Girl’s Home, Terezin, Czech Republic 2014

by Dennis Darling

Dagmar Lieblova was a child prisoner at Terezín, deported to Auschwitz, then dispatched as slave labor to Hamburg, a city then in the daily cross-hairs of Allied bombers. There she cleared the streets of debris from the previous night’s air raids. Dagmar was finally liberated, sitting among the dead, by British troops at the notorious Bergen Belsen concentration camp. The eighty-year old Lieblova died last month in Prague, beating the odds after having been forced as a teenager to dwell four desperate years in harm’s deadly way.

The ranks of the generation that lived through the horrors of World War II are rapidly thinning. Soon, all those who have experienced the war’s seminal events will be gone. For the past five-years I have photographed the remnants of a group that endured the unprecedented terror of Nazi Germany – survivors, like Dagmar Lieblova…prisoners of Terezín.

Why am I interested in survivors of this particular concentration camp, located forty miles north of Prague, above all others?

Of the more than 40,000 detentions centers, concentration, work and death camps located throughout German occupied Europe, Terezín was unique in a number of ways, most notably because of the large number of artists and creative types imprisoned there and the legacy of art and music they produced that survived. The camp also became known, although far from the truth, as the “country club” of German camps; a reputation gained partly due to the fact that the walled prison town was skillfully staged as a “model Jewish ghetto” by the Nazi propaganda machine to successfully fool the International Red Cross inspectors into believing that all Jewish camps resembled the sham they viewed at Terezín.

Although Terezín was not an extermination camp, death was far from a stranger. Terrible conditions of depravity and evil prevailed there as well. More than 30,000 inmates perished from exposure, malnutrition and disease while awaiting transport to the East. Nearly 90,000 others were eventually deported east to Auschwitz–the vast majority murdered. Of the 155,000 Jews who were processed and held at Terezín, less than 8 percent survived the war.

The portrait of Dagmar Lieblova was taken in the doorway of the Czech Girl’s Home located on Terezín’s town square. It was here that young Czech girls, including Lieblova, were housed, more than twenty-five to each small room, after they were deemed old enough to be separated from their mothers. The chalk drawing on the building’s wall, a butterfly (motyl in Czech), has become the symbol associated with Terezín because of a poem that survived the camp and an author who didn’t. The poem I never saw another butterfly was written by Pavel Friedman, a teenager imprisoned at Terezín and later murdered at Auschwitz.

When I first started the Terezín project I was timid about approaching the survivors to ask them to talk about their experience, then sit for a portrait. I found it hard to comprehend why they would be interested in speaking to a person from rural upstate New York, raised Irish Catholic and who, at the time, really couldn’t precisely express why he was interested in making their photograph.

I was even more reluctant to ask those survivors who lived in the vicinity of Terezín to accompany me for their portrait session to the place of such personal sorrow. Much to my surprise, nearly everyone I asked made that journey of forty miles and seventy years, including Dagmar Lieblova.

I later happened upon a 2010 editorial in the New York Times that put precisely into words not only the reason for the Terezín survivors’ willingness to be a part of my project but, why I was compelled to attempt the series as well. In that editorial, the author and Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar lamented, ‘that after 65 years, the last living survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing one by one,’ and he points out that at best, ‘only the impersonal voice of a researcher will soon be left to tell the Holocaust story’. At worst, he warns, it will be told in the “malevolent register of revisionists and falsifiers.” He cautions that this process has already begun. “This is why those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to mankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the power to enflame theirs, too.”

Reliable sources estimate that only a few hundred Terezín inmates still survive to tell their stories. To date, I have made more than 150 portraits, in eight countries. I am honored to have been the recipient of their trust and feel fortunate to have been able to make some of the last visual records of their unique histories–The last of living memory.

This Thursday, April 12, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Dennis Darling has taught photojournalism, social documentary and graphic design in the School of Journalism at UT Austin since 1981. He has published two books of his work: “Desperate Pleasures” and “Chameleon With Camera.” Darling’s most recent documentary work, a photography series on Holocaust survivors entitled “Families Gone To Ash: Giving voice to the survivors of Terezin” was exhibited at the American Center of the American Embassy at Prague during June and July of 2014.

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler (2016)

By Natalie Cincotta

A German novelist and screenwriter, Norman Ohler first happened upon the topic of drug use in the Third Reich through a Berlin-based DJ, who told him that drugs were widespread at the time. Intending to write a novel on the subject, Ohler went into the archives in search of historical detail for his book. What he found in military records and the personal papers of Hitler’s physician was so astounding that Ohler left the world of fiction to write a work of history.

The result is the highly readable, bitingly ironic Blitzed, that, although not without problems, lends a fresh perspective on Hitler and the Second World War. In sum, Ohler aims to show that drug use was rife in Nazi Germany. From its rise through to its collapse, German citizens were high, German soldiers were high, and Hitler was high.

In the 1920s, many Germans turned to artificial stimulants to cope with the trauma of WWI, Ohler argues, and eventually Nazi promises of collective ecstasy and euphoria became like a drug itself. In 1937, in a pharmaceutical factory not far from Berlin, the pharmacist Dr. Fritz Hauschild found a drug to match the social intoxication of the time: Pervitin.

The first German methylamphetamine, Pervitin was a performance-enhancing drug that gave the consumer an “artificial kick” of heightened energy, alertness, euphoria, and intensified senses, often lasting more than 12 hours. Pervitin was marketed to Germans as a panacea cure for anything from depression to “frigidity” in women. By 1939, the drug was also distributed among German army battalions as they swept through Poland and France without sleep and without halt.

The “people’s drug:” Pervitin (Karl-Ludwig Poggemann via Flickr)

Ohler even goes so far as to say that the use of Pervitin was crucial to Germany victory in France in 1940. The German surprise-strategy to drive tanks through the Ardennes – later coined the “sickle cut” by Winston Churchill – was a near-impossible operation, argues Ohler, that only stood a chance if the Germans could drive day and night without stopping. Learning from the use of Pervitin during the Polish campaign, army officials realized that overcoming fatigue was just as crucial as tactic and equipment. The Wehrmacht ordered 35 million tablets for the campaign.

Critics have pointed out that Ohler tends to make sweeping generalizations. Does the evidence he presented, in fact, allow Ohler to say that many or most German citizens and soldiers were taking methylamphetamines? In a scathing review, historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Ohler severely overstates the role of drugs in both civil society and the military effort. “To claim that all Germans, or even a majority of them, could only function on drugs in the Third Reich,” writes Evans, “is wildly implausible.” While it may be difficult to pinpoint how many ordinary Germans took Pervitin, Ohler makes a convincing case for its methodical use and central role in the 1940 campaign.

Hitler and his entourage at the Wolf’s Lair, June 1940. Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, stands in the second row, second from the right (via Bundesarchiv)

The second issue that Ohler addresses is that of Hitler’s drug use. Fearing illness and an inability to perform, Hitler sought out performance-enhancing remedies that came in the form of vitamin injections and glucose solutions from Dr. Theodor Morell, his personal physician who saw and treated him more or less daily from 1936 until the end of the war. By 1944, Ohler argues, Hitler was addicted to a mix of cocaine and Eukodal (an opiate), assumed to be marked by an ‘X’ in Morell’s charts. When Eukodal supplies began to run out by February 1945, Hitler began suffering withdrawal symptoms.

Ohler’s assertion that Hitler was a drug addict has roused the ire of some historians, notably Evans, who has dismissed Ohler’s claims as a “crass,” “inaccurate” and morally problematic account that excuses Hitler of his own behavior and crimes. But, that does not seem to be Ohler’s argument here. Blitzed does not propose to reshape our understanding of Hitler’s psyche or ideology, but rather to understand the elements – including drug consumption – that held Hitler firmly in a world of delusion that ultimately prolonged the Second World War. Historians including Anthony Beevor and Ian Kershaw consider Blitzed a valuable addition to scholarship that is not apologetic, but illuminative.

Perhaps the debate about Blitzed is not only about our understanding of Hitler and National Socialism, but also about who gets to contribute to the already well-trodden scholarship. In his review, Evans expressed concern that Ohler’s background as a novelist gives him a “skewed perspective.” But the perspective of an outsider may be what the discipline needs. Blitzed allows the general reader to learn about a well known period in a new light, while also offering new lines of inquiry for scholars. A meticulously researched and bold work, Blitzed is a must-read for the general reader and scholar alike.

More by Natalie Cincotta on Not Even Past
Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia (Review)

Kevin Baker reviews Omer Bartov’s Hitler’s Army
David Crew discusses the work of German propaganda photographers during the Second World War
Chris Babits on finding Hitler (in all the wrong places)

Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler, by Stefan Ihrig (2016)

By Kelly Douma, Penn State University

Stefan Ihrig closes this book with a quote that encompasses his argument from Raphael Lemkin, the father of the word genocide: “Genocide is so easy to commit because people do not want to believe it until after it happens.” All the signs and symptoms of Nazi-perpetrated genocide existed throughout the decades leading up to the Holocaust, but were ignored by the greater public. Ihrig’s evidence takes the form of German reactions to the Armenian genocide. He argues that the pro-Ottoman nature of World War I Germany and the open genocide debate of Weimar Germany contributed to a “pragmatic” approach to “human rights, life, and liberty,” ultimately laying the groundwork for the virulent anti-Semitism of the Third Reich. Through extensive use of contemporary newspapers as well as court trials and military correspondence, Ihrig creates an image of German politics and culture beginning in the 1890s that makes the Holocaust seem – although still far from inevitable –a product of building tension rather than a sudden explosion of anti-Semitism.

Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, 1930 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ihrig begins his argument by elucidating an often overlooked connection in modern European history between the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. He does not attempt to compare their causes or results, but rather investigates Germany’s political involvement with the Ottoman Empire and Turkey both during the massacres of the 1890s and the genocide of the 1910s. From there he teases out an intricately woven political fabric connecting Germans and the Ottomans, resulting in a pro-Ottoman stance despite the rumors of anti-Armenian activity. He identifies several pro-Armenian Germans stationed in the Ottoman Empire whose correspondence stands against the bulk of material, which typically did not comment on genocidal activities. The most notable of these men was Max Erwin Scheubner-Richter, a German consul in Erzurum province. Scheubner’s correspondence, among others, helps Ihrig answer his question, “What could Germany have known about the Armenian genocide?” He finds that, in fact, the German military and government must have known nearly everything about the Armenian Genocide, although he does not go so far as to suggest that they were actively involved. He states that Germany knew what was happening, but was willing to “sacrifice the Armenians as the price of preserving Ottoman goodwill toward Germany.” This is a bold claim that has strong repercussions for the study of Germany in WWI and the interwar period.

After establishing German military and political knowledge of the Armenian Genocide, Ihrig tackles the much more difficult question: how much did the German public know of the Armenian Genocide and what was the cultural reaction to it? The second half of the book proves that Germans during the interwar period knew a great deal about the Armenian Genocide. Ihrig describes the emergence of a German cultural script that included pragmatic and extended debates on both the justification and the denial of the Armenian Genocide. Through intensive reading of German newspapers across the political spectrum during the interwar years, Ihrig defines what he calls “The Great Genocide Debate” of 1921-1923. His detailed analysis shows that pro-Armenian writers were consistently at odds with those who claimed the necessity of the Turkish reaction to the “Armenian problem” or reinterpreted the events to justify the genocide in terms of Armenian aggression. He also identifies two men, Franz Werfel and Armin Wegner, who wrote novels and open letters about the Armenian Genocide, but were ultimately too late to warn the German public about the genocidal capability of the Nazi party.

The German–Turkish Non-Aggression Pact was signed between Nazi Germany and Turkey in 1941 and lasted until 1945 (via Wikimedia Commons).

In the last section of his book, Ihrig finally answers the question that has been burning throughout his research: how did this cultural, political, and governmental response to the Armenian Genocide influence the events of the Holocaust? He could not be more clear in his answer. He states that the Nazis were inspired by the Armenian Genocide. He firmly critiques historians who argue that interwar Germany did not “come to terms” with the Armenian Genocide. Rather, he asserts, “Germany came to terms in a manner that we would perhaps not expect and cannot morally condone.” In his eyes, Germany recognized the events and, in a term he coined for this book, practiced a form of “justificantionalism,” or intellectual justification of the events of the genocide.

Deported Armenians leaving their town (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ihrig’s book is written for both experts of the field and general historical readers. The book leaves room for continuing research on the connections between Germany and the Armenian Genocide, such as why Germany was able to cross confessional lines to support the genocide of a Protestant Christian minority by a Muslim government. Ihrig also does not focus specifically on Hitler’s experience with the Armenian Genocide and instead assumes his knowledge of the events as a product of the developing cultural discourse and his position as an avid newspaper reader. This answer doubtless will not convince some readers of his connection and it could use further fleshing out. However, the work stands overall as a thorough treatment of to otherwise missed connection between the first and second acknowledged genocides of modern history.

You may also like:

The Tatars of Crimea: Ethnic Cleansing and Why History Matters.
Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman (1992).
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007).

Looking Into the Katyn Massacre

By Volha Dorman

U.S. government officials have often been hesitant to take the Soviet Union to task on their humanitarian crimes. This reluctance to confront Moscow was usually an effort to avoid worsening already poor relations. After World War II, for example, the U.S. was willing to let Soviet war crimes committed during the war go unchallenged despite clear evidence of Soviet guilt. As early as 1943 the United States was aware that the Katyn Forest Massacre had been carried out by the Soviet secret police, or NKVD. Yet, in order to avoid inciting Soviet retaliation, the US remained silent.

Polish officer lapels and banknotes found in the mass grave at Katyn (via Wikimedia Commons).

The Katyn Massacre involved the killing of 4,243 Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders imprisoned by the Soviets after their invasion of Poland in September of 1940. Even though the USSR denied its participation at Katyn and blamed Germany for the massacre, the Germans presented hard evidence in 1943 that proved Soviet involvement. Medical examinations of the corpses of Polish officers exhumed in the Katyn Forest proved that these victims were killed no later than the spring of 1940. The Katyn Forest is located just east of the Belarusian-Russian border, an area Nazi forces did not reach until nearly a year after the massacre, making it impossible for the Germans to be involved.

In 1951 the United States government created a Special Committee responsible for a thorough investigation of the Katyn Forest massacre. Among the goals of this Committee were to discover which country was guilty for the crime against the Polish nation, as well as to disclose the truth about whether any United States government officials could be blamed for concealing information about this event. It did not take long for the members of the Committee to compile a staggering amount of evidence showing the guilt of the NKVD, however, the investigation of United States government officials proved to be far more challenging.

The Katyn Forest today (via Wikimedia Commons).

In some cases, the Committee had to interview the same government officials multiple times, as additional facts were revealed about their knowledge of the massacre that had been left unmentioned during their first testimony. In addition, the investigation revealed that at that time there were officials in the United States government who took it upon themselves to filter out of their reports any unflattering information about the USSR. Nevertheless, the data gathered by the Select Committee from these interviews showed that most government officials distrusted the Soviet authorities and suspected their guilt in Katyn Forest Massacre. However, they felt that they were in no position to denounce the actions of the Soviets, as it may have jeopardized the prospects of the Allied Forces’ victory. Moreover, such condemnation of the USSR would not have been supported by President Franklin Roosevelt, as he believed in the absolute sincerity of the Soviet government and considered recently discovered information by American emissaries to be German propaganda.

The former American Ambassador, Averell Harriman, and former Under Secretary of State, Summer Welles, claimed that the United States government acquiesced because, first, it believed in Stalin’s pledge to cooperate with the Western Democratic countries after the end of the war, and second, the U. S. was trying to secure Soviet participation in the war against Japan. Ultimately, there was a fear within the United States government that if a case against the Soviets was pursued over the Katyn massacre the USSR might seek revenge against the U.S. by making peace with the Nazis.

Letter from Beria, chief of the NKVD, to Stalin proposing the massacre of Polish officers held by Soviet troops, 1940 (via Wikimedia Commons).

As a result, the USSR suffered no penalty for its terrible crime against the Polish victims, which, as was later revealed, had been planned by Stalin to eliminate the potential for a Polish uprising in Soviet territories with strong historical connections to Poland. Stalin had also intended to create a pro-Soviet satellite out of Poland after the war, a process made much easier by the annihilation of Poland’s old guard officers. Many American government officials and organizations had correctly assessed the character of the USSR during the war, but chose not to condemn its actions, since it could have led to unpredictable consequences during World War II.

Sources:

Final report of the Select Committee to conduct an investigation and study of the facts, evidence, and circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre pursuant to H. Res. 390 and H. Res. 539. United States, Government printing office, Washington: 1952 (location of the document – LBJA, “World War II, Katyn Forest Massacre, 1952”, Box # 121)

You may also like:

After WWII: A Soviet View of U.S. Intentions.
Everyday Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000).
The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements by Lynne Viola (2007).

Virtual Auschwitz

By David Crew

Ralf Breker wearing the VR headset in front of his VR view of Auschwitz (via BBC News).

The Bavarian State criminal office (LKA) in Munich, Germany has developed a 3D virtual reality model of the infamous Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp to be used in trials of Nazi era war criminals who still remain alive. Drawing upon original blue prints, laser scans of remaining buildings and contemporary photographs, this VR model allows prosecutors, judges and lawyers to view Auschwitz from almost any angle. The digital imaging expert, Ralf Breker, who developed this technology says that it can be used, for example, to determine whether someone who was a guard in Auschwitz in a specific watchtower could or could not see crimes committed in another part of the camp. Breker thinks the technology he developed will soon be used in other types of criminal proceedings because it allows investigators to re-create crime scenes that no longer exist as they were when the crime was committed. He hopes, however, that when the German legal system no longer needs his 3D model of Auschwitz, it will be given to a museum so that it does not fall into the hands of anyone wanting to turn it into a computer game.

For further details and an interview with Ralf Breker, see

Marc Cieslak, “Virtual reality to aid Auschwitz war trials of concentration camp guards”

Also by David Crew on Not Even Past:

The Normandy Scholar Program on World War II.
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007).
Normal Pictures in Abnormal Times.

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