In 2016, it became clear that a leading German newspaper had repeatedly echoed Asahi Shimbun editorials without independent verification, shaping anti-Japanese sentiment in Germany.
This essay examines the resulting public opinion, the Freiburg comfort-woman statue controversy, and insights from Hitler’s Furies, revealing how societies enable collective crimes while evading responsibility.

2016-09-18

Since August of the year before last, I came to learn for the first time that Germany has a powerful newspaper, such as Süddeutsche Zeitung, which closely resembles the Asahi Shimbun in its influence over domestic public opinion, and that its correspondents conducted no serious study or verification required of journalists, but instead repeatedly reproduced Asahi Shimbun editorials as editorials of their own, spreading anti-Japanese reporting throughout Germany.
As a result, I learned last year that opinion polls in Germany show that nearly half of the German population harbors anti-Japanese sentiment.
As I have stated many times, I am astonished and angered by this attitude among Germans.
Among them, I wish to present the following article from today’s Nikkei newspaper’s book review section to all the citizens of Freiburg, who, for reasons beyond comprehension, aligned themselves with South Korea—a country that has continued fascism under the name of anti-Japanese education initiated by Syngman Rhee for seventy postwar years—and decided to install what is called a comfort-woman statue, a movement no different in nature from Nazism, for the first time in Europe.
Those who have long insisted that we should “learn from Germany,” including Kang Sang-jung and the Asahi Shimbun, together with China and South Korea, which have repeated the same claims in international society, have attempted to justify the falsehood of the Tokyo Trials—where white victors judged the yellow race—by invoking this slogan of “learning from German facts.”
For readers around the world who prefer clarity, let me add that this is my most scathing irony directed at them.
What follows is the book review in question.
Hitler’s Furies by Wendy Lower, professor at Claremont McKenna College.
Women who escaped conviction, and the reasons why.
During the Second World War, Nazi Germany carried out mass murder under the banner of the “Final Solution” within Germany itself and in occupied Eastern territories—Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states—targeting Jews as well as so-called “asocial elements” and “inferior races.”
The number of victims is said to exceed six million.
Research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum further indicates that there were more than forty thousand Nazi camps.
Such vast slaughter could only have been possible with the involvement of society as a whole.
The conclusion of the Goldhagen Debate that erupted in Germany in 1996 was precisely that ordinary Germans had voluntarily participated in war crimes.
The excuse that “the Nazis did it on their own” was thereby brought to an end.
Yet, strangely, nearly half of these “ordinary Germans” were left entirely unaccounted for.
They were women.
According to this book, more than 500,000 young women were dispatched to the Nazi-occupied East during the war as teachers, nurses, secretaries, welfare workers, and wives.
They were already thoroughly immersed in Nazi hygiene and racial biology.
As “apostles of the Führer” and “bearers of culture,” they directly witnessed genocide and quickly came to understand that Hitler’s war was a war of annihilation.
Their self-identification as patriotic Germans rendered them insensitive to mass murder and led them to divide looted Jewish property as spoils of victory.
They became indispensable components of Hitler’s killing machine.
Of the more than a dozen female accomplices examined in this book, only one was ever convicted.
They attempted to bury their past through perjury and silence, changed their names through marriage, colleagues concealed crimes, and judges demanded documentary evidence over survivor testimony.
Who could possibly have documented crimes at the scene as they occurred.
For survivors, the names of those who murdered their families were often unknown.
Above all, judges themselves showed an overall reluctance to convict defendants for Nazi crimes.
Thus, most of “Hitler’s daughters” escaped justice.