1942: Nemesis

Shortly after Pearl Harbor (with which the Japanese had also surprised Germany) and as a consequence of the Tripartite Pact, the Axis powers, as mentioned, di­vided up the world along the 70th meridian east.

In the middle of the worldwide struggle, it was hard to foresee which empire would finally prevail. But after German advances in Eastern Europe were checked by the Soviet Union twice, some contemporaries pointed at Japan. Wendell Willkie, the defeated Republican presidential candidate of 1940, who was sent by President Roosevelt on an around-the-world flight after the United States had entered the war, wrote: “Japan's dreams have at last taken on reality to our eyes, for we have seen the Japanese conquer a great part of the empire they planned. [...] [If she prevails] we should witness the creation, not merely of a great empire, but of perhaps the biggest empire in history; an empire composed of about a billion people living on approximately fifteen million square miles of land; an empire occupying one third of the earth and including one half of its total population.”^[2577] If such a mighty empire would arise, even great powers like the United States were believed to lose out, since “[n]either peace nor prosperity, neither freedom nor justice, could flourish in such a struggle for existence.”^[2578]

At the start of 1942, the Japanese government quickly got to work consolidating the newly conquered regions of Southeast Asia; its plan was to make them an in­tegral part of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The individual territories were to have very different fates. Some were to re­main directly under Japanese rule, like long-established colonies such as Korea and Taiwan, which were ruled by a governor-general. In others, “independent” puppet regimes were to emerge, as in Manchukuo; the situation was similar in the occupied regions of China, where the military ruled with the aid of Chinese collaborators. The Philippines and Burma were granted formal independence during the war. As a (dependent) junior partner, Thailand in turn served still another role. However, this “plurality of imperial rule” does not reflect a well-thought-out master plan, but a mishmash of improvised measures and prolonged disputes about authority and direction that lasted until the last days of the war.

The Japanese Empire never achieved stability or even prosperity, also due to rapid setbacks and the ongoing difficulty in implementing its lofty plans. For example, the goal to settle five million Japanese people in Northeast Asia through settler colo­nialism was nowhere near achieved.^[2579] But the Japanese government had certainly expected difficulties to occur, assuming that establishing the nucleus of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere alone would take around 20 years.^[2580] The hegemony over Asia was to create the basis for victory in a decades-long final war against the Western democracies.^[2581] The empire was to provide the necessary materials for this: raw materials and people. The first part of the Japanese plan to create a great empire through a series of blitzkrieg victories had worked out.

As defeat became more and more evident in the last two years of the war, attempts at “cooperation” increased. The Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo in November 1943 emphasized the independence of the individual participants (in­cluding Burma, the Philippines, and Thailand). The event also served as a stage for pan-Asian ideas and the image of Japan as East Asia's liberator from Western colo­nial rule. Not everything was pure rhetoric, and the worse the war went for Japan and the more urgent the mobilization of the empire became, the more compromise and concessions were made.

Yet, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere brought destruction and death to its inhabitants. Massacres of the civilian population, draconian punishments, forced prostitution, and medical experiments on humans were just as much a part of Japan's brave new empire as famine: “Between 1941 and 1945 alone, war claimed around 24 million lives in Japanese-occupied Asia, perhaps 3 million Japanese, and 3.5 million more in India through war-related famine.”^[2582]

East Asia saw also the increasing use of forced labor, especially as the final mo­bilization approached.^[2583] The exploitation of millions of people happened in dif­ferent ways, from deceptive recruitment to deportation, and from forced labor to enslavement. In some places they worked for the Japanese military, in others for private Japanese companies. Their numbers included Koreans working in Japan (estimated at 750,000 to one million) and Koreans and Chinese performing var­ious kinds of forced labor on the Asian mainland (for Korea alone, estimates are around 4.5 million).^[2584] Especially brutal and fatal were the working conditions of the so-called comfort women and the romusha, a word meaning “laborer,” but here denoting forced laborers (albeit mostly paid) in Japanese-occupied Indonesia.

On the other end of the Eurasian continent, by 1942, Hitler's Reich had become a wartime bubble of extraordinary size, stretching from France's Atlantic coast to Scandinavia and the Baltic states to the Caucasus. More than 200 million people in 17 nations were subjected to German occupation.^[2587] However, the experience of German rule could differ significantly not only from one territory to another, but also from one social group to another. On the one hand, Nazi expansionism introduced radically new elements into the history of imperialism, particularly by fusing war with racial genocide to a hitherto unseen extent. This turned the Third Reich's hegemony over large parts of Eastern Europe into a campaign of violence and, ultimately, led to a state-directed operation without historical precedent: the planned annihilation of significant parts of entire populations. On the other hand, Germany's New Order also included attempts at more conventional strategies of rule, including the collaboration with political and economic elites, the establish­ment of semi-independent puppet regimes, and the compulsory (but also volun­tary) use of labor forces from conquered populations and allied states. Nonetheless, the fact that the Nazi Empire was a multifaceted as well as a multiethnic polity cannot question its essential objective of racial and political reordering and the gen­ocidal “purification” of especially Eastern Europe as part of its ruthless pursuit of Lebensraum for the German “master race” in its supposed final struggle with in­ternal and external enemies.

Crucially, while Hitler had since the 1920s dreamed of a Greater Germany through a “drive to the East,” the war itself had a catalytic impact and led to a radi­calization of aims and means that far exceeded any pre-war plans. First the series of Blitzkrieg victories in 1939-1941, and then the military turning points after the lost Battle for Britain and the disastrous attack against the USSR in June 1941, which brought the specter of defeat, unleashed the full destructiveness of the regime.

Apart from the skyrocketing populations of prisoners interred in the increasing number of concentration—and later extermination—camps, the Nazi regime's growing radicalization can also be traced in the “General Plan for the East.” This was a scientifically designed long-term program for resettlement and the pro­vision of food supplies for the German people approved in the summer of 1942. It envisaged population transfers and decimations on a colossal scale. It planned the death by starvation and disease of between 30 to 45 million Slavs through food confiscations.^[2588] The resulting void was to be filled over the next generation by up to five million ethnic German colonists and settlers, supposed to push the Third Reich's ethnic boundaries up to 1,000 kilometers eastward. This Germanized land­mass, with is promise of economic autarky, was at the core of the Nazi's imperial vision. In fact, at this point overseas territories were not envisaged anymore as areas of German settlement.^[2589]

The genocidal strategies of the Nazi Empire were, from the outset, part and parcel of its plan to radically alter the racial composition of Europe. Nazi extermi­natory policies in Eastern Europe were systematically planned and sanctioned by the highest echelons of the regime, so that individual officers had significant room for maneuver to conduct violent campaigns, even though no one was forced to do so. Nazi ideology linked the purification of the Germanic race directly with the ex­termination of Jews and Slavs.

By 1942, the Nazi New Order had radically redrawn Europe's political config­uration. Reflecting the level of contempt the German conquerors had for several of their subjugated peoples, they did not consider Poles, Czechs, and Yugoslavs as worthy of statehood, and subsequently erased their nations from the map. They also sought to entirely eliminate Poland's elites. Ukraine was dismembered according to the occupiers' needs. Croatia, by contrast, became a German puppet state, while Greece's territory was divided into occupation zones. Ruthless German plundering resulted in the deaths of up to 300,000 Greeks through famine. While the Baltic States had dreamed of independence, their hopes were equally crushed as they were joined with Belorussia to form the Reich Commissariat of the Eastern Lands. It was only due to the exigencies of war, and the resulting need for compromises on the German side, that some of the countries allied to Nazi Germany enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy after 1942-1943.

Once the strategic Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact from August 1939 had served its purpose, the German dictator was convinced that a war against his ally was vital since the rapid industrialization of the USSR posed a serious challenge to future German hegemony in Europe. Defeating “Jewish Bolshevism” had been a

core objective of the Nazi movement from its inception. As the Commissar Order and the Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlass (court martial ordinance) that prepared the Soviet invasion made clear, German troops would reject any restrictions from inter­national law, and their violent acts even against civilians would not be dealt with by German martial courts. Operation “Barbarossa” combined a lethal anti-Semitism, anti-Slavism, and anti-Marxism and completely blurred the boundaries between a military, civil, and racial war. While the campaign was aimed at eliminating the en­tire Soviet ruling strata and killing POWs in large numbers, a famine plan was also drawn up for decimating millions of non-combatants.

Victory over Stalin would enable the regime to command the Soviet Union's vast resources, which were needed to defeat a United Kingdom that proved unwilling to abide by German continental hegemony—despite Hitler's attempts to force Chamberlain, and then Churchill, into a separate peace. Defeating the USSR was also crucial to contain first the threat of an American intervention, and later to chal­lenge the United States directly from a position of strength. However, despite the brutality against civilians and the Red Army, as shown by the deaths of 3.3 million (57 percent of all) Soviet POWs by 1945,⁸² Stalin was able to turn the tide. After huge initial losses, he mobilized his armies to ultimately stop and then push back German advances.

The Nazi resettlement plans for the East ultimately failed. Nonetheless, by early 1944, over 340,000 ethnic Germans had been transferred to the annexed regions. For ethnic cleansing, the regime had developed and used a unique system of terror and mass slaughter. On-the-spot executions, slave-like labor regimes, extermina­tion camps, and gas chambers ultimately killed around three million non-Jewish Poles, and over five million Jews deported from all parts of the empire; at the time of the Wannsee Conference in 1942, the full-scale destruction of the entire European (and potentially global) Jewry was already planned (“final solution”). The Holocaust was the most violent example of a large-scale state-controlled extermination cam­paign in history. On a smaller scale, the racial cleansing was also directed at ethnic Germans through the eugenic program, as Nazi doctors forcibly sterilized almost 400,000 “hereditary inferior” Germans, and killed 200,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans until the end of the war. Homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, and political opponents were likewise killed by the Nazis, in significant numbers.

In the end, the Nazis' ethnic genocides, brutal oppression of any potential resist­ance, and violent retaliation campaigns totally undermined whatever loyalties sub­ject peoples might otherwise have developed. The occupation forces thus missed the opportunity to exploit the widespread anti-Soviet hostilities of various Eastern European groups to stabilize the regime over time.

Yet, the Nazi Empire did not always treat racial “others” systematically, ac­cording to prescribed rules, but time and again depending on specific contexts and exigencies. It thus tolerated, and even wished to ally with, other religions or ethnicities. Indeed, at the peak of World War II, “as Hitler's soldiers marched into Muslim-populated territories in the Balkans, North Africa, the Crimea and the Caucasus, and approached the Middle East and Central Asia, Berlin began to pro­mote Nazi Germany as a protector of Islam.”⁸³ Not only were Muslims to be explic­itly exempted from ethnic cleansing in the east. Muslims across the entire Islamic world were also to be mobilized in a joint effort of the regime's central branches— including the SS, the Wehrmacht, Joseph Goebbels's propaganda apparatus, and the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories—to fight against Jews, the USSR, and the British Empire. Demonstrating the multiethnic composition of the Nazi Reich, Muslims were to be treated as allies.

The variety of forms of rule within the Nazi Empire becomes even more ap­parent at the Western front. Unlike the regime's dissolution of entire nation-states in the east, and with the exceptions of the borderlands of Alsace and Lorraine, conquered states in western and northern Europe otherwise maintained their ter­ritorial integrity, and they were not envisaged as sites of German settlement. In ge­neral, the Wehrmacht also treated both captured soldiers and civilians according to the standards of international law. Nonetheless, western Jews and many political opponents were just as harshly persecuted and murdered as those in the east. Yet, no master plan existed for western and northern Europe; while policies could be the outcome of ad hoc decisions, there also existed significant competition and con­flict between different government branches within the Nazi Empire, exposing its “polycentric” character.

The Nazi Party's racial policies were closely intertwined with their vision of a new economic order in Europe. While the latter failed to a large extent, its attempted realization nonetheless had extreme consequences for societies across the western, northern, and eastern parts of the German continental empire. For understanding the dynamics of Nazi imperialism, the efforts that other powers had undertaken since the 1920s to carve out continuous demographic, political, and economic blocs are significant. These included Mussolini's aspirations to establish a North African empire and to secure economic domination in the Middle and Far East, and es­pecially Japan's expansion into mainland China and its concurrent advancement of the Co-Prosperity Sphere in East Asia. What linked the Third Reich with these synchronous imperial projects was that an extreme form of economic and polit­ical nationalism pushed for self-sufficiency and the will to overcome the regimes' dependence on world markets, believed to make them vulnerable in the despised liberal world order. In this global reshaping of empire, the state generally assumed a much greater responsibility for and control over the economy, leading the state to own and manage important branches of industry itself.

Insofar as the Nazis thought seriously about Europe, they did so primarily in selfish terms to orchestrate a regime of plunder and social oppression on a gigantic scale, proving themselves incapable of developing a lasting and mutually beneficial

economic order across the empire. Despite the deficient economic planning, the empire did ultimately contribute significantly to the regime's war effort. Since the end of slavery in the nineteenth century, the Nazi “Ausländer-Einsatz” between 1939 and 1945 remains the largest case of the forced deployment of huge numbers of foreign workforces in history.^[2590] In the summer of 1944, 7.8 million foreign civil workers and POWs were registered as workers in the “Greater German Reich,” with the addition of over 500,000 prisoners of concentration camps, most of whom had been deported from abroad—almost 30 percent of the entire workforce employed in the German economy at the time.^[2591]

The Nazi Empire sustained the German war effort in other important ways, as the Nazis let other people starve to feed the Germans. This inhumane logic re­flected Hitler's zero-sum-game approach to economics more generally, which saw no mutual benefit in free trade and reduced the value of territories according to their capacity to provide the German Volk with foodstuffs and valuable resources. The Nazis' 1939 war nutrition plan had anticipated steep drops in food supplies, which were then to be countered by the exploitation of conquered states—in the be­lief that Nazi Germany's inner political stability depended on maintaining certain living standards. The regime's initial plans for a continental Grossraumwirtschaft (a large-scale German-dominated economic sphere) wanted to partition Europe into a predominantly agrarian, peasant east, and an industrially booming central and northwestern wing. Russia was supposed to be deindustrialized and turned back into western Europe's corn chamber. The colossal failure of this plan meant that in the end, western European countries had to compensate for the lack of eastern provisions. One solution to Nazi Germany's lack of resources and foreign exchanges was the ruthless plundering of defeated states, as exorbitant taxes were imposed on them. This system became central to financing the Nazi wars.

After the crushing defeats of the second half of 1942 (El Alamein, Midway, and Stalingrad), exchange and cooperation between the imperial Axis did become increasingly difficult and rare. Eventually, the Axis manifested itself only in the utopias and dreams of an ultimate victory that was receding further and further from the realm of possibility. During the conflict's two final years, the German media reported only sporadically on the fighting in the Far East. However, when reports did appear, they often emphasized that the Japanese Empire had at its dis­posal “the largest natural resources existing anywhere in the world” and that it therefore “would never be able to be defeated.”^[2592]

However, paradoxical developments were not to be overlooked. The pervasive wartime scarcity and lack of goods and work rendered sustainable politics virtu­ally impossible. Furthermore, in reality and against all propaganda, exploitation,

enslavement, forced labor, and violence reached unprecedented levels in the last years of the war—in both empires.

In the end, the imperial Axis enjoyed only a brief moment, and its end came quickly. Looking back, many people have argued that in the longer term, the “non- have-nations” would never have been capable of winning against the economic su­periority of the Allies after the United States entered the war and the Germans failed to conquer the USSR. Yet, the Axis powers were economic superpowers in 1942, and the aggressors had the advantage until at least mid-1942. So why could the im­perial Axis not use the advantages it had while they were available to it? One central geostrategic problem was that the two empires never succeeded in joining territo­ries; not for lack of trying, even if their attempts were poorly coordinated. A link via the Russian or Indian region seemed within reach on multiple occasions in 1942. At the same time, the ever greater territorial expansion of both imperial blocs became a weakness; the imperial expansion and ultimately overexpansion became their Achilles' heel, in either case making the nightmare scenario of a war on multiple fronts inescapable. The defeats of the second half of 1942 turned the lofty talk of a Eurasian bloc into the stuff of dreams.

In the end, the fates of the two empires diverged strongly. While Hitler's em­pire was conquered and crumbled, the territory of the Japanese Empire was still largely intact when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Although a series of islands and parts of the Philippines had been lost, the army's of­fensive efforts on the Asiatic mainland in the previous year meant that the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere had achieved its maximum geographic ex­pansion at the point of its collapse. Yet, by this time, the Allied powers had already achieved total control over the seas and airspace. This seemingly sudden collapse of the empire required millions to be repatriated. In the fall of 1945, seven million Japanese alone remained stranded in the former empire.

VII.