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concepts of evil

concepts of evil The purpose of this paper is to show examples of evil both individual and institutional. Adolf Hitler’s vision of war and genocide was chosen as an example of individual evil. What other person in the 20th century defines evil better than Adolf Hitler? The Japanese invasion and subsequent rape of the then Chinese capital city of Nanking (Nanjing) in December 1937, was chosen as an institutional example of evil. These pages will show how a man rose to power in Germany and set in motion events that engulfed the world’s then superpowers in the costliest war in world history. How an army lost control of it’s men that then looted, burned and then systematically raped, tortured, and murdered 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers in a matter of weeks. Adolf Hitler was born at 6:30 p.m. on the evening of April 20, 1889, in the small Austrian village of Braunau Am Inn just across the border of German Bavaria. As a young boy, Hitler found school easy and got good grades. He had even idolized the monks where he attended school at a Catholic Benedictine monastery at age seven. Hitler’s family moved to the village of Leonding in 1898. There a history teacher named Dr. Leopold Potsch touched Hitler’s imagination with exciting tales of Bismark and Frederick the Great. For young Hitler German nationalism quickly became an obsession. In World War I he served in the Bavarian army, was gassed and wounded, and received the Iron Cross (first class) for bravery. The war had embittered him and he blamed Germany’s defeat on the Jews and the Marxists. He settled in Munich, joined with other nationalists in 1920, to form the Nazi party. In 1923, he tried to overthrow Bavaria’s Republican government, but, the army put down the revolt and he was imprisoned. Hitler was now known throughout Germany and used his nine months in prison to write “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle). “Mein Kampf’ is not a book that Hitler actually wrote in the usual sense. He dictated it to Rudolph Hess while pacing his prison cell in 1923-24 and then later at an inn in Berchtesgaden. In his book, Hitler divides humans into categories based on physical appearance, establishing higher and lower orders, or types of humans. At the top was the Germanic man with his fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. Hitler refers to this type of person as an Aryan. He asserts that the Aryan is the supreme form of human, or master race. In Hitler’s mind, since there was a supreme form of human, then there must be others less supreme, or racially inferior. Hitler assigns this position to Jews, the Slavic peoples, most notably Czechs, Poles, and Russians. Hitler also uses the book to explain how the Jews were keeping the master race from assuming it’s rightful position as rulers of the world by tainting it’s racial and cultural purity. He would also like you to believe that Jewish people had invented certain forms of governments in which the Aryan comes to believe in equality and fails to recognize his own racial superiority. In this book he refers to Jews as parasites, liars, dirty, crafty, sly, wily, eternal bloodsuckers, and the mortal enemy of Aryan humanity. “Mein Kampf” also provides an explanation for the military conquests later attempted by Hitler and the Germans. He states, among other things, that Aryans are the master race and are entitled by that fact to acquire more land for themselves. This Lebensraum, or living space, will be acquired by force and include the lands to the east of Germany, namely Russia. That land would be used to cultivate food and to provide room for the expanding Aryan population at the expense of the Slavic peoples, who were to be removed, eliminated, or enslaved. “When “Mein Kampf” was released in 1925 it sold poorly. However, after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, millions of copies were sold. It was considered proper to own a copy and to give one to newlyweds, high school graduates, or other similar occasions. Although it made him rich, Hitler would later express regret that he produced “Mein Kampf”, considering the extent of it’s revelations.” Those revelations concerning the nature of his character and his “blueprint” for Germany’s future served as a warning to the world. That warning was mostly ignored by the world. Hitler came to power in 1929, when the depression brought the nazi party mass support. He made prime use of his frenzied but magnetic oratory of hate and power his insight into mass psychology, and his mastery of deceitful strategy. His use of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Communism gained him support both with the workers union and the bankers and industrialists. After being defeated in an attempt to be elected president of Germany in 1932, President Paul Von Hinndenburg was persuaded to make Hitler chancellor in 1933. The Reichstag gave Hitler dictatorial powers and he used them to gain control over all facets of German life. Anti-Semitism was now law and concentration camps were established. In 1934, German voters approved the union of the presidency and the chancellorship. As Hitler prepared for war, he bullied smaller nations into making territorial concessions. He became allied with two other dictators Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain, whom he helped bring to power. Austria and Czechoslovakia were absorbed into his new German empire he named the “Third Reich”. In 1939, he signed a non-aggression pact, with another tyrant, Joseph Stalin, the head of Russia. This agreement basically gave Hitler the right to invade Poland. With the invasion of Poland World War II began. Hitler himself took control of the German war effort. At first Germany was wildly victorious, but the tide turned. By July 1944, the German military situation was desperate. Hitler’s own generals tried to assassinate him but failed. Unfortunately, for the world Hitler was only injured and not killed. This act would have shortened the war by almost a full year. Instead, he remained in power and insisted that Germany fight to the death. Hitler by now resided in a bunker he called the “fuhrerbunker”. In this underground bunker in Berlin, while the Russians approached the city, he married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, on April 29, 1945. On April 30, they both committed suicide. Hitler shot himself in the mouth after taking poison. She simply died by poison injestion.4 He left Germany a devastated nation. The death toll staggers the mind. The toll is estimated to possibly be in excess of 61million lives. “A list of the casualty numbers from some of the countries involved: The Soviet union, a total of 25,568,000 soldiers and civillians. Germany, 7,060,000. Poland, 6,850,000. Italy, 410,000. France 810,000. Great Britain, 388,000. The United States, 295,000.”5 With the doctrines that he had earlier established in “Mein Kampf”, he also put to death millions of so called “inferior” peoples in his concentration camps. Millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavic peoples were killed. Even people that were mentally retarded or handicapped were not spared. Hitler’s final legacy to the world has to be the memory of the most dreadful tyrant of modern times. Perhaps no other event in modern history shows a more precise picture of human evil in an institutional form than the Japanese sacking of Nanking. Author Iris Chang, summarizes the horror that the civilian population must have experienced in the introduction of her book “The Rape of Nanking” by stating: “The chronicle of humankind’s cruelty is a long and sorry tale. But if it’s true that even in such horror tales there are degrees of ruthlessness, then few atrocities in world history compare in intensity and scale to the Rape of Nanking during World War II.”6 “ One historian tried to put The Rape of Nanking in quantitative terms. He stated that if the dead from Nanking were to link hands, they would span a distance of some two hundred miles. Their combined blood would way in at 1,200 tons, and their bodies would fill 2,500 railroad cars. If the dead were stacked on top of each other, these bodies would reach the height of a 74-story building. The slaughter of people in this one Chinese City alone-exceeds the civilian casualties of some European countries for the entire war.” 7 Americans tend to think of World War II as beginning on December 7, 1941, with Japan’s surprise attack on pearl harbor. Europeans date it from September 1, 1939, and the Blitzkrieg assault on Poland by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and Panzer divisions. Yet Asians trace the beginning of the war all the way back to Japan’s first steps toward the military domination of East Asia-the occupation of Manchuria in 1931. In much the same way that Hitler did, Japan too, used a highly developed military machine and a master race mentality to set about establishing its right to rule its neighbors. Manchuria fell quickly. Four years later, in 1935, parts of Chahar and Hopeh were occupied. In 1937, Peking, Shanhai, and finally Nanking fell. The Chinese would not rid themselves of the last Japanese until almost the end of the war, in 1945. Much like Hitler’s Germany, Japan suffered mightily during the Great Depression. Soaring inflation, labor strikes, a tremendous population explosion, and even a massive earthquake, in September 1923, only exacerbated the dismal conditions. Expansion of Japanese territory became a popular argument in order to stave off mass starvation by giving Japan a place to grow the food required to feed its people. China seemed like the most obvious place for this Japanese dream of “Manifest Destiny”. The Japanese believed that this would inevitably lead to war with the United States. So, when western financiers began to invest more heavily in China instead of Japan it made the argument even more plausible to them. In the 1930’s, Japan had launched an undeclared war with China. They set about creating incidents that would make their conquests in China seem all the more reasonable. On September 18, 1931, they had their army blow up the tracks of a Japanese owned railway in southern Manchuria hoping to incite an incident. When the blast failed to derail an express train, the Japanese killed the Chinese guards and fabricated a story for the world press about Chinese saboteurs. Because of this incident, Japan seized Manchuria. By the summer of 1937, Japan finally succeeded in provoking a full-scale war with China. By the time July ended the Japanese had control of the entire Peking region. By August, they had invaded Shanghai. Flush with victory Japanese military leaders boasted that they could conquer all of China in three months. The battles for these Chinese cities were, however, taking much longer than they had boasted. When a battle for one Chinese city dragged from summer to fall, and then from fall to winter, all hopes of an easy victory were shattered and with them all Chinese hopes of a merciful conquest. “By the time Japanese troops entered Nanking there was a standing order that no prisoners were to be taken alive.”8 The logic to this order was not directed because of the fierce defenses by the Chinese, but, because there would be no way to feed these prisoners. Not only would this order help eliminate the food problem but would diminish the possibility of guerrilla actions by the Chinese. Because they lacked the manpower, the Japanese relied heavily upon deception. Their strategy for mass butchery involved two steps: “Promising the Chinese fair treatment in turn for an end to resistance and then dividing the captives into groups of one to two hundred men, and then luring them to different areas of Nanking for killing.”9 Because at this point the Chinese were suffering from disease and starvation and inept leadership, taking them captive turned out to be easier than the Japanese ever dreamed. Chinese soldiers surrendered in the thousands and were systematically slaughtered. At a place called Mufu mountain, just North of Nanking, an estimated 57,000 men, both civilian and soldiers, were executed. The disposal of bodies after this mass killing also proved to be a mammoth problem for the Japanese. They attempted to dispose of the bodies by mass burial, but ditches and holes of that size were hard to locate or dig. Cremation was an option sometimes used, but the Japanese often lacked the sufficient fuel to do a proper job. They attempted this in disposing of the bodies at Mufu, but the barrels ran dry of fuel before the bodies were reduced to ashes. Even seasoned war correspondents were shocked by the Japanese actions. A horrified Japanese reporter watched as “the soldiers lined Chinese prisoners on top the city gate and walls, then bayoneted them. The victims fell from the wall and blood splattered everywhere.”10 They forced Chinese men to line up by the river. Those in the first row were beheaded. Those in the second row were forced to dump the severed bodies into the river before they themselves were beheaded. The killings went on from morning until night. The next day, tired of killing in this fashion, they lined them up in front of machine guns and raked them with crossfire. Prisoners escaped into the river but none were able to make it to the other bank. Next the Japanese turned their attention on the women. “No matter how young or how old they all could not escape the fate of being raped.”11 Coal trucks were used to round up women from streets and villages. Each of them was allocated to fifteen or so soldiers for sexual intercourse and abuse. Officers of all levels indulged in the orgy. It was not uncommon for the officers to tell their men to pay the women money or kill them in some out of the way place to conceal the evidence of the crime. The most startling realization that comes to mind when learning of the tragedies in Nanking is that most of these war crimes went unpunished. Unlike their Nazi counterparts, who were either executed or sent to prison, a lot of these Japanese soldiers were never tried. Even until this day, the Japanese government refuses to accept or to even acknowledge that these crimes took place. The horrible atrocities perpetrated by these two governments were very similar. By the use of propaganda they were able to dehumanize their foes and make the killing of them much easier and justifiable. The depression played a role with the ability of these evil ways of thinking to take root. Greed was also a major factor. In the Japanese and German governments willingness to systematically conquer, kill, and eliminate the perceived cause of their misfortune by whatever means necessary, we can not for a second believe that these things will never occur again. As long as there is racism, religious intolerance, greed and hatred mankind will never be free from these atrocities. The amount of evil in this world is only measurable by the amount of evil in ones heart. Bibliography: Bibliography Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York, New York: BasicBooks, 1997. "The History Place." The Rise of Adolf Hitler. 1998. (20 June 2000). Joachimsthaler, Anton. The Last Days of Hitler, The Legends, the Evidence, the Truth. London: Arms & Armour Press, 1996. Tanaka, Yuki. Hidden Horrors; Japanese War Crimes in World War II. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. "WWII Casualties.” (22 June 2000).

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