Rehabilitating War Criminals in 1950s Japan and Germany

In the 1950s, social reconstruction policies in Japan and West Germany focused on redrawing the post-occupation social body at the expense of wrestling with the political and moral legacies of the war. Both societies worked to rehabilitate as “fully” Japanese or German those nationals who bore the brunt of Allied policies — those branded war criminals or denied aid, for example — while simultaneously marginalizing those in socially ambiguous or dangerous categories such as ethnic Koreans and Chinese or mixed-race children. This project considers the emerging regimes of social integration and exclusion in Japan and West Germany to examine the crucial impact of American policies of occupation and alliance at the framing stages of the Cold War.
Historians have written voluminously on the overall success (and failure) of the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials and political “re-education” under the auspices of the Allied victors in World War II.  A close comparison between Japan and West Germany not of the trials but the subsequent politics of clemency, parole, and rehabilitation of those convicted in Allied courts exposes the specificity of each separate context as crucial to the processes and outcomes of reconstruction in the 1950s. It also engages directly with the comparison itself, both as an intellectual and as a political enterprise.  Comparisons of Japan and Germany have a long and complex history of their own.  This project recasts the terms of comparison that have dominated this history by rejecting the simple binary framework that lends itself to cultural explanations for Germany’s “success” and Japan’s “failure.”  In contrast, it resituates each country within the webs of international relations that shaped their postwar experiences. The asymmetries between the two countries’ histories are multiple.  This project engages with them directly and treats the comparison as itself a historically constituted subject of inquiry.