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Prosecutor Robert Jackson of the United States opens the trial with a strong indictment of the defendants.

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility.

Kirk Saduski

One week after the surrender of Japan on September 2nd, General Douglas MacArthur ordered the arrests of Japanese leaders, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. On the morning of September 11th, as soldiers approached to Tojo's home, he shot himself with a Colt .32. Tojo survived and he would stand trial. In this final episode of "1945" from the National World War II Museum, we explore the consequences of World War II. In Nuremberg, 24 leaders of the Third Reich are put on trial, 12 sentenced to death. In Tokyo, 28 officials are charged, seven sentenced to death. Rich Frank joins Don Miller and I for this final episode of the series. So here we are. I've said, I've discussed this with Don, I think World War II is the largest event in human history, not just the largest conflict, not just the largest war, but when you can take into account the part, there's no part of the globe that's not affected, when you take into account the number of people, Don, is at 65 million as at the?

Donald Miller

Well, we're still counting, you know, the Russian archives still have further casualties. You know, in the realm of 65, Gerhard Weinberg is arguing now that it's almost 70, I'd say 65.

Kirk Saduski

65 million people, fatalities in six years, let alone the grievous wound, grievously wounded people who will never psychological-

Donald Miller

Two thirds of them, women and children, by the way, in the-

Kirk Saduski

Oh, the fatalities.

Donald Miller

Yeah.

Kirk Saduski

Yeah.

Richard Frank

I think it's very important not to focus solely upon what actually happened between 1937 and 1945. What you really have to contemplate and contemplate very soberly is exactly what happens if the war just keeps rolling along for months or years. And particularly in the Asia Pacific Theater, where you've got these enormous numbers of Asians dying overwhelmingly by starvation or related things, disease, of course.

Kirk Saduski

Well, and give us a sense of the scope of that. You're saying Asians, but I mean.

Richard Frank

Right.

Kirk Saduski

List the areas.

Richard Frank

Okay, we start with China, China's suffers the greatest number of casualties in the Asia Pacific Theater, and there are various numbers that have been advanced about that. The People's Republic of China uses a figure of about 20 million dead and about 10 million injured or disabled. I think a realistic set of numbers for the Asia Pacific Theater is about 25 million total dead. The Japanese civilian deaths probably, in my view at high end, are about one to 1.2 million, which tells you immediately that for every Japanese civilian who died, 18 or nearly 18 others died, they're almost entirely other Asians, non-whites. The biggest group would be the Chinese, probably about 12 million dead there. If you look at that 12 million dead, you could do it this way, you could say, "Well, okay, it's 12 million dead over 97 months. That's 124,000 every month for 97 months." If you look at what we now call Indonesia, you go at 2.4 million deaths from starvation in '44, '45, that's literally about 100,000 every month, plus another 300,000 who die as slave laborers to the Japanese. Then you go to Vietnam and they have a mass famine in early 1945, at least a million dead. The Vietnamese say it's two million. The great recent historian about that, Greg Huff, points out that not only was there a million dead Vietnamese, but they died primarily between April and August, 1945, which is 200,000 dead Vietnamese every month.

Kirk Saduski

And your point is, obviously if the war had rolled on, if we had blockaded and continued the fire bombing, not only would Japan have suffered, because Japan still had millions of troops in Asia, those casualties, those figures, I should say, those fatalities throughout Asia, in Korea, in Indonesia, in China, et cetera, would've continued.

Richard Frank

Right, exactly, and the other thing is the Koreans in particular had a very near miss with an absolute catastrophe, because as the Japanese did not have food, they were gonna strip it outta Korea, ruthlessly. And you're talking about, I think it's about 23 million Koreans. You're looking at the prospect of millions of deaths.

Kirk Saduski

We often think of the War, of World War II being from 1939 to 1945, but in fact it was really 1937 to 1945.

Richard Frank

Yeah, it's a very interesting quandary about how we got into the notion that what happened in China in 1937 was not really the beginning of World War II. It's full scale, so what we're talking about, millions of combatants, it goes on steadily from '37 to '45. It has global implications, not only in Asia, but in Europe. It's tied to the conflict between Germany and Japan. There's just all kinds of ways that this is all tied together. And I remain baffled by why we persisted, except for the fact being very parochial, that the war began either in Europe in July, in September, 1939, or for the US in December, 1941. Then we became directly involved. That was when the war began, but that's not how the rest of the globe experienced it.

Kirk Saduski

Well, let's stay in 1945. Describe what's happening in China.

Richard Frank

China by 1945 is in a desperate shape for many reasons. Primarily however, economic and in terms of food. The most effective strategy the Japanese used against the Chinese was economic. And by '41, the Chinese are almost paralyzed in terms of what they can do internally because of the economic collapse and inflation. So China, by 1945, is just barely hanging on by a thread.

Kirk Saduski

Going on September, October, into, for the rest of the year, the balance of 1945, Japan begins to change in a fundamental way. Can you explain that, or is that too simple?

Richard Frank

You know, I think-

Kirk Saduski

It's too complex.

Richard Frank

It's too, yeah.

Kirk Saduski

That's not too simple.

Richard Frank

And really, when you read the contemporary accounts, I mean, we go for weeks and weeks where we're still, even though what we're seeing seems to be very favorable, everyone is still very wary about, is this actually gonna hold?

Kirk Saduski

One of the ironies, I think is that they're waiting to the very end, and even then it was not a sure thing, pins and needles, as you said, Rich. And yet the initial embrace of the Japanese to this new situation was ironic. And I think the occupation, if we can get into that, was relatively smooth. And again, you would think it would've been just the opposite, but it wasn't.

Richard Frank

I think it's a supreme example of the Japanese cultural emphasis on consensus, consensus to go on to the end, to the 15th of August. When the consensus changed, surrender, then suddenly that what to us initially, certainly the initial occupying forces were struck by the fact that they weren't meeting fanatical resistance, that little kids were not coming up to them with grenades in their hands to blow them up, that there was this acceptance. But once the consensus shifted to acceptance, that's why basically the occupation went, from our perspective, with incredible smoothness compared to what we thought we might be facing.

Kirk Saduski

Douglas MacArthur is one of the most controversial figures in American history. Without getting into the various controversies, there doesn't seem to be much controversy in terms of his term as overseeing the occupation. You see, his reputation is very high. Talk about Douglas MacArthur and his handling of the occupation.

Richard Frank

I think one of the distinctive features, positive features about Douglas MacArthur, and we could do another podcast about the negative features of Douglas MacArthur, but one thing about MacArthur was if you lined up all the American top leaders in the 1940s, I would argue that Douglas MacArthur was probably least tainted by racism of any of them. And the other thing was, there was nothing about MacArthur, once the Japanese surrendered, there was no vengeance in the heart of Douglas MacArthur with respect to the Japanese people in general, or most of the Japanese, there were a handful of individuals, some of the militarists or whatever here, he was quite willing to settle accounts with. But he made, you know, just an tremendous initial impression with his initial statements, you know, we weren't gonna try ordinary Japanese and et cetera.

Kirk Saduski

So there is some retribution though, I mean, as harmonious as it was. But the Nuremberg Trials are well known, less well known are the beginning of the Tokyo Trials. Let's talk about that,

Richard Frank

Tokyo, what happened in terms of the war crimes trials in Asia was we had the principle and the famous part of it is the Tokyo trials, which were of the top level leaders. And there were 28 individuals who were on trial, 25 were convicted, and I think it's seven were ultimately executed. But you also have to bear in mind that there were also B and C level trials. All of those were normally conducted at the locale of where the crime was committed. And that could be all over Asia, all the areas that the Japanese had occupied. The Tokyo Trials didn't get started until after the Nuremberg Trials got going. And obviously the single most controversial aspect about the Tokyo Trials is why wasn't Emperor Hiro tried. And having spent a long time, I think what happened here was that in the fall of 1945, during the early days, early months of the occupation, we finally agreed with the protestations issued by Japanese officials initially, that their food situation was so critical, they're gonna be facing a famine in mid 1946. And MacArthur became convinced that this was true. And MacArthur also became convinced that the only way to head off famine in Japan in 1946 was with American food, which was not going to be an easy sell, to say the least. And there was a very real prospect that if Japan had a famine-like condition, which would strike primarily in Honshu, where most of the population lived in an area of food deficit, so automatically they were gonna be in great peril, that there would be civil disturbances that couldn't be controlled. And he thought that the emperor, as a force to represent stability, might be critical in trying to head off or ameliorate that situation. I think that is ultimately what was behind MacArthur's decision to urge that we not try the emperor, although he sent a very typical MacArthur message, which basically lied through his teeth. He said, you know, he investigated the emperor and the emperor was not guilty of anything or whatever, which was not true. And that's how we got to the Tokyo Trials. And as it turned out, and this is a story that I think deserves to be celebrated, because what happens is MacArthur, although there's a struggle, he eventually convinced President Truman to send food to the Japanese. And this is mostly the residual urban population because the cities have emptied out because of the food shortage. So in fact, in Tokyo, there's about 2.5 million Japanese in the Tokyo region, and we're feeding every single one of them with American food. We actually save more lives during the occupation than we took during the war. And then on top of that, one issue that comes up, which usually gets glossed over, is that part of the guarantees made to the Japanese about a surrender is we're gonna repatriate, have all the Japanese overseas repatriated. There are six million of those civilian and military just about even split. And they come back. And meanwhile, the slave laborers or laborers that Japan has brought in to mainly do their war industries, they're supposed to go home. And this is like a perfect storm set up for epidemics. And the guy who heads up the medical end of the occupation, Crawford Sams, he's a colonel, he'd never worked directly with MacArthur before he came in for the occupation. And what's remarkable is that Crawford Sams, when he recognizes they're facing this deadly set of epidemics, he breaks the Japanese medical organization loose from its controlled by the Imperial Army and mobilizes them and works with them to head off and control a whole medical textbook list of things. The leading Japanese historian of the first generation historian of the occupation, Takame, says that basically what he and his Japanese colleagues accomplished was they saved, as Takame said, perhaps three million lives. Well, three million lives is virtually the exact number of Japanese who died in the entire war from '37 to '45. That's just a medical end of the occupation.

Kirk Saduski

I didn't know that, wow. That's a staggering idea.

Richard Frank

Yeah, basically, because you know, at that point in time, people understood, which has been lost typically in the West, I think is there's this stupendous disparity between the number of Japanese civilians who perished during the war as a result of the war, and those who died as a result of Japan's war. To my experience in dealing with people throughout Asia who lived in countries that were occupied by Japan, in fact, I just had an episode sort of confirming this just a couple days ago here in the museum, talking to a woman from Malaysia. And she was saying that her grandparents were very young during the Japanese occupation. They had terrible stories about that, passed on to her parents, passed on to her, and still very, very much alive in all of these nations, which is why by all accounts, there's very troubled relations beneath the service between the Japanese and most of the other people in Asia. The Chinese, particularly the Indonesians, particularly the Vietnamese who suffered the greatest numbers. In the US we've almost totally lost sight of exactly how horrific this was. I think basically, if you lined up all the dead civilians in the Asia Pacific War, about six or 7% are Japanese. All the rest are others. Almost all of them are other Asians.

Kirk Saduski

Chinese, Filipinos.

Richard Frank

Chinese, Filipinos.

Kirk Saduski

Korean, Malaysian.

Richard Frank

Yeah, Burmese, Vietnamese.

Kirk Saduski

Vietnamese.

Richard Frank

There's a death toll everywhere you go. I mean, this whole issue in 1945 is not whether anyone's gonna die, it's who's gonna die and who's already died, and whether we're gonna give the Japanese a pass when they've been the principal cause of this. I've just been drafting up some chapters that talk about life in the Southeast Asian nations during Japanese occupation. And just reading the material that you can find about this, it's incredibly depressing to contemplate what went on, what it was like for these people to have experienced it. And I really feel, you know, it's just to me so wrong that we neglect what happened during Japanese occupation. Conversely, and I was very conscious of this when I wrote my book "Downfall," what I did not wanna do is only depict the people who have been victimized by the Japanese. I wanted to make it clear that I was following this, and I wouldn't have said it the way I say it now, that count all the dead and treat all the dead assuring a common humanity. But I instinctively thought that was critical. That's why I start the book with a very graphic description of the Tokyo Fire raid in March, 1945, because I wanna make it very clear that I'm not denying the common humanity of the Japanese. And I have a very graphic description of what it was like to be in Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. And at that time, I was working on this back in the 1990s, we didn't have nearly as many rich sources as we have now on all these other places. And in terms of the new things that we have, just within the last 20 years or so, we've had all kinds of information about China, about all these other places that have illuminated and expanded our understanding of these things, and also more graphically describing innumerable episodes of what it was like to be occupied by Imperial Japan in World War II.

Kirk Saduski

In the book "Judgment at Tokyo," author Gary Bass describes a tense and quiet auditorium listening as the diary of a Japanese soldier was submitted as evidence.

Gary Sinise

"The naivete I possessed at the time of leaving the homeland has long since disappeared. Now, I am a hardened killer and my sword is always stained with my blood. Although it is for my country's sake, it is sheer brutality. May God forgive me. May my mother forgive me."

Kirk Saduski

The unprecedented destruction of the Second World War left tens of millions of people in Asia and Europe without a home and a very uncertain future. Historian and author Stephanie Hinnershitz is with us to explain more. Let's talk about this because across the world, and including the United States, which we'll get to, people now have to deal with the consequences of World War II. Millions of homes have been destroyed, millions of families' lives have been upended. Give us a sense of what the chaos was like. Let's start in Europe, we'll move to Asia, and then eventually the United States.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

When the war ended, one of the big challenges for nearly everyone in Europe was the fact that there were borders that once existed that no longer exist. So you have people who are basically stateless, they're homeless, not only because their actual physical homes were destroyed during the war, but also just they don't necessarily have nations to return to when the war is over. So in Europe alone, there are anywhere between about 40 million, numbers upwards of 65 million displaced persons after the war.

Kirk Saduski

That is just mindboggling.

Donald Miller

I think that and all these migrations going on too, I mean, let alone the displaced persons and the animosity too between the groups internally, where to go, people just getting pushed around.

Kirk Saduski

Yeah.

Donald Miller

Yeah.

Kirk Saduski

Well, and as you said, Stephanie, literally not just homes, but state borders have shifted and changed. And you were one day in Poland, now you're in Germany, or you were in Germany, now you're in Poland, let alone obviously the Red Army's not going away. That changes and is huge migration of Germans that had migrated part of the Lebensraum, you know, the reason for Germany went to war in the first place, all those Germans who had migrated east now have to migrate west. Where are they gonna go? Their home was probably bombed. Talk about that.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

One of the biggest forced relocations, all the different terms that you can apply to it, were these Germans who had no place to go to now, so within this larger number of the 40 to 65 million, but within that are these very large groups of Germans. And one of the really interesting things about this post-war period is that you get these two concepts or terms that start to take on a little bit more definite meaning. So displaced persons, the concept is not super unique 'cause they are basically refugees, but the idea of here are people who have no home to go to and they either can't or are unwilling to return home, whether that's because they're gonna face persecution, maybe they don't wanna go back to places that are now under control of the Soviet Union. There's all different reasons why you have people who are displaced. They don't have a home to return to. This is something that basically the Allied forces are still gonna be dealing with. They're gonna step in with other different organizations under the UN and they're gonna be working to figure out what do you do with all of these people, including Germans, who really have no place to go and they're still gonna need assistance? So in many, many ways, the work of the Allies are not even close to being done when the war is over, 'cause they have to tackle this problem of what do you do with all of these people?

Kirk Saduski

The Allied military forces, primarily the British and the Americans, have to go almost overnight, go from prosecuting the war to protecting, as you said, up to 65 million people, how did that work?

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Very dicey, the camps, the displaced persons camps that are gonna be created, they are going to be run jointly by British and Americans and also with UNRAA, U-N-R-A-A. And that they jointly administer these camps that are well intentioned, but they are obviously trying to deal with a mass number of people. So you have even survivors of the Holocaust who are now displaced persons, people who are formerly slave laborers, and they're being put into these camps with the intention of helping them to get back on their feet and to be hopefully returned someplace. But it's very difficult to run them. Like you mentioned, you have this military force that's trying to administer these camps as best as possible.

Kirk Saduski

That's not what they were trained for.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

No, no, not at all.

Kirk Saduski

One of the things, Don, you talk about all the time, well, when we've talked about our guys who were shot down and held in a prisoner war camp, well, what you always mention is that this is after being in an airplane accident, if you will.

Donald Miller

A major crash,

Kirk Saduski

A major crash, which has a psychological impact, which we don't, so the military is attempting to help these people reconstruct some kind of life, but that's just physically, right, materially, how are these people coping emotionally, psychologically?

Stephanie Hinnershitz

They're-

Kirk Saduski

With the trauma of the largest event in human history. And they were at the center of it.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

That's one of the criticisms. There will be some, I guess you could call 'em inspectors, from the US who will be sent to some of these displaced persons camps, especially throughout Austria and other places where they will look and see what exactly are the living conditions of people who are in these camps. And one of the big criticisms is that yes, basic needs are trying to be met, being housed and have shelter and food, but there's really not a lot being done at all for any of the trauma.

Kirk Saduski

Well, and then at the center of it all, you've mentioned and Don mentioned, were the millions of Jews who were the target of the Nazis, were the target of the Third Reich. So even if they could go home, why would they, why would they go back? Certainly, why would you go back if you were a Jew who had lived in Poland and you lived in Auschwitz, why would you return?

Stephanie Hinnershitz

One of the other goals of these displaced persons camps were to help people get back on their feet economically. So one of the key, key goals was to helping people find jobs. So if you have that goal that not only are you gonna be housed and fed and you need to be able to have some place to return to, and even if you are psychologically traumatized by what you went through, still, the idea is you're going to be able to be self-sufficient.

Kirk Saduski

And that presupposes that the economy, whether it's in France, Belgium, Netherlands, Hungary, Germany, you name it, is put back together. I mean, these are all countries that had been under war. So their economies essentially had collapsed.

Donald Miller

I talked to this German woman and she said during the war, she had moved to Berlin from Aachen, right? During this period she was gonna return home. She got on the train, someone asked her where she was headed, and she said, "Aachen." He said, "I've just been there, there is no Aachen."

Kirk Saduski

I mean, you can go through all the job training and you can, you know, you're attended to medicinally and maybe even a little bit emotionally, but if there's no there there, to what end? And then you have to face, well, okay, where will I go then? What's my new identity? Let's talk a little bit about Asia, Stephanie. Tell me how was it similar and how was it different?

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Ooh, similar I would say in that you're dealing with this post-war world where empires are crumbling or they no longer exist. So you had that decolonization that is going on in Europe and also in Asia. So that is still making this idea of who are you and where do you belong very complicated. I mentioned before the numbers, trying to get a handle on the number of displaced persons or refugees is very, very tricky. We went through this at the museum when we did the liberation pavilion. This was actually a really big, really big debate that we had right here and trying to figure out how many displaced persons, refugees were there in Asia. So I mentioned earlier, and Don mentioned as well, that there's this overwhelming number in Europe that could be 40 to 65 million. The numbers when you're looking at, we'll take China, it's very difficult to actually come down to something. And part of that is too based on what the numbers a nation reports. So you've got Korea, you've got basically what used to be the Japanese empire, but then also you're dealing with what used to be the French Empire. So you're starting to see a lot of these different.

Kirk Saduski

Basically Indochina.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Yeah, Indochina, yeah. So Korea and China and the Philippines, which is also gonna go through its own transition as it transitions to being its own nation, not under US control, not being a colonial, well, a commonwealth, and getting its independence.

Donald Miller

And that happened so quickly.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Yeah, yeah.

Kirk Saduski

Well, that's an interesting point. How, I mean, again, overnight under occupation in Asia, whether it's Malaysia or Korea, et cetera. And then all of a sudden overnight, your world is turned upside down. The Japanese are displaced. What comes in lieu of the Japanese?

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Right, now we're dealing with American occupation. So this begins the occupation program. And that's another sort of complicated thing to navigate. Are you still Japanese but you're living under American occupation and having to get used to some of the different economic changes that are gonna be going on under US occupation?

Kirk Saduski

Well, talk about that a little bit, about General MacArthur and the people that worked for and under him and how they administered what was an occupied enemy, a former enemy.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Yeah, it was. It's very interesting to look at the goals of occupation in Japan. And there were a couple different phases of it. So I would say one of the most interesting aspects of the way he administered occupation and trying to actually rebuild or reconstruct Japan was trying to do something that I think we might call like land redistribution. That's a more, maybe quote, "radical," way of putting it. But there were these Japanese families that had these conglomerates, these economic conglomerates. And one of the things that MacArthur wanted to challenge or sort of break down were those conglomerates. So trying to break apart those economic corporation that dominated so much and try and redistribute some of that land, try and redistribute some of the wealth, work with MacArthur and work with some of his aides there. So the reason why I bring that up is because I think it highlights MacArthur's approach and the US approach to occupation is that we're not just going to occupy, right? We're not just going to feed them, that's really, really important. But how do you reshape a society in a way that might actually have a lasting legacy?

Kirk Saduski

It's interesting, and I've certainly over the years, and I've gotten into discussions with people, historians even here at the museum, where I don't know of another instance in world history where one nation went to war, total war with another, defeated totally that enemy, and then rather than keeping their foot on their throat, they gave 'em a hand up. I know that's a little simplistic, but it's in essence, I think, but tell me what you think, Stephanie.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

I think you have to question and you have to try and get a handle on what might sound kind of, not crude, but simplistic, but what would the United States get out of treating a former foe the way that it did. So not only, we do wanna do a lot of humanitarian good, we wanna help feed the people who are starving, but what does the United States achieve or accomplish? What can they benefit from? What can we benefit from in administering occupation this way?

Donald Miller

That's really good point. This is where the Cold War wraps into this.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Yep, that's exactly it, right, yeah.

Donald Miller

It's right behind the Marshal Plan things.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Kirk Saduski

And to follow up because yes, that's part of the debate, but there's self-interest in it for the United, this is not humanitarian, this is not Mother Teresa. But I would suggest that if what's in your self-interest is actually in the self-interest of whom you're helping, it's a win-win. Ultimately, I don't care what the motives are necessarily for the Marshall Planner, et cetera.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Yeah.

Kirk Saduski

If helping me helps them, all the better for all of us.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

So with the displaced persons in Europe, in 1948, we have a Displaced Persons Act, which allows for some of these individuals who are struggling, many, many Jews who were survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution, 1948, they start to come to the United States. So in one hand, that's great, we're doing something very humanitarian. On the other hand, like you mentioned, Don, we're in the early years of the Cold War now. So what can the United States get from bringing over some of these individuals who don't wanna go live under the Soviet Union?

Kirk Saduski

Well, we never think about, or we rarely think about it as we should because we had displaced persons in the United States. At the beginning of the war, infamously, Japanese Americans were rounded up primarily on the West Coast and put into so-called internment camps. All right, what homes did they go back to?

Stephanie Hinnershitz

So I really do appreciate being able to talk about this in the context of bigger displacement and movements because it's very important to think of it that way, 'cause it was not a voluntary movement. And one of the groups was Japanese Americans, and they were referred to at the time as refugees. So a lot of magazines, a lot of periodicals actually looked at Japanese Americans as refugees, and they used that term. So that's not me projecting backward and saying, let's take this.

Kirk Saduski

That's interesting. I didn't know that.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

And use it, but yeah, they were tumbleweeds and refugees. They were people who really had no place to go. So it's all in the same language, when you're using it, whether it's for displaced persons or in China, it's that idea of the war created situations where people moved involuntarily. They had to move, and that happens right here in the US too.

Kirk Saduski

Give us an idea, how many ultimately Japanese Americans were displaced interred, both Japanese Americans, and I know there were also Japanese nationalists who were living here.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Yes.

Kirk Saduski

So give us the total and differentiate, please.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Mm-hmm, we used to say approximately 120,000, but now we know it was more 122,000 give or take, that were displaced from the West Coast and had to go into one of the camps, and then from there, you know, get sort of spitballed out whether they go back or whether they go elsewhere. Within that number, about 80, 82% were Nisei. So they were American citizens.

Kirk Saduski

Right, so over 80,000 American citizens.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

American citizens.

Kirk Saduski

Were thrown into camps in the United States.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

So when those exclusion orders are lifted in January of 1945, so that's when Japanese Americans can legally return back to the West Coast and try and pick up the pieces of their lives, that is going to be incredibly difficult because there's still, this is almost, so 1945 through about 1947, this is a period where you basically see domestic terrorism against Japanese Americans who are trying to return back to their homes. You have white groups who are trying to fire bomb their homes and they're trying to kill them. So they are allowed to go back, but why would you, why would you go back?

Kirk Saduski

Right, well, and are there places to go back to?

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Yeah, economically, what they have to go home to is certainly not what they left behind. Businesses, Japanese Americans sold their businesses off, they sold all their inventory. There's nothing to go home to there. Again, just homes, there really is nothing economically or even structurally to return home to in 1945.

Donald Miller

And it's one of the biggest housing crunches this country's ever experienced.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Donald Miller

The housing shortage was enormous.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Yeah, absolutely.

Donald Miller

Servicemen, you know, can't get into housing.

Kirk Saduski

Help us understand the entire scope of World War II, including the post-war period and displaced persons around the world.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

Mm-hmm, I think there's material aspects of that, just trying to struggle and regain and be able to live and survive. But also just having an identity. What does it mean to live after this very massive event? Like you survived, just, you gave the number, right? This massive number of people who did not survive. So I think it's important to think about, well, how do those who did, what do they make of it, right? What does it mean to have survived this very, very enormous fatal event? What does it mean for a displaced person? What does it mean for someone who survived the Holocaust to go into a camp and then come to the United States when so many others did not? I think trying to grapple with that touches absolutely every part, every part of the globe.

Kirk Saduski

We obviously at the museum, but in and in movies and films and in literature, and so, we grapple with '39 to '45. I don't think we've come close yet to grappling with '45 onward.

Stephanie Hinnershitz

No, no, absolutely not.

Kirk Saduski

In a letter to the American judge at Nuremberg, President Truman wrote, "An undisputed gain coming out of Nuremberg is the formal recognition that there are crimes against humanity." Historian Rebecca Erbelding joins us. Let's talk a little bit about at the Nuremberg Trials, what was, again, this is unprecedented. Set the scene for us and what happened at Nuremberg.

Rebecca Erbelding

The Allies have lots of debates during the war as to what to do with the leaders, with the Nazi leaders. There wasn't a lot of legal precedent for prosecuting people for war crimes, certainly for waging proactive war. The Allies are kind of making up a lot of these charges out of thin air, declaring them as legal and then trying to try people. When we talk about the Nuremberg Trials, really, I think what most people think of is what is actually known as the International Military Tribunal, the IMT. It is the major war crimes trial. 22 major Nazi criminals put on trial for almost a year. The trial opens in November, 1945, and lasts until the following September. There are subsequent Nuremberg Trials. And so, that's why we pluralize that word. And those are focused on doctors, on industrialists, on a total of about 199 defendants from all walks of German life, leadership of different organizations that the Americans then try subsequent to this international trial, this major international trial. The Nazis who are in the international trial, the 22 leading Nazis, are Hermann Goring, they're people who work in propaganda, they're people who worked in the different regions of German-controlled territory and had different jobs. They kind of picked from a group of leadership, kind of the representative people that the Allies wanted to try. And they were tried on conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. And the Holocaust is a part of the trial, it is not the majority of it, most of it is about this proactive waging of war. And of course, many of the defendants give what is now known as the Nuremberg Defense. Basically, we were just following orders. It wasn't our decision, it was Hitler. And of course Hitler is dead at this point. So it's very convenient that they just say they're following orders. But they are tried on those grounds, and with the Holocaust as a part of that.

Kirk Saduski

And there were, yes, and some of the other defendants, Albert Speer, Joachim, Minister of Armaments and Hitler's architect.

Rebecca Erbelding

Speer, Ribbentrop.

Kirk Saduski

Ribbentrop.

Rebecca Erbelding

Yep.

Kirk Saduski

Keitel, Keitel, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, the whole gang. But there were-

Rebecca Erbelding

That they could find and that hadn't-

Kirk Saduski

Right.

Rebecca Erbelding

Taken their own lives.

Kirk Saduski

And there were other trials, not just at Nuremberg, but around Europe, that there were many trials. Can you estimate essentially how many Germans ultimately were held accountable and responsible by some, whether it was American or Russian or Polish authorities over the next couple of years?

Rebecca Erbelding

So you've asked a historian a question with a lot of caveats, and I have to throw it back at you a little bit because like, how many people are tried, how many are held responsible, which is I think to some extent, subjective. So how many people are found guilty? I think the Allies are trying, the Western Allies, I'll speak about the Western Allies, the Western Allies are trying to run actual trials, with a judge, sometimes with witnesses, with testimony, and where the defendants are allowed to have representation, most of the time. A lot of the trials are based on certain camps. So there is an Auschwitz trial in the Soviet Zone, there is a Bergen-Belsen trial that the British Run, the US-run Dachau trials, and they use Dachau as kind of a general place where different kinds of crimes are tried. Sometimes the crimes are against Allied soldiers. So Allied airmen who are shot down, there'll be a trial. One of the first ones is held at Caserta, just outside of Naples, trying a German major who had participated in the death of an Allied airman. And so there are trials, large and small. I would say probably in terms of how many people are tried, we're in the tens of thousands. How many people are convicted is much lower than that. And how many people actually received the justice that they deserved is much, much lower than that. And how many people walked away is much more than the number of people who are tried. The Allies are performing triage. A lot of times, as you see with the IMT, the International Military Tribunal, they're picking representative people to try, knowing that they absolutely can't try everybody. And I think as the 1940s go on, there's less appetite from the American people for these trials and to continue to have their sons overseas as military police supervising people for these trials. And then you also get wrapped up in the Cold War. You know, there's a battle between the Americans and the Soviets and the British.

Kirk Saduski

And Germany was often the prize.

Rebecca Erbelding

And Germany is often the beneficiary of that because, you know, we need powerful allies in Europe and we can't have a weak Germany here. So even as we're occupying, there are compromises being made.

Kirk Saduski

This is, you know, you could make a case as the 1945 is as important a single year as there has ever been in world history.

Rebecca Erbelding

I absolutely agree with you that 1945 is a pivotal year. And I think when you go back, you can trace almost any modern debate that we have, almost every decision that we make to something that is happening in 1945 and is just continuing to ripple today.

Kirk Saduski

Don, we've spent the last few weeks discussing the events of 1945. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that many of those events really are fundamental to shaping the modern world we live in today. What do you think?

Donald Miller

Well, I think they are, if we remember them, and that's our obligation. We can forget, it's the easiest thing to do. And sometimes remembering is very difficult because it can be awfully painful. Even when it's joyous, I think it's poignant to place yourself, if you can, on the spot that a certain event in history took place is to put yourself in the stream of life. You're part of the story. You're consciously remembering that you're part of the story. And if you write it down, all the better, because then you're a true participant. That's the importance of history.

Kirk Saduski

Some of the events of this year were, this was a particularly eventful year, 1945. We began a few weeks ago discussing the liberation, if I can use that term, of the extermination center at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Donald Miller

Yeah.

Kirk Saduski

And then we marched through some very difficult things. The horrific battle for Manila, the battle the American Marines capturing Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the continuing bombing of both Germany and the fire bombing in Japan. And then of course the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of this in one 12 month period, extraordinary events, very difficult to, hard enough for us just to recount and recapture. Imagine trying to live through it all.

Donald Miller

It's too much, it's really, just to hear you, the litany, you know, you just recalled a small segment of it and it's overpowering. It's Humpty Dumpty fallen from the wall and he's totally cracked in the pieces. Can he ever be put back together again? People must have wandered after the war, as they walked into another world, what's going on here?

Kirk Saduski

Speaking about how hard it was, I can't imagine being a parent during the war, and now in 1945 when he's either coming home or he is not. And imagine if he comes home either wounded, let alone just as if he comes home and you have to bury him. Your life will never be the same.

Donald Miller

Well, you said a lot there, brother, you said it to me earlier this morning and it really struck me because I felt a real sharp pain, a sting of guilt about my grandparents that I never asked them, all the interviewees I've done, I never asked them what it felt like to have that gnawing, constant, incessant sensation of you're gonna lose him or not. Letters don't come in. And it's just an awful thing, it's just an awful thing. And when I finally talked to one of my aunts, she said that she was pregnant before my uncle went over and served with the Big Red one. But every time she looked at the baby, she thought of her husband. It was a painful reminder, it should have been a joyous moment. Is his father ever gonna see him again, let alone am I ever gonna see him again? I did a biography years ago of the American intellectual, Lewis Mumford. He lived in a small country town up in New York State called Amenia. His son at 18 volunteered and he went in as a replacement in Italy. And of course, replacements show up and they're considered bad luck 'cause they haven't worked with the unit. You know, they don't know the protocol. And maybe they'll get us all killed here. Sometimes the guys wouldn't call replacements by their names, they didn't want to know their names because they'd probably be gone pretty soon. Well, he was killed, and his parents who lived by themselves and were not young and real young, and they were in their early 50s, they got the letter and the rest of their lives, and Mumford lived into his 90s and was a very productive man, but was haunted by that boy's death. He asked me one time to fetch a painting for him, and Georgia O'Keeffe he wanted to show me, and O'Keeffe was a friend of his, and he said, "Go upstairs," I had never been on the second floor of their house, and, "It's in the bedroom on the right." And I walked up and opened the door. And my God, I walked into a time warp. His name was Geddes, after the Scottish botanist, Patrick Geddes, who was an accolade of his, and I just froze. It was the boy's room, Geddes's room, the day he left for the war. Nothing had changed, the toothbrushes, the books, the boots, his fishing rods, his shotgun they shot rabbits with. Sacred space, sacred space. I asked him what was the saddest moment of his life. He said, "Well, that was the deliverance of the telegram." But he said, "Even worse was when we got the word on the radio that the war was over, the war in Europe at that point. And we were a farm community. And everyone got in their trucks and rode around and rang cowbells and blew whistles and things, and formed an ad hoc kind of parade. And all my wife and I did is retreat to the kitchen so we couldn't hear the sounds. And we just cried and cried." That was it for him. And then we had to make the decision. We never thought of this. We were gonna bring him home. The governor offered us the opportunity to bring him home and bury him, even in Arlington if he wished. And after tremendous soul searching, and he said, "My God, you can't believe how difficult that decision was, not to be able to see his grave perhaps, but at the same time to honor him." And then I thought it was over in a sense, but there was no termination because I wanted to know how he died, because I wanted to know if he died with anybody. I wanted to know if he died alone. And he didn't have any buddies. So we wrote to his company commander, and his company commander did not know who he was. And they started to ask questions. He was very good about this. And they did find a kid who went on the scouting mission with him, but wasn't with him when he was shot by a sniper. So he died alone in the Italian woods, only six or seven days after arriving at the war front. There was this cliff, this ravine between us, the gap, there was no closure, that's what closure means. You know, the searing together of the two lives, life, death, termination, prayer, remembrance. We went through none of that.

Kirk Saduski

That's why they had to keep the room exactly.

Donald Miller

Yeah, yeah.

Kirk Saduski

In the state.

Donald Miller

Exactly.

Kirk Saduski

Of course.

Donald Miller

Just the way it was, and it happened to me a second time, an earlier time in life when my grandmother sent me next door to a young man's house who I adored, and they sent me over there to get something. And they sent me upstairs to this young man's bedroom. And he was a tanker in Tunisia, and he was killed. His tank was immolated, you know, he burned to death. I was told that later. But even as a young kid at age six, I knew that something aghast had happened in here. I don't know what it was, but it was scary. It was his room just the way it was. And I thought, why don't they, even as a kid I thought this, why don't they clean this up just to try to erase the memory so it's not with them all the time? And I asked my mom and she said, "They have to have it."

Kirk Saduski

Well, it's almost, I would imagine that some part of your heart, some part of your brain can pretend that he's gonna walk in.

Donald Miller

Yes.

Kirk Saduski

And everything's gonna be there for him just as it was. He's gonna walk in, he's coming home tomorrow, he'll be here tomorrow.

Donald Miller

And if this stuff isn't here, did you forget about me?

Kirk Saduski

Yeah, yeah, what happens?

Donald Miller

Did life go on?

Kirk Saduski

It's like when the guys would come back on the Eighth Air Force, when they would come back and they were reported missing, but they weren't, and they came back to their Nissan huts and they had been already, their foot lockers had already been cleared out.

Donald Miller

Yeah.

Kirk Saduski

I can't imagine parents, of course, you're gonna keep the footlocker there, of course you're gonna keep his baseball mitt there. Of course you are.

Donald Miller

Yeah.

Kirk Saduski

Don, I can't think of any better way to conclude our series, but you concluded your great book, "The Story of World War II," by quoting a veteran. I think it would be appropriate if we conclude our series with that quote.

Donald Miller

This is a writer, very popular in his time, Robert Crichton. Robert wrote a memoir, and this is just a section from it. This is 30 years after the war, on the anniversary of the day that he was wounded. And this is just a small segment from it. "The greatest defeat in anything is to forget. Forgetfulness dismantles time, the ultimate gift of life. Death might be seen as a condition of running out of time. If something is forgotten, it never happened. It is correct to say that the loss of memory murders life. Knowing this, I keep on forgetting, failing to find any acceptable reason for this willful, even suicidal forgetfulness. I have come to blame it on the war because I remember the war." Well, there's the poignancy of it. To bring up the war was to spin him into tremendous depression. The death, he suffered post-traumatic distress in the war. All these haunting, horrible memories he had. And yet he knew that if he forgot, he'd murder the experience, he'd murder the war, he'd murdered what he'd done. It would all disappear. And he didn't wanna slip, it was bad enough getting old, but he didn't want to slip into a state of a historical unactivity. And that, of course is forgetting.

Kirk Saduski

Of course, and I would imagine, it would be, it's probably too strong to say, but murdering himself in a way, because-

Donald Miller

You know, it is.

Kirk Saduski

And however it affected him emotionally and psychologically, he still achieved something. And he still was part of something that was necessary, and that was an experience that was shared millions of times around the world. I was thinking when you were de describing the Mumfords and your next door neighbor and the Gold Star parents, those were experiences the way you so eloquently describe them, that happened in America, hundreds of thousands of times.

Donald Miller

Isn't it something?

Kirk Saduski

Across the world million, tens of millions of times, unimaginable to us, but that's why we can't forget.

Donald Miller

No, you can't.

Kirk Saduski

Don, it's been a pleasure and an honor discussing the events in 1945 with you the last few weeks.

Donald Miller

It was, I'm glad we signed up for the tour .

Kirk Saduski

See you next time, pal.

Donald Miller

Okay.

Kirk Saduski

Goodbye.

Donald Miller

Bye.

Kirk Saduski

Thank you for listening to this podcast series. We wanna give a special thanks to our sponsor, the Long family, for their generous support of this series, and to our guests, Richard Frank, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Rebecca Erbelding, John McManus, Stephanie Hinnershitz, as well as Patricia Clarkson and Gary Sinise. We thank you. To learn more about the American experience in World War II, visit the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. The museum's website has a dedicated page for this podcast series where you can find articles and recommended reading about 1945.