A book by a brilliant British journalist, also known unfortunately for his splenetic behaviour, is amongst my evergreens. Author of Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, Robert Fisk was, by any standards, a great journalist. In my review of his book, he claimed to have detected a factual mistake (there was none) and wrote such a rude letter to me that I tore the review off my paste-up file. But when the second edition of Pity the Nation came out, I found it irresistible not to give Fisk credit for fresh material in his 700-page book.

Apart from being erudite, Fisk was brave and risked death to cover a story. Shells were bursting around him when he ran to cross the Shatt al Arab river to safety.

He was also extremely lucky professionally, for he was passing by the Palestinian refugee camp at Qana, Lebanon, when Israeli gunfire murdered over 100 men, women and children

He quotes a woman who survived the massacre as saying: “A man was lying in two pieces. There was a woman who was pregnant and I could see the arms and legs of an unborn baby poking out of her stomach. There was a man who had shrapnel in his head. He was not dead but you could see a piece of metal in the neck; he’d had his throat cut. He told his daughter to come to help him and lift him up. And I heard her say: ‘wait a minute, I am trying to put my brother together — he is in two pieces.’ There was another brother holding a child in his arms. The child had no head …”

Fisk’s Lebanon, Behr’s Imperial Japan and Junge’s and Schroeder’s Nazi Germany — all provide insight into nations at war

Then he quotes an Israeli soldier as saying: “It is a war; in a war these things happen … it is just a bunch of Arabs. Why are you taking it so hard?”

Another of my evergreens, not yet moth-eaten, is British journalist Edward Behr’s biography of Hirohito, emperor of Japan during the Second World War. A man with a powerful pen, Behr also had a unique sense of humour. Notice, for instance, the name of one of his books. It is fantastic, bizarre and weirdly humorous: Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? According to Oxford Reference, the title is based on what a British television reporter shouted repeatedly to women and children fleeing the newly independent Zaire.

On Japan, Behr tells us of the Japanese emperor’s humiliation by Gen Douglas MacArthur followed by Gen MacArthur’s own humiliation by a furious American president, Henry Truman, who said, “I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea. I was never so put out in my life.”

Did Hirohito encourage his generals in their war plans, including the attack on Pearl Harbour? Author Behr’s conclusions are that the emperor — in whose ‘divinity’ the Japanese people believed and were ready to kill all non-Japanese, and kill themselves — knew and blessed the war plans.

When translated into statecraft, the belief in the emperor’s divinity appeared to be the Asian version of Nazi philosophy. In fact, so close was the ideological bond between the two breeds of herrenvolk [master race] that Behr quotes someone as questioning, “Who learnt from whom?”

In brief, the Japanese intelligentsia, and not just the generals, believed it was the divine duty of the Japanese state and people to rescue all East Asians from the control of Western colonial powers, the exceptions being Germany and Italy.

How the Japanese people were to view their position in Asia was made clear in The Way of the Subjects, a booklet which was written by Japanese government officials, distributed by the ministry of education and made compulsory reading in schools. Lambasting European big powers and America, it said that, culturally, Japan had a mission to “fashion East Asian nations into changing their following of European and American culture and to develop Oriental culture to contribute to the creation of a just world.”

On the 2,601st anniversary in 1941 of the founding of the Japanese empire, then home minister Kiichiro Hiranuma, a super hawk, said that what made Japan a uniquely superior country was that “foreign kings, emperors, presidents are all created by man, but Japan has a sacred throne inherited from the imperial ancestors. Japan’s imperial rule is, therefore, an extension of heaven. Man-made dynasties collapsed, but the heaven-created throne is beyond the power of mere mortals.”

On Aug 8, 1945, three months after Germany had surrendered and Japan was alone, then prime minister Kantaro Suzuki turned the tables at a meeting where the peace party wanted Hirohito to end the war. However, Suzuki pleaded for a continuation of the war in most emotional terms and said that time had come for “the supreme sacrifice” that needed the “death of one hundred million people.”

Three months earlier, thousands of miles away across the Eurasian landmass, Adolf Hitler had his testament dictated to Gertraud “Traudl” Junge, one of his four secretaries, whose autobiography, Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary, is another one of my evergreens.

Junge is Hitler’s most quoted aide, even though she served Der Fuhrer only for two and a half years (from mid-1942 to Hitler’s suicide in April 1945), unlike Christa Schroeder, who was on his staff from 1933 to 1945. For scholars, however, Junge’s importance stems from her closeness to Hitler and the last dictation he gave her. Unlike Schroeder’s book, Junge’s memoirs contain that remorse — the guilt for being part of the Nazi establishment — which Schroeder’s book, He Was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s Secretary, lacks.

Being a woman and close to Hitler had many advantages, including the audacity to say to him things no party colleague or field marshal would dare say. As conditions worsened and defeat neared, Junge had the courage to ask, “My Fuhrer, don’t you think the German people will expect you to fall in battle at the head of your troops?”

Hitler replied, “I am no longer in any physical shape to fight. My trembling hands can hardly hold a pistol. If I am wounded, I won’t find any of my men to shoot me. And I don’t want to fall into the hands of the Russians.”

He was right, says Junge. “His hand shakes as he lifts a spoon or fork to his mouth, he has difficulty getting out of his chair, and when he walks his feet drag over the floor.”

Schroeder had wider experience and started working for the Nazi party when it was still not in power. She remarks that Hitler had an above-average memory for remembering people and events, and when he met Schroeder after becoming chancellor he recalled that he had met her once and took her on his staff.

The most revealing part of Schroeder’s memoirs concerns the fate of the Berghof — Hitler’s home in the Bavarian Alps — and the looting she was witness to. As Hitler’s death was announced, she said, “the change occurred in a manner scarcely to be described […] Chaos broke out [… people] stormed the farm and cleared it, dragging off animals and breaking open stockpiles of potatoes […people] removed not only the articles which were easily transportable but also all the furniture. Nothing was left […] strange women appeared […] and made off with full containers. The police officers so previously devoted to law and order […] all were suddenly transformed and unrecognisable.”

Also to turn up at the Berghof was Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe chief, who issued an extraordinary order: the destruction of the minutes of the situation conferences. Otherwise, he said, “the German people will discover that during the last two years they had been led by a madman!”

Next: Einstein’s Universe

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman and an author

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 30th, 2022