Comrade Guevara
At 4:45 a.m. on September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland from both the south and the east, and Poland's two allies, Britain and France, were forced to declare war on Germany, and World War II broke out in full swing.
In this war, Germany invested a total of 44 divisions, including 7 heavy armored divisions, 4 light armored divisions, 4 motorized divisions, as well as 1,939 aircraft, 2,800 tanks, and a total strength of 887,000 troops. In order to resist the enemy's attack, Poland invested a total of about 1 million troops, but due to serious deficiencies in war preparations, weapons and equipment, and command system, as well as more than one million British and French troops engaged in a "sit-down war" on the Western Front, it only resisted for 36 days and perished, which shocked the whole world.
Map of concentration or extermination camps established by Nazi Germany
At that time, Poland was the most populating country of Jews in Europe, with a population of 3.5 million, and the Nazi regime led by Hitler vowed to exterminate all Jews in Germany and its occupied areas and vassal states with the aim of extreme anti-Semitism. For this reason, in April 1940, half a year after the annexation of Poland, Nazi Germany established concentration or extermination camps in the occupied territories such as Auschwitz, Chełumno, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Bersec, which were used to slaughter millions of Jews and Polish prisoners of war.
At this time, in order to avoid the danger of death, a large number of Jews were forced to flee with their wives and children to neighboring Lithuania, preparing to enter the Soviet Union from that country, then cross the sea to Japan, and finally flee to China, the United States and other countries willing to accept Jewish refugees. However, according to the regulations of the Soviet government at the time, Jewish refugees would be denied entry unless they had a "third country" visa. Therefore, in desperation, these Jews could only turn to the Japanese embassy and consulates in Lithuania for help, hoping to obtain visas to enter the Soviet Union.
The Jews were brutally persecuted and even massacred by Nazi Germany
However, since Japan had already formed an alliance with Germany at this time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, out of consideration for the preservation of the "Covenant," strictly forbade the envoys of various European countries to issue visas to Jews, otherwise they would be severely punished. However, Chimu Sugihara, who was the acting consul of the Japanese consulate in Kaunas (the capital of Lithuania from 1920 to 1940), could not bear to see the Jews being slaughtered, and his conscience drove him to disobey the orders of his superiors and began issuing visas in large quantities on July 27, 1940, the so-called "life visas", in the hope of helping them out of trouble.
On August 3 of that year, Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union, and the Japanese consulate was notified to evacuate, but at this time, Sugihara Chimu was still issuing visas around the clock. On August 23, Sugihara was transferred to Berlin, but just before the train left, he was still busy issuing visas for Jewish refugees who had gathered outside the carriages. According to incomplete statistics, in the past one month, Sugihara Senmu issued a total of 4,500 handwritten visas, helping at least 6,000 Jewish refugees to escape to "third countries" for refuge.
As an aside, almost at the same time, He Fengshan, then the Chinese Consul General in Vienna, and Wang Tifu, the puppet Manchurian "Consular Supplement of the Legation" in Germany, were also doing the same good deed.
"Life visa" issued by Senmu Sugihara
According to incomplete statistics, during World War II, more than 30,000 Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai, of which at least 4,000 were able to escape through the "life visa" issued by He Fengshan, and another 12,000 were saved from doom because of the "life visa" issued by Wang Tifu. Sugihara Chimu and He Fengshan, two diplomats from mutually hostile countries, have surprisingly consistent actions in saving Jewish refugees, which can be called a good story in history. Although Wang Tifu is a "traitor", his righteous act of saving the Jews is worthy of praise.
But what makes people sigh is that although Sugihara Qianmu has done amazing good deeds, it has not been duly praised in China. After the end of World War II, Sugihara was imprisoned as a prisoner of war in an Allied asylum and was dismissed from his post the following year after returning to Japan, living a life of extreme hardship. At this time, the Japanese government mistakenly believed that Sugihara had accepted money from Jews in order to issue visas in violation of regulations, right-wingers denounced him as a traitor sympathetic to China, and the American occupation forces regarded him as a militaristic bureaucrat.
A list of Chimu Sugihara and the Jews he rescued
Because of this, Sugihara Chimu was unable to obtain a decent and stable job for more than ten years, and in order to survive, he changed several occupations until 1960, when he was hired as the director of a trading company's office in Moscow, and was forced to work and live overseas for many years. In 1975, Sugihara returned to Japan after completing his term of office, and immediately settled in Kamakura to live a reclusive life.
In 1985, after the Israeli government learned of Sugihara's charitable deeds that year, it awarded him the "Foreign National Justice Medal" and erected a memorial monument to him on the Jerusalem hill. On July 31 of the following year, Chimu Sugihara died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 86. In 1991, after Lithuania gained independence from the Soviet Union, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs discovered the real reason for Sugihara's issuance of visas to Jewish refugees when it investigated the archives of its dealings with the country. Only then did the Japanese government officially apologize to the widow of Chimu Sugihara.
The Sugibara Senmu Memorial Hall in Gifu Prefecture, Japan
Today, Sugihara's deeds have been widely praised and included in Japanese elementary and middle school history textbooks, and Nippon TV produced and broadcast a documentary TV series dedicated to him in 2005. In 2018, when then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Lithuania, he personally visited the memorial hall of Senmu Sugihara and claimed to be proud of him. At the same time, the Jews and their descendants who were rescued by the Thousand Acres of Sugihara are also commemorating and remembering this great humanitarian in various ways in Israel, the United States, Lithuania and other countries.
Sugihara Senmu should be deeply gratified if there is knowledge under the spring.
bibliography
1. Gao Xin, "Men of International Justice - Remembering Japanese Diplomat Sugihara Thousand Mu", Party History, No. 05, 1997.
2. Wang Tifu, "Memories of Puppet Manchurian Diplomats", Heilongjiang People's Publishing House, 1988.
3. He Fengshan: "Forty Years of Diplomatic Career", Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1990 edition.
4. Wang Tifu's dictation, compiled by Yang Mingsheng, "The Puppet Manchurian Diplomat Who Met Hitler and Saved the Jews", Heilongjiang People's Publishing House, 2001.