How could Japanese airmen volunteer to become kamikaze pilots? Why did the SS believe in the racist values ​​of the Nazi regime? For nearly 20 years I tried to answer questions like these by meeting with hundreds of people who participated in World War II. I was interested in what motivated perpetrators, but I also encountered victims who were faced with dire decisions.

I traveled the world, met rapists, murderers and cannibals; I spoke to heroic soldiers, survivors of atrocities, and a man who shot children. I used some of this material in various television series that I wrote and produced, but much of it was never published. Which is why, in 2007, I wrote a book, Their Darkest Hour, about the 35 most extraordinary people I've met on my travels. I was amazed at how relevant their testimonials are today.

Experience shows that the past is not a foreign world. Certainly, the circumstances were different from today. But these dilemmas were posed to people who were like many of us in fundamental ways, and I think that's why we can learn more about ourselves by asking ourselves the simple question: “What would we have done in his place?”

Choose between life and death for Jewish children

As a teenager, Estera Frenkiel, secretary of a ghetto in Lodz (Poland), received 10 certificates to prevent Jews from being sent to concentration camps. At the heart of many of the stories I found was a stark choice. Whether it's to pull the trigger, drop the bomb, hide your neighbor or save yourself; die for your principles or live for convenience.

I've met people who faced all these problems, but no one faced such a tough problem as this Polish woman, who had to make the devastating decision of who would live and who would die.

In the spring of 1940, Frenkiel and his parents were among 160,000 Jews forced by the Nazis to live in a ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz. Germans rarely entered the ghetto, so the Nazis had the Jews set up a council of elders to deal with day-to-day administration.

This meant that the council of elders in Lodz and especially its director, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, had considerable power over the lives of other Jews. It also meant that those closest to Rumkowski could lead a "better" life than most in the ghetto. In that context, the young Frenkiel was "lucky" as she worked as a secretary in Rumkowski's office.

This became crucially important in September 1942, when the Nazis ordered the deportation of those unable to work—children, the sick, and the elderly—because Rumkowski and his circle were given the chance to save their children by the Nazis. "Biebow (the ghetto manager) came to our office," Frenkiel recalls, "and said: 'I'll give you ten waiver forms for the release of your children.' And I typed them out as fast as I could for her to sign. Not only I received these forms, but my colleagues as well. Frenkiel then had the opportunity to save ten lives. Who would I choose? How much would this terrible decision distress her? He didn't freak out for a second.

He acted on instinct: “What could I do? I also had close relatives. He had an uncle who had to be saved, a cousin. For me, the family itself is the closest thing. I had to take care of them. Of the ten certificates, I first considered my own family.”

After saving his own, he took notice of his closest people. “I gave the neighbors two certificates and one also to the doorman, who had a little girl, so those three forms were used almost immediately... (The neighbor's) children used to come to my house. I knew them. They weren't my children, but they were children that I knew and once you meet someone it becomes very difficult…”. Frenkiel never pretended that she was motivated by anything other than a desire to protect those closest to her.

She confessed to feeling guilty when she saw the desperation of mothers whose children were being deported. She once or twice felt that she should have saved the most useful people, but those feelings didn't last long. Ultimately, he always thought he had done the right thing.

In crises, Frenkiel believes, we take care of ourselves first and those closest to us. In either case, the certificates only resulted in a stay of execution. “Later everyone was sent away, even those one had rescued earlier. That's how it is. Thats the reality". When the ghetto was eliminated by the Nazis in 1944, Frenkiel was taken to the Ravensbruck concentration camp. There he survived a “selection” process and worked in a labor camp until his liberation. After the war he settled in Israel.

Prisoner of War

Peter Lee was a young officer in the British Royal Air Force (RAF). Captured in Borneo, he suffered from starvation, disease, and was beaten. Originally from the north of England and belonging to the working class, it was those values ​​that he learned growing up in the 1930s that helped him face one of the worst experiences of World War II: being captured by the Japanese.

He was imprisoned in Sandakan, Borneo. The Japanese wanted an airport and the prisoners of war were to build it. The heat there was intense. “Basically we had to move dirt,” recalls Lee. “There were no machines. It was all handwork." If the prisoners did not work as the Japanese wanted, they were beaten.

“Regardless of being an officer or another rank, you had to obey the orders of the lowest-ranking Japanese soldier. If you didn't obey right away, depending on that soldier's personality, you'd get your head smashed in or hit on the butt with a stick. There was one occasion when a [British] officer intervened when one of his men was beaten by some Japanese guards and several of them beat him horribly." "My opinion, from all our experience, is that the treatment of prisoners of war by the Japanese was brutal, sadistic and uncivilized."

With all that, how did he manage to survive? “The natural emotion is anger. That is the natural emotion of any reasonable person,” he replies. “If you are attacked, you defend yourself, but as a Japanese prisoner of war, you quickly realize that this is not the case. If you try to defend yourself they hit you without pause. And that's where the law of survival comes in." “You have to realize what situation you are in and act accordingly. In other words: you have to put up with it.

Through a phenomenal exercise in self-discipline, he erased the hate and even the rage from his emotions. Not only did he do that in Sandakan, he also removed another "negative" force: self-pity. He saw that it was a "disadvantage to have that state of mind."

“The best thing you could do was think of ways to help the community... in those circumstances, keep your mind and body busy as much as possible (...), and never feel sorry for yourself same". Lee believes it was crucial to just focus on "living in the present." “There was no point in remembering the past—family, friends—because the past was the past and all you get if you reflect on the past in relation to the horrible present is torture yourself.” His mental strength, his stoicism, his physical stamina, all these qualities became his protection against self-pity and physical and mental decline.

Volunteered to fight with the SS

Despite losing an eye and an arm, Jacques Leroy decided to fight again alongside his comrades when necessary. In popular culture, the relationship between Germany and Nazism is explicit. Not everyone realizes that Nazism and Fascism aroused the interest of many non-Germans. In fact, the most fanatical member of the SS I met was Belgian.

Jacques Leroy grew up in Bache, Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium. During his youth he shared the views of Léon Degrelle, leader of the fascist Rexist Party. And so, racist and deeply anti-communist, it is no surprise that he volunteered to fight Stalin in a special Walloon division within the SS.

I learned how to make Udon (one of Japanese noodles made from wheat flour). It was a lot of fun!! https://t.co/TZIjMupLSk

— ふくしひとみ Wed Nov 02 09:54:36 +0000 2016

“The ideological goal of the Waffen SS was to train men, elite men,” says Leroy. "This word is no longer appreciated in our pluralistic society, but it was to train men who could take charge of a command and serve their country." The purpose was clear. "It was the war against Russia, against communist and Bolshevik Russia, which was the reason for everything."

Leroy and the rest of his division's volunteers were transferred to the Eastern Front. Leroy proved to be a brave and fierce combatant. But, in the snowy forest of Teklino in western Ukraine in 1943, they clashed with a Red Army that vastly outnumbered them with disastrous consequences.

“These fights were truly terrible. We lost 60% of our men. We fight like lions. We attacked and took position after position!” But Leroy's luck evaporated.

“I was kneeling behind a birch tree and suddenly I felt like an electric shock. I dropped my gun (...) and at that moment I saw blood, blood dripping on the snow. It was my eye that had been hit by a bullet (...). And I had three bullets in my shoulder." Leroy was left bleeding in the snow until two of his comrades took him to a field hospital where neither his eye nor his arm could be saved.

And now comes the most extraordinary part of his story: Seriously disabled as he was, he rejoined his unit. Because? "To not fall into mediocrity and to be with my comrades," Leroy replies. "Of course I had lost an arm and an eye, but when you're young, things don't affect you in the same way as an older person."

“But above all, to avoid falling into mediocrity. I don't like doing nothing, not having a goal in life. Sometimes they have to be a symbol in life. If not, what is life for? It's not for watching TV all the time!" Leroy emphatically denies having seen atrocities committed against Jews: “Never, never, never! I never saw a scene like that, so I don't think so!" When I tell him that there is photographic evidence of corpses in concentration camps, he says: "And do you really believe that those photos are true?"

I Killed a German Prisoner

After joining SMERSH, the notorious Soviet counterintelligence unit, Zinaida Pytkina had to kill a German prisoner. At first glance, sitting in her rickety little house in Volgograd, Zinaida Pytkina looked like a typical Russian granny. After all, she was almost 70 years old when I met her. However, the directness of his gaze was at odds with his age. This was a woman who was emotionlessly appreciative of everyone she met.

He had worked for SMERCH, the Soviet secret intelligence unit, specializing in gathering information from German prisoners. These Germans, Pytkina asserts, were not ordinary prisoners of war, having been captured by special Soviet squads. As a result, SMERSH operatives felt they could treat them however they wanted.

Thus, they ordered German soldiers to reveal their mission, units, battle plans, names of their comrades. And if they didn't cooperate as they wanted, they were treated “gently”. “Gently” was their way of describing torture, because if the Germans didn't talk like that, they would bring in a “specialist” who would “give them a bath” (a euphemism they used for beating) to “sing”.

Even today, Pytkina is proud of SMERSH's actions. She believes that it was okay for her to mistreat the German prisoners. “The same way they treated us. (...) He kills our soldiers, what should I do?" he says.

Pytkina not only witnessed the interrogation and torture of German soldiers, she also participated in their murders. One day, a superior told him to "solve" something about a German major. She knew exactly what he meant: they were asking her to kill him. "When they brought the prisoners after the interrogations, it was a normal thing... If they had brought a dozen men, my hand would not have trembled to kill them all."

“I wouldn't do it now, regardless of whether they're enemies or not, because I'm over it and I'd let others figure it out, but at the time, if they had put all those Germans in a line, I would have shot them all, for so many Russian soldiers who lost their lives at 18, 19 or 20 years old..."

Pytkina recalls the moment she killed the German major: “I felt joy. My hand didn't shake when I killed him. The Germans were not asking us to save them. They knew they were guilty and I was furious,” she recalls. "I saw an enemy and my father, my uncles, mothers and brothers who died for them." She didn't look as his body fell into the pit. “I was satisfied. I did my homework. I went to the office and had a drink.

Assured Kill Mission

Japanese pilot Kenichiro Oonuki was asked if he wanted to go kamikaze and crash his ship into an Allied warship. The target against which Kenichiro Oonuki flew on April 5, 1945 was an Allied fleet off the coast of the Japanese island of Okinawa.

His mission was simple: crash his explosives-laden fighter plane into an allied warship. Oonuki would explode into millions of pieces and, also, they told him, he would transform into some kind of god.

Oonuki was one of the infamous warriors of World War II: a kamikaze. Allied forces soldiers called these suicide Japanese pilots "crazy."

In war, the belief that the enemy is mad unites everyone around a common goal. But the kamikaze were not crazy at all. A study of Japanese history reveals that, paradoxically, the only "inscrutable" Japanese were probably the few who, when asked, did not volunteer to become kamikazes.

In the fall of 1944, a Japanese Air Force officer visited the Oonuki training base seeking “volunteers” for a “special mission.” He made it clear that none of those who volunteered would survive. He asked the soldiers to think about it and the next day to give one of three answers: “No”, “Yes”, or “Yes, I volunteer with all my heart”.

“We were surprised,” Oonuki said. “I felt that it was not the type of mission that he would willingly request.” But, as the night wore on, the soldiers thought about what could happen to them if they said “No”. They could be accused of cowardice and excluded, or this could affect their relatives. With the exception of a brief period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan had been one of the most culturally isolated countries from the rest of the world.

The government that had come to power in the 1930s had called for a return to “traditional values” that existed before contact with the West. So, in 1944, for someone to be excluded from their cultural group was a terrible humiliation.

Oonuki and his friends realized that those who did not show up might be "sent to the front lines of the most severe battle where they would meet certain death anyway." Therefore, the easiest action was to show up "volunteer with all my heart", as did Oonuki and the other pilots in his course. "Nobody wanted to, but everyone said 'Yes, with all my heart' (...). We couldn't resist."

It would have required an exceptional person to withstand this pressure. The propaganda proclaimed that the kamikaze were heroes: they would receive a “promotion”, their families would get a bigger pension after their death. They would be gods. Their souls would live in Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, where the emperor would worship them.

Oonuki survived because his plane was forced to land by American fighters. He was not happy: “It was a dishonor; attacking a special mission means you must face an honorable death.”

Disregarding this background, Oonuki's experience is a clear example of the crazy behavior of the Japanese during World War II.

However, if we include the context, their attitude was anything but irrational: “We were very calm and we went through a very calm and dispassionate vetting process (before agreeing to participate).” In fact, as Oonuki understood, sometimes the only sensible option is to take the option that others consider "crazy".

By Laurence Rees