Kempeitai

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The Kempeitai ( Japanese 憲兵隊 , literally: "legal soldiers ") was the military police arm of the Imperial Japanese Army from 1881 to 1945. In addition, it also performed military police duties with the Imperial Japanese Navy under the supervision of the Navy Ministry (nevertheless, the Imperial Japanese Navy had with the Tokkeitai their own military police) and the civilian police under the supervision of the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Justice . Members of the Kempeitai were called Kempei .

During the Second World War , the Kempeitai was often referred to as the "Japanese Gestapo " in Allied propaganda .

history

The Kempeitai was created in 1881 by the Kempei Ordinance ( 憲兵 条例 , kempei jōrei ). Their role model was the French gendarmerie . The details of the military, executive and police tasks were regulated in the Kempei Rei of 1898, which was changed twenty-six times until the surrender of Japan in August 1945.

The unit initially consisted of 349 men. The enforcement of the new conscription law was an important part of their duties, as there was resistance against it within the farming families. The internal tasks of the Kempeitai were the guidelines of the unit, personnel management and public order as well as communication with the ministries of the Navy, the Interior and the judiciary. Her public responsibility included the provision of military police units for the army, general public security and secret service tasks .

In 1907 the Kempeitai was relocated to Korea , where its main official mission was defined as "keeping the peace [of the Japanese army]". Nevertheless, she served as a military police for the units of the Japanese army stationed there. There the units remained responsible even after the incorporation of Korea into the Japanese Empire in 1910 as Chosen Province until the first March 1919 movement .

Kempei NCOs and Corporals on a Passenger Train (1935)

The Kempeitai maintained public order in Japan under the command of the Interior Ministry; in occupied territories it was under the orders of the War Ministry . Japan also had a civilian secret police called Tokkō , which is the Japanese acronym for Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu ("Special Higher Police") as part of the Interior Ministry . Like them, the Kempeitai was given the power to arrest people such as communists and liberals who were alleged to have undermined public order without a warrant. In the 1930s and 1940s in particular, the Kempeitai became less and less reluctant to extort confessions through torture.

When the Kempeitai arrested a civilian whose offense was under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department, he was usually transferred to a civil prison and given a civil trial. However, it was very difficult to prove one's innocence in such a trial as there were almost no rights for defendants in Japan before 1948.

The Kempeitai was known in the occupied territories from 1937 during the Second World War , among other things for its brutality. But it was also feared in the Japanese heartland, especially in his colony Chōsen, especially when Hideki Tōjō became prime minister during the Pacific War , who was in command of the Kempeitai of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria from 1935 to 1937 and used the Kempeitai for this purpose to make every Japanese loyal to the war. Under Tōjō, the Kempeitai made Japan a kind of police state .

At the end of the war, the Kempeitai had over 36,000 official employees, not counting the many unofficial employees in the occupied territories. When many territories were occupied by Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, the Kempeitai recruited many locals to assist with simple tasks. Formosans and Koreans in particular were used throughout Southeast Asia to act as auxiliary police to maintain public order.

The Kempeitai was disarmed and disbanded after Japan's surrender in August 1945.

The military police of today's Japanese Self-Defense Forces are called Keimutai ( 警務 隊 , "squad for police matters "), individual members are called Keimukan ( 警務 官 ).

Japanese intelligence services and the Axis powers

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Kempeitai made various contacts with certain European pre-war intelligence services. When Japan later signed the Tripartite Pact , official relations were established with these, now fascist, secret services. These were the German defense and the royal Italian SIM . The Japanese army and navy used these connections to contact the secret service units of the Wehrmacht , SS and Kriegsmarine regarding information from Europe and vice versa. Europe and Japan quickly recognized the merits of this cooperation (for example, the Japanese provided the Third Reich with information on the strength of the Soviet troops in the Far East before Operation Barbarossa and Admiral Canaris offered his help on the question of respect for Portuguese neutrality in East Timor ).

The police attaché known as the “butcher of Warsaw” at the German embassy in Tokyo, Josef Meisinger , also worked closely with the Kempeitai . According to the former German ambassador Heinrich Georg Stahmer , she was obliged to work with Meisinger in the event of "suspected espionage". Meisinger used this agreement for his own purposes and denounced Nazi opponents such as the industrialist and “Jewish rescuer” Willy Rudolf Foerster in Tokyo, untruthfully, as Soviet spies. German courts later found that Meisinger had known that those who had been reported as “communist” or “suspected of espionage” would be arrested and “at best” released after long pre-trial detention. He "exploited" this experience to render anti-Nazi opponents "harmless in his sense."

An important point of contact was the Penang submarine base in Malaysia . Submarines of the Italian Regia Marina , the German Navy and the Japanese Navy were stationed in this base . New technologies and information were exchanged here at regular intervals. By the end of the war the Axis powers also used bases in Italian-occupied Ethiopia , which to Vichy France belonging Madagascar and some "officially" neutral places like the Portuguese colony of Goa in India.

The cooperation of the secret services continued until the beginning of 1945, before it was only continued to a very limited extent until the end of the war due to the current war situation.

organization

The Kempeitai maintained a headquarters in every major regional army , commanded by a Shōshō ( major general ) with a Taisa ( colonel ) as staff officer and two to three branch offices each commanded by a Chūsa ( lieutenant colonel ), each with about 375 men.

The branch offices were again divided into 65-man sections called buntai . Each buntai was led by a Taii ( captain ), who had a Chūi (first lieutenant ) as a staff officer and another 65 men. Furthermore, the buntai were separated into different departments called bunkentai , commanded by a Shōi ( lieutenant ) with a Junshikan ( warrant officer ) as a staff officer and another 20 men. Each department consisted of three groups: a police group or Keimu-han , an administrative group or Naikin-han, and a special task group or Tokumu-han .

In occupied areas, the Kempeitai set up units made up of foreign volunteers. These were supported by the Kempeitai and integrated into the organization, but their rank was limited to that of a Sōchō (Oberfeldwebel).

In 1937 the Kempeitai consisted of 315 officers and 6,000 men. These were part of the publicly known troop. The Allies estimated that the Kempeitai had at least 75,000 members, and probably more, at the end of the war. This estimate includes undercover and unofficial personnel.

Tasks in wartime

Kempeitai was responsible for the following areas:

  • Exit permits
  • Labor recruitment
  • Counter espionage and counter propaganda (carried out by the Tokkō -Kempeitai as "anti-ideological work")
  • Replenishment requests and rationalization
  • Operational information and propaganda
  • Securing rearward areas
  • Operation of prisoner of war and forced labor camps. (The Kempeitai provided guards for various human experimentation units ( Unit 731 ) that housed "difficult" prisoners.)
  • Provision of forced prostitutes (" comfort women ") for the war brothels.

uniform

The staff wore either the standard M1938 field uniform or the cavalry uniform with tall black leather boots. Civilian clothing was also allowed, but badges of rank or the imperial chrysanthemum had to be worn on the lapel . Uniformed staff wore black angle cuffs on his uniform and a white band on the left arm with the sign of Kempei ( 憲兵 ).

A full dress uniform, which included a red cap , a gold and red field armband , a dark blue uniform skirt and trousers with black lampasses , was worn by officers on ceremonial occasions until 1942. Badges of rank were gold lacing on the arms and epaulettes .

Members were armed with either a cavalry saber and pistol for officers or a pistol and bayonet for regular men. NCOs wore a Shinai , especially when dealing with prisoners.

Foreign espionage

The Kempeitai was represented together with other Japanese secret services in non-Japanese countries around the world. It relied mainly on the local Japanese communities, which had formed everywhere since around 1895, due to strong emigration. These Japanese abroad were called dōhō ( 同胞 , dt. About "compatriot"). According to the Japanese government, they had dual citizenship and were first and foremost obliged to the emperor and the empire and only then to their local homeland. But locals were also recruited. For example, a cell in northwestern Mexico recruited several American sailors to spy on the naval bases along the California coast. Some of them have been arrested and sentenced to prison terms over time.

In Europe, officially neutral Spain and later the allies Germany and Italy were the starting point for espionage activities across the continent. Great Britain in particular was spied on early on as a potential enemy of the war.

The Kempeitai also worked to varying degrees with secret societies such as the Gen'yōsha or the resulting Kokuryūkai . These ultra-nationalist groups were mainly active in the occupied territories of continental Asia and in some cases behaved in a similar way to organized crime.

Political Department

The political department refers to the political and ideological department of the Kempeitai in the time before the outbreak of the Pacific War. It was there to suppress hostile ideologies and opposition, and to maintain ideological morality within the military.

It served primarily as a means of political propaganda for the war advocates within the Japanese army. In its initial phase, this was mainly directed against communism, but over time it expanded to other areas such as maintaining the morale of war in the heartland as well as in the occupied territories.

The main area of ​​application here was Manchukuo and mainland Asia. It can best be compared with the political department of the NKVD and the Politruk with its political commissars, but also had references to the propaganda departments of the SS. Its areas of application were mainly the spreading of racist theories, counter-espionage, sabotage and the infiltration of enemy units. It worked closely with local police units and secret services, but also with various nationalist parties, and also recruited locals for special operations.

Structure of the Japanese secret services

The Kempeitai was directly subordinate to the Sambo Hombu , the General Staff of the Army. This in turn was subordinate to the imperial headquarters Daihon'ei , which regulated the actions between the three branches of the armed forces.

Kempeitai divisions in annexed and occupied areas

  • Kempeitai Training Center in Keijō (Seoul)
  • Kempeitai- Chōsen department in Chōsen (Japanese-Korean units)
  • Kempeitai indigenous department in Manchukuo (Japanese-Manchurian units)
  • Kempeitai Native Department in Mengjiang (Japanese-Mongolian Units)
  • Reorganized Republic of China's Kempeitai Native Division (Sino-Japanese Units)
  • Kempeitai Formosa Department
  • Kempeitai South Pacific Department
  • Kempeitai Southeast Asia Department
  • Kempeitai Training Center in Singapore
  • Kempeitai Training Center in Manila (Philippines)

public perception

In contrast to the SS , for example , the Kempeitai is rarely found in Western literature and films.

  • In Barefoot through Hell - Part 1 ( Ningen no Jōken I , 1959) by the director Masaki Kobayashi , the Kempeitai 1943 provided 600 “special workers” for an ore mine in Manchuria . Two Kempeitai officers explain that these workers must be isolated from the “normal workers” and give orders that “their quarters must be fenced with barbed wire”, which is electrified.
  • In the Franco-Belgian comic series Heroes without Scruples , the antagonist of the first multi-part story, the so-called Hong Kong cycle, is a former colonel from the Kempeitai.
  • In Clint Eastwood's film, Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), one of the main characters is a former Kempei whom the other soldiers marginalize for fear that he has been sent to them as a spy to monitor their loyalty and morals. Ultimately, it turns out that he was reassigned to them to fight in the Battle of Iwojima after disobeying an officer's orders. He should have shot a family dog ​​whose bark was in violation of "military secrecy and calm."
  • In the US series The Man in the High Castle (2015), in which the Axis powers won World War II, the Kempeitai is shown in the Japanese-occupied western parts of the US, the Japanese Pacific States , as part of the ruthless occupying power.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Masae Takahashi (editor and commentator), Zoku Gendaishi Shiryo ( Materials on Contemporary History, Second Series ), Volume 6, Gunji Keisatsu ("Military Police"), (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo, 1982), pp. v – xxx.
  2. ↑ Dajokan-Tatsu (Decree of the Grand Council of the State) No. 11 of March 11, 1881 (14th year of the Meiji period). This decree was subsequently amended by Chokurei (Secret Council Decree) No. 43 on March 28, 1889 (22nd year of the Meiji period).
  3. ↑ Secret Council Decree No. 337 of November 29, 1898 (31st year of the Meiji period)
  4. ↑ Secret Council Decree No. 323 in 1907 (40th year of the Meiji period).
  5. ↑ Naohiro Asao, et al. ed., Shimpan Nihonshi Jiten ("Dictionary of Japanese History, New Edition"), (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1997) pp. 742 ("Tojo Hideki"), and pp. 348-349 ("Kempei").
  6. ↑ Clemens Jochem: The Foerster case: The German-Japanese machine factory in Tokyo and the Jewish auxiliary committee Hentrich and Hentrich, Berlin 2017, p. 180, ISBN 978-3-95565-225-8 .
  7. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 183.