Revisiting the Myth of Chiune Sugihara

Chiune Sugihara – the famous ‘Japanese Schindler’ – has been the subject of academic controversy over the last few years due largely to the work of Professor Rotem Kowner of the University of Haifa in Israel who has been asking sensible questions and documenting the nonsense spouted by the ‘Holocaust Industry’ in regard to Sugihara.

I’ve previously dealt with the myth of Sugihara’s actions and how they are deliberately misconstrued by jews and Japanese philo-Semites.

For the sake of clarity in my article I wrote how:

‘Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who was stationed by the Imperial Japanese government in Kovno, Lithuania as the Vice-Consul between October 1939 and September 1940. He is regarded as one of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad Vashem and also credited with ‘saving’ 6,000 to 10,000 jews from the ‘Holocaust’.

He did this – with the connivance of Polish intelligence and the remains of its Foreign Service in the Far East – by issuing thousands of 10-day transit visas to Japan to jews and Poles. This combined with an agreement with the Soviet Union to provide transport to the same refugees to Vladivostok over the Trans-Siberian Railway – at five times the normal ticket cost per refugee – facilitated the removal of these jews and Poles from Europe to Japan and then eventually to the Shanghai ghetto.

Sugihara’s reasons for doing so he later claimed was as follows:

‘You want to know about my motivation, don't you? Well. It is the kind of sentiments anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He just cannot help but sympathize with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes, Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes.’

So, in essence Sugihara ‘took pity’ on the jews – although personally I also think his conversion to Russian Orthodox Christianity in the 1920s in Harbin, China also played a significant role in his conduct – and while he certainly organised the visas. The perception of him as a ‘Holocaust rescuer’ is not only far-fetched. It is patently ludicrous.

Other than the fact that Sugihara was an espionage agent working at the behest and with the connivance of the Japanese government of the day rather than some charitable individual working alone. The problem in large part is the sheer public illiteracy about the details of the ‘Holocaust’ narrative.

To quote a writer named Stephen Matsumoto:

‘Sugihara was stationed in Kaunus, Lithuania almost at the exact same time as the Nazi invasion of Poland that resulted in the exodus of tens of thousands of Polish Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Over the course of the next 30-40 days, he worked around the clock to issue approximately 3,000 visas. This was no small feat when considering each visa was hand written in Japanese characters.’

The issue here is that Matsumoto assumes that the ‘Holocaust’ was ‘occurring’ between October 1939 and September 1940, which is nonsense. Since the beginning of the ‘Holocaust’ is normally dated to around the Wannsee Conference that occurred on 20th January 1942 in Berlin.

So, the jews weren’t ‘fleeing from the Holocaust’. They weren’t even fleeing for their lives, but rather they were trying to get out because they were rich jews – remember the Soviet Union charged them five times the standard train fare (i.e. they knew they could afford it) – trying to protect their ill-gotten gains from the German authorities and wanted to move to a location – such as the Far East - where they would be able to enjoy their ill-gotten gains in peace and quiet.

In summary then contrary to received wisdom; Sugihara was an espionage agent working for Japan’s Foreign Service who produced thousands of visas to rich jews so that they could escape the consequences of their actions in Europe.’ (1)

I wrote those words long before Kowner began to research and publish his own work on Sugihara, and I am glad to say they have proved prophetic in that my interpretation is validated by Kowner’s own conclusions.

Kowner writes in his 2017 article ‘Sugihara Chiune in Israel’ how:

‘There was no doubt that the Japanese diplomat had in fact granted visas and that this act, along with many other factors, eventually facilitated, the process of saving the lives of a large number of Polish Jewish refugees. Nonetheless, according to the information received by the Commission, Sugihara did not risk his life or his position carrying the aforementioned activities. This means in essence that he did not differ much from quite a number of consuls, among which there are even some representatives of Nazi Germany, who provided Jews with visas before the Final Solution was enacted, and thus indirectly and unknowingly helped to save their lives.’ (2)

His point is well-taken in that if we look to what I’ve come to term ‘The Other Schindlers’ (3) then we note a similar pattern to the claims about Sugihara in that – as Kowner notes – they are almost universally foreign diplomats of neutral countries – also often also operating in neutral or semi-neutral countries such as Vichy France for example – and simply fulfilling their duty as diplomats and rarely doing anything out of the ordinary for the jews.

I’d also further expand Kowner’s point here in that they also almost universally issue visas or help get jews out of Axis-controlled Europe before the ‘Holocaust’ is even alleged to have become German policy in early 1942. This means that we cannot – as Yad Vashem and its many supporters do without actual justification – say that their actions were driven or related to the ‘Holocaust’ because it hadn’t even allegedly become German policy when they were conducting their ‘rescues’ and even if it were it cannot have motivated their actions because it was supposedly a ‘Top Secret’ German policy and cannot therefore have been known to them.

Thus, we can say that if a ‘Holocaust rescuer’ isn’t operating from early-to-mid 1942 onwards then they cannot by dint of the history of the ‘Holocaust’ itself be a ‘Holocaust rescuer’.

Kowner has also taken aim at the entire idea that Sugihara was a ‘Holocaust rescuer’ in the sense that he meant to ‘rescue jews from the Germans’ and was actually simply fulfilling his function as a Japanese diplomat and also an agent of Imperial Japanese intelligence. (4)

Nor are me and Kowner alone in doubting the Sugihara as ‘Holocaust rescuer’ narrative since as Jordyn Haime wrote in 2023 in the ‘Jewish Journal’: (5)

‘Sugihara issued some 2,140 transit visas, some used for entire households. But Meron Medzini, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Department of Asian Studies, wrote in his 2016 book “Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews during the Holocaust Era” that “Not all of the visas were used, and this makes it difficult to substantiate the claim that Sugihara was instrumental in helping [the commonly accepted number of] between 6,000 and 7,000 Jews leave Lithuania.”

Sugihara’s act was also only one step in a series of events that led to the refugees’ escape. Tokyo required them to have a final destination permit as a condition of their transit through Japan, and those were provided by Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch consul in Kaunas at the time who stamped thousands of Jewish passports to visa-free Dutch Curacao. Jewish organizations stepped in to pay for the refugees’ transit across the Soviet Union, which was miraculously granted by Soviet authorities.’

‘After arriving in Japan, Jews left for Australia, Canada, the United States and other countries. Others were later deported to Japanese-controlled Shanghai, where authorities imprisoned them in a ghetto for the remainder of the war.’

‘Claims that Sugihara helped several thousand Jews; that his requests for visas were rejected “three times” by his superiors; and that he was dismissed and punished for his actions are all important details that make Sugihara a hero. But they are also all claims that researchers have debunked.’

Haime’s point is simple: Sugihara didn’t help – and cannot have helped - nearly as many jews as he is credited with doing – much like the similar claims that have been made by jews and Japanese philo-Semites about Lieutenant General Kiichiro Higuchi and which are now known to be almost completely fabricated – (6) as the evidence of Sugihara’s unused visas directly contradicts this and further the fact that Jan Zwartendijk – the Dutch consul and Sugihara’s diplomatic colleague in Kaunas – was also directly involved also suggests that this was more of a case of diplomats working together to solve a problem – remember jews were queueing in large numbers outside the consulates and embassies of neutral countries looking for visas and thus causing administrative, political as well as practical problems for neutral diplomats in Kaunas.

This means then that the evidence is significantly against Sugihara being a ‘Holocaust rescuer’ at all but rather a Japanese diplomat doing his job.

In fact, as Kowner has documented; it turns out the entire cult of Sugihara as a ‘Holocaust rescuer’ is actually a piece of fake history in the service of Israeli diplomacy and Hasbara.

He writes:

‘Indeed, on 18 December 1969 Sugihara visited Yad Vashem and was awarded a certificate of recognition. Moreover, his youngest son, 19-year-old Nobuki, received a scholarship for studies in Jerusalem and landed in Israel in late August 1968.’ (7)

‘After watching the film ambassador Amnon Ben Yohanan and his assistants were of the opinion that Sugihara had certainly helped Jews and that a tribute to his deed could contribute to the improvement of Israel’s feeble image in Japan that emerged as a result of the Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut a year earlier. Having been in contact with Sugihara since 1968 and aware of his deteriorating health, the embassy sta' were looking for a means to settle Sugihara’s inconclusive case in Yad Vashem. In a letter sent in late 1983 from the embassy to the Diaspora (Tfutsot) Section—a section charged with maintaining relations with Jewish communities around the world at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem, the public relations attaché, Mr Eitan Margalit, urged the verification of Sugihara’s story. Quick action, he explained, would allow Yad Vashem to grant Sugihara the title of Righteous among the Nations and thus enable the embassy to grant him the title at the time of the documentary broadcast on Japanese TV. Margalit mentioned the speaker of Israel’s Parliament (Knesset) at the time, Menahem Savidor (1917-1988) and the ex-Minister of Religious Affairs, Dr. Zerach Warhaftig (1906–2002), both grantees of Sugihara’s visas as possible witnesses to the case.’ (8)

‘The Yad Vashem’s recognition, in turn, was the trigger for major commemoration activities in Japan, most notably the first book on Sugihara, written by Shino Teruhisa in 1988, the subsequent publication of a book by Sugihara’s widow, Yukiko, two years later and the subsequent construction of a memorial park and museum in the town of Yaotsu. These and other commemoration activities stimulated similar actions in Lithuania, Poland and the United States, which, in turn, inspired further commemoration efforts and the bestowal of honours in Israel and Japan.’ (9)

In other words: Sugihara’s status as a ‘Holocaust rescuer’ was – and is – a tool for post-war Israeli Japanese diplomatic rapprochement not something that has come from diligent archival and historical research and then been recognized, but rather is something unsupported by archival and historical research which has been massively stretched/distorted to fit onto the simple facts that Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat in Kaunas and he did issue visas to jews to travel to Japanese Imperial territory but the rest is simply invention and imagination and not history.

The ‘Holocaust Industry’s’ response to Kowner’s research has been predictably rhetorically venomous but light on actual evidence since Mordecai Paldiel – formerly of Yad Vashem – and Rafael Medoff – of ‘The David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies’ in Washington D.C. - could only manage responding that:

‘Q: Prof. Rotem Kowner, of the University of Haifa, claims in his article that the Jewish refugees in Lithuania whom Suighara saved did not face any “immediate physical risk” from the Germans, because Lithuania was under Soviet occupation. The implication is that Sugihara’s assistance didn’t really save their lives. However, the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia points out that when the Soviets took over Lithuania, there was “a wave of arrests” of Jews by the Soviet secret police.

Paldiel: The assertion that the Jewish refugees in Lithuania did not expect to fall under Nazi rule is not borne out by historical data. In fact, many expected a German-Soviet war could break out at any time. They saw the Nazis conquer France, Belgium and Holland just a few weeks earlier. There were long lines of Jewish refugees in front of the Japanese consulate in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, pleading for visas to allow them to leave the country as fast as possible.

Of course these formerly Polish Jewish refugees were in danger, from both the Soviets (who threatened them with expulsion to Siberia unless they adopted Soviet citizenship) and the Germans (who, as pointed out by Zerach Warhaftig, who headed the Jewish Agency Palestine office in Lithuania, were expected to invade soon).’ (10)

Medoff and Paldiel’s attempt to swerve the Kowner’s (obviously correct) point that the jews of Lithuania ‘did not face any “immediate physical risk” from the Germans, because Lithuania was under Soviet occupation’ is to immediately try and claim the Soviet Union’s jewish dominated secret police of the time (the NKVD) were ‘mass arresting’ jews with the unsaid qualification ‘because they were jews’ and thus were ‘anti-Semitic’ and an ‘immediate physical threat’ to said jews in Lithuania.

This is a deliberate falsification by Medoff and Paldiel in part because over half of the Lithuanian Communist Party’s members as well as members of its youth wing were themselves jewish at the time. (11)

Nor was this an exception to the rule since the very Soviet arrest program Medoff and Paldiel are using to claim the Soviet Union was ‘anti-Semitic’ as a way to try and prop up the historical myths around Sugihara was largely conceived of and run by jews!

To quote my article on ‘Jews and Communism in Lithuania’:

‘This jewish operational control is shown by the fact that jews dominated Soviet-occupied Lithuania's media with Leiba Sausas being deputy director of the Telegram Agency (ELTA), Emanuelis Ciranskis being deputy chairman of the Radio Committee, Genrikas Zimanas being deputy editor of the Lithuanian Communist Party's Central Committee’s official organ ('Tiesa') and Eugenijus Vicas being the deputy editor of the new communist Russian language daily newspaper 'Truzenik'.

Further the Soviet censorship bureau in Lithuania ('Glavlite') was run by three jews: Bencionas Borisas Gurvicius, Abelis Sinjoras and Libe Korbaite, while 9 of its 32 employees charged with political censorship of the media were jewish. This is a representation of jews among the official political censors of Lithuania of some 28 percent, which again directly parallels the level of jewish over-representation and domination of the Lithuanian Communist Party at the end of 1939.

When we move onto those who were directly involved in the Soviet terror apparatus in Lithuania - which was responsible for at least 34,460 deportations and a great many deaths - it gets even more frightening as the new director of the State Security Department Antanas Snieckus (later dictator of Lithuania for nearly three decades and who incidentally was himself possibly jewish and certainly associated closely with jews in Lithuania) established a twelve man headquarters for the wave of Soviet terror that was about to sweep Lithuania.

Of those twelve individuals some six of them were jewish, which is - of course - fifty percent and in massive disproportion to the size of the jewish population in Lithuania although such over-representation is in keeping with Soviet terror mechanisms in general.

In relation to the staff that this headquarters employed it is perhaps not a surprise to learn that out of 254 members of the Snieckus' State Security Department some 44 were (Lithuanian) jews, which is nearly 20 percent of the total number of staff.’ (12)

We can thus see that Medoff and Paldiel attempt to claim jews were in ‘imminent physical danger’ from the Soviet Union’s secret police (the NKVD) because they were ‘anti-Semitic’ is complete nonsense because that very purge was actually targeted at non-jewish Lithuanians by a heavily jewish Soviet bureaucracy and security apparatus.

The truth is simply that jews were trying to get out of Lithuania to try and set up shop elsewhere – nor was the Soviet Union’s decision to let them transit the country to Japanese territory ‘miraculous’ since jewish groups (largely based in the United States) were paying high fees for the privilege (five times the normal cost), (13) which gave the Soviet Union vital and otherwise hard to acquire foreign currency to trade with so the Soviet Union was hardly going to murder jews serving as a golden goose to prop up its ailing economy – and there was no real threat to them by the Soviet Union. Had the jews in Lithuania been simply looking for a ‘place to call home’; they could very easily have simply settled down to life in the Soviet Union which was perfectly safe for jews then and later.

The fact they didn’t and instead sought to use the Japanese consulate as a way to get access to rich countries (such as the United States) and cities (such as Shanghai) to settle in tells us that the jews Sugihara was helping – remember likely as a way to both generate foreign currency income for Japan and also as a solution to the problem of jews queueing up outside neutral consulates/embassies for visas and impeding/preventing the consulates/embassies from carrying out their normal diplomatic functions and duties to their citizens – were simply economic migrants looking for ‘streets paved with gold’.

The truth then is that not only is the story of Chiune Sugihara largely an ahistorical myth but one that we can trace back to the Israeli government itself.

References

(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-chiune-sugihara

(2) Rotem Kowner, 2017, ‘Sugihara Chiune in Israel: A Delayed Reception’, Deeds and Days, Vol. 67, p. 241

(3) For example, see my articles: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-second-japanese-schindler; https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-ho-feng-shan; https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-manuel-quezon-the-filipino; https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-moritz-hochschild; https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-iranian-schindler; https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-brazilian-schindler

(4) Rotem Kowner, 2023, ‘A Holocaust Paragon of Virtue’s Rise to Fame’, American Historical Review, Vol. 128, No. 1, pp. 34-39

(5) https://jewishjournal.org/2023/07/19/researchers-say-japan-has-exaggerated-the-story-of-chiune-sugihara-the-japanese-schindler/

(6) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-manchukuo-schindler

(7) Kowner, ‘Sugihara’, Op. Cit., p. 241

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid., p. 245

(10) https://unitedwithisrael.org/holocaust-hero-criticized-in-leading-history-journal/ also https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/358716/holocaust-hero-attacked-in-leading-history-journal/

(11) Liudas Truska, n.d., 'Preconditions of the Holocaust: The Upsurge of Anti-Semitism in Lithuania in the years of the Soviet Occupation (1940-1941)', p. 9 (http://www.komisija.lt/Files/www.komisija.lt/File/Tyrimu_baze/Naciu%20okupacija/Holokausto%20prielaidos/Eng/Truska/Research%20by%20L.Truska%20(english).pdf)

(12) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-communism-in-lithuania-1918

(13) https://jewishjournal.org/2023/07/19/researchers-say-japan-has-exaggerated-the-story-of-chiune-sugihara-the-japanese-schindler/; also cf. Hillel Levine, 1996, ‘In Search of Sugihara’, 1st Edition, Free Press: New York