Germany and Japan: From the Devastation of War to “Champions of Peace”

Eight Decades of Building and Supporting Peace

What began under the extraordinary circumstances of military defeat became, over successive generations, something much more significant: a democratic commitment repeatedly renewed by Germans and Japanese themselves.

Germany's transformation deserves particular recognition. Over eight decades, successive generations helped turn a country devastated morally, politically and physically by National Socialism into one of the world's most stable democracies and a central pillar of European peace. Reconciliation with former enemies, European integration, constitutional democracy, historical education and an exceptional culture of remembrance became defining features of the Federal Republic. Germany did not erase its history. It demonstrated that confronting history can become a source of democratic strength.

Japan followed its own remarkable path. From the devastation of the Pacific War and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki emerged a democratic society with an exceptionally strong post-war commitment to peace. Japan rebuilt its international influence primarily through economic development, innovation, diplomacy and cultural influence rather than territorial expansion.

Neither transformation was immediate, perfect or historically identical. Yet their achievement across almost eight decades remains extraordinary.

Germany and Japan demonstrate that nations are not condemned forever by the darkest chapters of their histories. Nations can learn, rebuild, reconcile and change.

That lesson provides an important frame for the comparison that follows.

At the end of this article, we return to the example of Germany and Japan and ask what lessons their extraordinary post-war transformations might offer Russia and future generations of Russians: how responsibility can be confronted without becoming permanent national humiliation, how reconciliation can replace grievance, and how a country's international identity can ultimately be rebuilt around peace rather than war.

1 September 1939

On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning a war that would devastate Europe and develop into a racial and ideological war of annihilation. German responsibility for that aggression and for the crimes committed under National Socialism is beyond dispute.

Yet one historical question remains both difficult and relevant: how does a society arrive at war? Who actively desires it, who enables it, who accommodates it, and who opposes it but no longer possesses the institutional power to prevent it?

The question is particularly revealing because Germany in September 1939 was not characterised by the mass war enthusiasm remembered from August 1914. That fact does not diminish responsibility. It makes the historical problem more complicated.

More than eight decades later, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, expanding a conflict that had begun in 2014, raises a different but related question. Without equating two fundamentally different regimes and historical circumstances, comparing how political leadership, institutions, elites and public opinion interacted before these wars may illuminate something larger:

A society does not necessarily have to desire war for a state to become capable of starting one.

Germany, 1939: From Support for the Regime to War

At the centre of Germany's decision stood Adolf Hitler. The documentary record leaves little doubt that war was not simply the accidental product of diplomatic miscalculation. Hitler regarded territorial expansion as fundamental to Germany's future. The Hossbach Memorandum of November 1937 recorded his conviction that Germany required greater Lebensraum. By May 1939, he was telling his military leadership that the coming conflict with Poland was not fundamentally about Danzig, but about expanding Germany's territory and power.[1]

His objectives combined geopolitics, racial hierarchy, territorial expansion, destruction of the post-1918 European order and an ideological struggle against enemies whom he understood in racial and conspiratorial terms.

The interpretation of Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer is particularly important. Bauer challenged explanations that treated Nazi expansion primarily as the product of conventional economic interests. In his analysis, Hitler imagined Germany confronting a worldwide Jewish conspiracy supposedly operating through two otherwise contradictory forces, Western capitalism and Soviet Bolshevism. The coming conflict was therefore, in Bauer's interpretation, fundamentally ideological.[2]

This does not mean that Hitler entered the war in September 1939 with a completed operational plan for the Holocaust. Bauer explicitly rejected that proposition. The programme of systematic extermination developed through radicalisation during the war, particularly from 1941. Antisemitism can nevertheless be understood as part of the ideological engine of Hitler's expansionism without claiming that the Final Solution already existed as an operational programme in 1939.

Around Hitler stood the radical Nazi leadership, including the SS and important elements of the party apparatus. Here the evidence for an active desire for expansion through war is strongest.

Beyond this ideological core, however, the picture becomes considerably more complicated.

The Military: Expansion Without Hitler's Risk?

The Wehrmacht cannot credibly be described as an anti-war institution.

German military leaders welcomed rearmament and the restoration of German military power. Many supported revision of the Versailles settlement and German territorial expansion.

Yet supporting expansion was not identical to wanting the particular general European war Hitler risked in 1939.

Gerhard Weinberg's research demonstrates considerable anxiety among senior officers about Hitler's willingness to provoke Britain and France before Germany was adequately prepared.[3] General Ludwig Beck, who resigned as Chief of the General Staff in 1938, became associated with plans to resist Hitler if the Czechoslovak crisis produced a general European war.

The distinction is therefore crucial. Some military leaders opposed Hitler's timing and strategic risks more strongly than they opposed German expansion itself.

Substantial parts of the officer corps supported rearmament, revision and expansion, while important figures feared the wider European conflict into which Hitler was leading Germany.

Business: Intention, Participation and Responsibility

There can be no sanitised account of German industry's relationship with National Socialism.

Major corporations benefited from rearmament and government contracts. Business leaders adapted to the dictatorship, and some actively supported it. During the war, German companies participated in expropriation, exploitation and forced labour on an enormous scale.

The work of Richard Overy, Peter Hayes and Adam Tooze demonstrates the deep integration of German industry into rearmament and subsequently into the Nazi war economy.[4][5][6]

Yet the historiography does not support treating German business as a single autonomous constituency demanding a general European war. This does not lessen industry's extensive involvement in rearmament, its accommodation with dictatorship or the subsequent participation of major companies in exploitation and forced labour.

The distinction is important because profit, complicity and intention are not interchangeable concepts.

Historical responsibility is not binary. Between the leader who decides upon aggression and the citizen who fears its consequences lie institutions and individuals possessing profoundly different degrees of agency. Understanding those differences does not dilute responsibility. It allows responsibility to be examined more precisely.

Workers and the Destruction of Organised Opposition

There is little evidence that German workers constituted a constituency demanding war.

More importantly, by 1939 there was no independent trade-union movement capable of organising opposition. The Nazis had destroyed the free trade unions in May 1933 and replaced them with the German Labour Front. Social Democrats, Communists and other political opponents had been outlawed, imprisoned, persecuted or driven into exile.

The question is therefore not simply whether German workers wanted war.

It is whether they retained institutions through which opposition to war could have political consequences.

By 1939, largely they did not.

Ordinary Germans: No War Enthusiasm, but Not Necessarily Opposition

Reports produced by SOPADE, the exiled German Social Democratic organisation, concluded after the invasion of Poland that:

"the overwhelming majority of the German people did not want war."[7]

SOPADE was an opposition organisation, not a modern polling institute, and its reports require appropriate caution. Yet their observations are consistent with broader historical evidence that September 1939 produced nothing comparable to the popular enthusiasm associated with August 1914.

But an essential qualification follows.

The absence of enthusiasm for a general European war did not mean that the same population rejected National Socialism, German expansion, antisemitism or revision of the Versailles settlement.

Many Germans had welcomed Hitler's restoration of German power, the Anschluss with Austria and the acquisition of the Sudetenland. Nazi propaganda had also fostered considerable hostility towards Poland.

The regime nevertheless found it useful to portray Germany as the victim rather than the aggressor. The fabricated Gleiwitz incident and propaganda concerning alleged Polish atrocities helped present offensive war as defensive necessity.[8]

Many Germans could therefore support Hitler's national revival and previous territorial successes while simultaneously fearing another major European war.

That distinction between support for a regime and enthusiasm for the war it ultimately begins is fundamental.

September 1 From Poland

An examination of German attitudes must never obscure the perspective of those attacked.

For Poland, 1 September 1939 was not a debate about German public opinion. It was the beginning of occupation, destruction, persecution and mass murder.

The German invasion was followed on 17 September by the Soviet invasion from the east, pursuant to the secret arrangements of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Poland was partitioned between two dictatorships. Under German occupation, Polish Jews were subjected to persecution and ultimately extermination, while non-Jewish Polish civilians, intellectuals, clergy and resistance members were systematically targeted. Millions of Polish citizens died during the war.[9]

The absence of widespread German enthusiasm therefore changes nothing about the character of the aggression or Germany's responsibility.

Instead, it sharpens the question:

How could a war of such devastating consequences begin without requiring a population overwhelmingly demanding that it begin?

Russia, 2022: A Decision From the Centre

Russia presents a fundamentally different political and historical case.

The Russo-Ukrainian War had already begun in 2014. By February 2022, Russian society had experienced eight years of Crimea's annexation, fighting in the Donbas, confrontation with the West and persistent official narratives portraying Ukraine as historically inseparable from Russia.

Nevertheless, evidence concerning the decision for the full-scale invasion points towards an unusually concentrated process.

Political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya concluded that Putin's decision caught much of Russia's own elite by surprise. Her analysis describes a strategic decision overwhelmingly concentrated around Putin rather than one emerging from broad deliberation among Russia's political and economic elites.[10]

The expression "Russia decided to invade Ukraine" is therefore analytically insufficient.

The state invaded. The decision itself appears to have been considerably narrower.

Putin: Why War?

Putin publicly offered several explanations.

NATO enlargement and Russian security occupied a prominent place in his address of 24 February 2022. Yet his earlier writings reveal another dimension.

In his July 2021 essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin challenged the idea of completely separate Russian and Ukrainian historical development. His address of 21 February 2022 went further, questioning fundamental elements of modern Ukrainian statehood.[11][12]

Scholars have consequently debated the relative importance of security concerns, Russian great-power status, imperial conceptions of history, nationalism, Ukraine's increasing Western orientation, regime interests and Putin's increasingly personalised understanding of Russia's historical mission.

A serious explanation should resist reducing the invasion to a single cause.

Security perceptions mattered. So did Ukraine's geopolitical orientation, the perceived contraction of Russia's sphere of influence, historical and imperial ideas about Russian and Ukrainian identity, and Putin's increasingly explicit challenge to Ukraine's right to determine its future independently of Moscow.

The invasion emerged from their interaction.

The Security Elite and Military

Russia possessed powerful security elites and nationalist circles advocating confrontation with Ukraine and the West. Some had favoured more aggressive policies for years.

Yet evidence that the Russian security establishment collectively demanded the full-scale invasion is much weaker.

The televised Security Council meeting of 21 February 2022 displayed public loyalty to Putin's policy. It did not establish that those officials had originated the decision.

Russia's armed forces prepared and executed the invasion, but execution does not itself establish that the military independently sought the political decision to invade. Research into the opening phase documents extraordinary secrecy surrounding preparations and operational weaknesses resulting partly from restricted planning and dissemination.[13]

As with Germany, the distinction between supporting state power, preparing for war and choosing a particular war is important.

Russian Business

The familiar term "oligarch" can suggest businessmen powerful enough to determine Kremlin policy. By 2022 this was increasingly misleading. Research into Russia's patronal political system demonstrates how economic elites had become dependent upon networks centred on the presidency.[14]

For internationally connected Russian businesses, full-scale war threatened foreign assets, Western finance and technology, export markets and personal mobility. There is little evidence that Russian business constituted an important constituency demanding the invasion.

This does not eliminate questions of subsequent participation, accommodation or benefit.

Once again, the distinction is between wanting a war and becoming part of the system that sustains it.

Media, Intellectuals and Religion

Russia in 2022 did not possess the total information control of Nazi Germany in 1939. Independent journalists and online media still existed, including organisations operating from abroad.

Yet the Kremlin had progressively restricted independent national media and constructed a dominant state information environment.

Nationalist thinkers and commentators also developed concepts concerning Russian civilisation, the Russkiy Mir, Western encirclement and the historical relationship between Russians and Ukrainians. Their direct influence on Putin should not be exaggerated. Their broader importance lies in helping construct an intellectual environment in which increasingly expansive claims about Russian history and identity became politically legitimate.

The Russian Orthodox Church belongs primarily in this category of legitimation. Patriarch Kirill became a prominent religious defender of the war after February 2022, although evidence that the Church itself was a decisive actor pressing Putin to launch the invasion beforehand is considerably weaker.

Did Ordinary Russians Want War?

There was no visible mass political movement before 24 February 2022 demanding a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Yet this does not mean Russian society was simply opposed to war.

A Levada Center survey conducted between 17 and 21 February 2022 found that 60 per cent of respondents blamed the United States and NATO countries for escalation around the Donbas. Russians nevertheless remained divided over the future of the separatist territories: 33 per cent favoured their independence, 25 per cent incorporation into Russia and 26 per cent their remaining within Ukraine.[15]

An experiment by political scientists Suthan Krishnarajan and Jakob Tolstrup, based on data collected before the full-scale invasion, found baseline support for military aggression against a neighbouring state at approximately 8 per cent. Exposure to threat narratives resembling those subsequently employed by Russian propaganda increased support dramatically.[16]

The implication is important:

Mass demand for war did not necessarily have to exist beforehand. Political support for military action could be constructed.

The academically defensible conclusion is therefore deliberately limited. There is little evidence of a mass popular movement demanding the full-scale invasion before 24 February 2022. There is substantial evidence that significant parts of Russian society had become receptive to narratives capable of legitimising military action.

Germany 1939 and Russia 2022: What Does the Comparison Reveal?

The comparison produces neither equivalence nor a simple repetition of history.

It reveals instead different relationships between leadership, institutions and society.

In both cases, the strongest evidence for actively choosing war is concentrated at the top. Hitler was the decisive force behind Germany's move towards war in 1939. Putin was the decisive force behind Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. Both operated within political systems in which personal authority had greatly reduced the capacity of other institutions to constrain fundamental decisions.

Below the leader, however, the picture becomes considerably more complicated.

The Military

The military establishments in both cases demonstrate the difference between supporting state power and wanting a particular war.

German officers broadly supported rearmament, revision and expansion, while some feared Hitler's timing and the prospect of conflict with Britain and France.

Russia's armed forces prepared and executed the invasion of Ukraine, but available evidence does not establish that the military independently demanded the political decision for full-scale war.

The comparison therefore warns against assuming that because an institution executes a war, it necessarily originated the desire for it.

Business

German industry became deeply integrated into Nazi rearmament and subsequently into exploitation and forced labour. Yet the historiography does not support treating German business as a unified constituency demanding a general European war.

Russian business was likewise embedded in an authoritarian political economy, but internationally connected economic elites had substantial material reasons to fear sanctions, isolation and loss of access to Western markets and finance.

In both cases, participation and subsequent benefit cannot automatically be treated as evidence of prior desire for war.

This does not absolve economic elites of responsibility for what they subsequently did.

It makes the nature of that responsibility more precise.

Society

The comparison of public opinion is more difficult but perhaps more revealing.

Germany in September 1939 showed little evidence of the mass war enthusiasm associated with 1914. This did not mean that Germans broadly rejected Hitler, nationalism, territorial revision or antisemitism.

Russia before February 2022 likewise displayed no demonstrated mass movement demanding full-scale invasion. Yet substantial sections of Russian society had accepted official narratives concerning NATO, the West and Ukraine.

In both cases, therefore, the absence of mass demand for war coexisted with political attitudes that could make the government's justification of war easier.

Information

Nazi Germany had destroyed the independent national press and could portray the invasion of Poland as defensive necessity.

Russia retained a more plural information environment, particularly online and abroad, but by 2022 the state dominated national television and had progressively restricted independent media.

These systems were fundamentally different in degree and character.

Yet both demonstrate something important: political leaders do not merely decide to fight wars. They also need to explain why war has supposedly become unavoidable.

The construction of necessity can therefore be almost as important politically as the decision itself.

Institutions

Here lies perhaps the most consequential comparison.

By 1939, independent German political parties and trade unions had been destroyed. The press had been subordinated. Universities, the civil service and cultural institutions had been transformed. Business increasingly operated within state priorities. The military retained power but failed to translate disagreement into effective political restraint.

Russia's trajectory was different and less total. Nevertheless, before February 2022 political power had become increasingly personalised. Independent media had been restricted, opposition movements repressed, civil society constrained and economic elites made increasingly dependent upon the state.

The scale and nature of these processes were profoundly different.

Their relevance to the decision for war is nevertheless comparable.

By the time each leader made the decisive choice, institutions capable of turning disagreement into effective restraint had been substantially weakened.

Comparison Is Not Equivalence

This point requires absolute clarity.

Nazi Germany in 1939 and Russia in 2022 are not historical equivalents.

By 1939 Germany was a totalitarian one-party racial dictatorship. Racial persecution was embedded in the state. Nazi ideology envisaged enormous territorial and demographic transformation. Germany's subsequent war in Eastern Europe became a war of annihilation inseparable from genocide and the Holocaust.

Russia in 2022 was an authoritarian and increasingly personalist dictatorship characterised by severe repression, curtailed media freedom and increasingly imperial claims towards Ukraine. But transferring the categories of National Socialism wholesale to Putin's Russia would obscure rather than illuminate both histories.

Comparison is valuable precisely when difference is preserved.

The narrower structural similarity is more defensible:

In both cases, the decision for a major war was substantially more concentrated than the society that eventually had to fight it.

Who Did Not Want War, and Why Did That Not Matter?

The comparison therefore produces a paradox.

Neither case requires us to imagine an entire society standing in the streets demanding war.

Instead, both raise a more difficult question: how can a comparatively concentrated decision for war become the policy of an entire state?

A leader needs institutions to implement decisions. Armed forces must fight. Bureaucracies must administer. Economic structures must supply. Information systems must explain why sacrifice has become necessary.

A citizen does not have to demand war before eventually accepting it.

A businessman does not have to desire war to supply the state.

A general does not have to devise the political objective to execute the operation.

An intellectual does not have to order an invasion to provide ideas that help legitimise it.

Responsibility is therefore not equal, but neither is it confined entirely to the individual at the top.

This is where the comparison acquires contemporary significance.

The lesson is not that societies bear no responsibility when their governments choose aggression. Nor is it that Germany in 1939 and Russia in 2022 followed the same historical path.

It is that democratic institutions, independent media, organised civil society, accountable government and the capacity to challenge political power are among the mechanisms through which societies prevent individual ambitions from becoming national catastrophes.

For Germany, remembrance of 1 September 1939 necessarily begins with responsibility: responsibility for the attack on Poland, for the occupation of Europe, for the Holocaust and for the immense destruction produced by National Socialism.

But remembrance can also ask why the mechanisms capable of preventing catastrophe had already disappeared.

That question does not diminish German responsibility. It gives historical responsibility a contemporary purpose.

Perhaps the decisive preparation for war therefore begins before armies mobilise. It begins when institutions capable of questioning political power gradually lose their ability to make disagreement consequential.

That may be the most important point connecting two otherwise profoundly different historical moments.

A society does not necessarily have to want a war for its government to start one.

The question history leaves us is therefore not only: Who wanted the war and why?

It is also: What had happened to everyone who did not?

Russia After the War: A New Path to Peace and Prosperity

Lessons from the Remarkable Transformation of Germany and Japan

Germany and Japan offer Russia an important and hopeful precedent. Their experience demonstrates that acknowledging a catastrophic past need not weaken a nation. It can become the beginning of renewal.

Russia will have to find its own path. But that path could begin with historical honesty: opening archives, protecting independent scholarship, listening to the experiences of Ukrainians, and allowing future generations to understand how and why the war happened. It would require reconciliation with a sovereign Ukraine and the rebuilding of institutions capable of ensuring that decisions of such consequence can never again become concentrated in so few hands.

Most importantly, Russia could redefine what it means to be a great power. Its extraordinary contributions to literature, music, science, culture and intellectual life already demonstrate a form of influence that reaches far beyond military strength or territorial control.

Germany and Japan showed that nations emerging from devastating wars can rebuild their international standing through democracy, economic achievement, innovation, culture, diplomacy and cooperation.

Their greatest post-war achievement was not simply rebuilding their countries. It was redefining their power.

Russia could one day do the same.

A nation's greatness need not be measured by the territory it controls, but by what it contributes to the world.

References:

1. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History (Cambridge University Press, 1995); see also the Hossbach Memorandum, 5 November 1937.

2. Yehuda Bauer, “World War II, Shoah and Genocide,” keynote lecture, Holocaust Educational Trust and Institute of Education, University of London.

3. Gerhard L. Weinberg, “The German Generals and the Outbreak of War, 1938–1939,” in Germany, Hitler, and World War II (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 129–145.

4. Richard J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford University Press, 1994).

5. Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

6. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Allen Lane, 2006).

7. SOPADE, “No War Enthusiasm,” September–October 1939, reproduced in German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute.

8. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Deceiving the Public: Using Propaganda to Justify the Invasion of Poland, 1939,” Holocaust Encyclopedia.

9. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Invasion of Poland, Fall 1939,” Holocaust Encyclopedia; see also the German Historical Museum's documentation of the invasion and occupation of Poland.

10. Tatiana Stanovaya, “Has War Made Putin a Burden for Russia's Elites?”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 16 June 2022.

11. Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” 12 July 2021, official Kremlin text.

12. Vladimir Putin, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation,” 21 February 2022, and “Address by the President of the Russian Federation,” 24 February 2022, official Kremlin transcripts.

13. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr V. Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds, Preliminary Lessons in Conventional Warfighting from Russia's Invasion of Ukraine: February–July 2022 (Royal United Services Institute, 2022).

14. Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Hale, “Russian Patronal Politics Beyond Putin,” Daedalus 146, no. 2 (2017), pp. 30–40.

15. Levada Center, “Ukraine and Donbass,” survey conducted 17–21 February 2022.

16. Suthan Krishnarajan and Jakob Tolstrup, “Pre-War Experimental Evidence that Putin's Propaganda Elicited Strong Support for Military Invasion Among Russians,” Science Advances 9, no. 45 (2023), eadg1199.