Why did Hitler not use his influence with China and Japan to negotiate a peace settlement, and gain prestige globally?

Germany's relationship with both Republican China and Japan in the 30s was characterized by a mixture of ignorance, short-term thinking, and opportunism. Although few in the Third Reich's foreign ministry had much experience with East Asian affairs, and Hitler less so, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War had rendered Germany's East Asian policy even more incoherent.

The stance of the few East Asian specialists within the Third Reich was that both Japan's and the GMD's anti-communism were essential prerequisites for containing communism globally. The pro-GMD voices within Germany tended to portray China as a mirror of the successes of German National Socialism. For example, Gustav Amann’s 1936 biography of Chiang Kai-Shek cast him as a Hitler-like figure that had transformed the GMD into an firm partner in the struggle against communism. Underneath Amann’s analysis was a strong approval on the part of the author of Chiang’s dictatorial actions such as the purging of the CCP and the end of the GMD’s alliance with the Soviet Union. Therefore, what emerged in Amman’s biography was a highly-selective history that omitted or over-simplified aspects of Chinese politics such the United Front that did not fit within Amann’s biases. For example, he asserts that the KMT, “the central executive bureau the political bureau, were never communist or proletarian; mass agitation was a tool, and labor strikes a weapon, of the United Front, they were never even a temporary expedient for the KMT or its regime.” Chiang’s dictatorship and elimination of any rival political parties to the GMD were necessary measures to ensure the fulfillment of Sun’s political dreams for a strong China. In Amann’s vision, the CCP and Marxism have no place in a future Chinese society. Such an analysis mirrored events in Germany as the Nazi state purged rival political parties and justified Hitler’s dictatorship as a necessary remedy for the chaos Germany experienced during the late 1920s. Additionally, Amann argued that the KMT represented a third way between murderous tyranny, as exemplified by Communism, and democratic pandemonium through the party’s fusion of ideology and the needs of the people. “Sun Yat-sen’s political theory was one young China would indeed follow in all its actions, it juts out like a bluff over the steppes of liberal democracy,” Amann confidently asserted. Such an analysis meshed well with his Nazi contemporaries who claimed the party was the vanguard of a modern and dynamic political movement. This mirrored analysis therefore posed a problem when Japan, one of the most consistently anti-communist states, invaded China.

A common recourse for this dilemma was to portray this conflict not as a war between the Japanese and Chinese, but instead as Japan’s justified assault on communism. Three Kladderadatsch, a satirical magazine heavily influenced by the state's ideology, cartoons exemplified this approach and its shortcomings. One of the earliest depictions of the war portrayed a Japanese samurai warrior about to confront an unruly Chinese dragon before a pagoda. As the dragon opens its mouth, a communist soldier brandishes a hammer and sickle at the brave Japanese. The caption beneath the cartoon stated “the Japanese: even the most good-natured dragon will become wild when he has such an indigestible beast inside of him.” The second cartoon, “Fernöstisches Herbstlied,” featured a skeletal Chinese communist playfully flying his own kite. Unfortunately for the Chinese civilians, this Communist kite is bomber raining destruction upon fields of corpses. The rhyming doggerel states “Mowing the fields,/ the autumn wind,/ high up in the heavens/ there stands his dragon.” The third visual depiction of China, “Hinter China steht Moskau,” depicted the nation as a beautiful smiling Asian woman {figure 5}. Sitting lotus position on a Chinese divan, behind this girl is a murderous communist, ready with a knife, with the caption reading “..as protector or murderer?” All three of these caricatures employed stock Orientalist images of a childish or exotic Far East combined with the anticommunist political message of Nazism. For example, the artist of “Hinter China steht Moskau,” portrayed a highly ambiguous China. The Chinese woman may either be a damsel in distress or a duplicitous “dragon lady” tricking the gullible onto the knife of her communist lover.

Yet Germany could not completely side with Japan in this war for economic reasons. German’s increasing economic investments within China was an ideal venue for the émigré press to present a portrait of a treacherous German state. Much of this trade, through the German firm HAPRO, involved the barter of military hardware to the KMT in exchange for Chinese raw materials unavailable for Germany’s war industries, especially tungsten. The irony of this situation was not lost on emigre critics of the Third Reich. Richard Kern’s “Das Dritte Reich im China” in Neuer Vorwaerts in September 1937 combined many of the ideas of his fellow exiles, but with the additional insight that the Sino-Japanese War was the direct result of a short-sighted foreign policy on the part of Nazism. In short, Kern’s argument was that Germany cynically bestowed the title “honorary Aryans” onto Japan in order to cement the latter into an anti-Soviet bloc. This attention from Germany inadvertently stimulated Japan to expand into China, the main importer of German arms. Ironically, Kern alleged that a defeat of the GMD only benefitted the CCP since Japan could not hold on to the territory it had seized. Kern concluded his piece with a letter from a German resident in Shanghai who stated that this foreign policy was “like a joke of history in which we were tied on one side by the anti-communist agreement in Japan, while on the other hand, we are the only really important arms supplier to the Chinese, or at least were.”

Despite the increasing affinity for Japan among the circles of German decision makers, the GMD still actively sought to actively court German public opinion to enlist this nation in the fight against Japan. One avenue was to found a German language newspaper in Germany that would give voice to the public propaganda of the KMT regime. This newspaper, Das neue China, published editorials by prominent Chinese intellectuals to persuade Germans of the righteousness of the Chinese cause. Zhu Jiahua’s 1939 editorial was typical of this attempt. From his position as head of the Sino-German Cultural Exchange, Zhu praised the wonders of German culture and science “which have brought the Chinese spirit closer together to the German soul.” Unfortunately, China’s material development could not match that of its Germany, and the latter had over the course of the previous century tried to help China regain its glory. Zhu informed his readers that these German-built schools, research institutions, libraries, universities, and schools now stand in ruins because of Japanese bombers, but that Chinese victory is assured because the GMD’s Three Principles of the People incorporated elements of German philosophy such as Fichte’s essays about collective strength of the spirit being greater than that of a weapon. Zhu’s lack of subtlety only underscored how much he attempted to place Chinese politics and culture within the same sphere as that of Germany. Unfortunately, public diplomacy as exemplified by Das neue China failed to persuade Hitler of any need to alter his policy of indifferent neutrality towards China. Das neue China ceased publication in 1941, but the KMT increased its publications directed towards the Western powers.

An interesting postscript was the short autobiography of the German General Alexander von Falkenhausen. Written in 1946 for the American occupation authorities, Falkenhausen related to his captors the fundamental weaknesses and contradictions in the Sino-German relationship on the basis of his experience as a private military adviser to Chiang. According to Falkenhausen, German foreign policy towards “China was, to say the least, peculiar, if it in fact could be called a policy.” Although deeply conservative and a member of the right-wing militia the Stahlhelm, Falkenhausen was highly ambivalent about the Nazis and accepted service with the GMD as a means to escape the pressure to conform to Nazi society. During his service in China, Falkenhausen noted the massive, untapped economic potential of the nation as well as its hospitable attitude towards foreigners. The threat to this idyll was Japan. From his vantage point of Nanjing, Falkenhausen saw that Japan’s chauvinism towards all races was a clear threat to peace and the amicable development of Sino-German relations. “The yellow peril,” he wrote, “was never Chinese but Japanese imperialism."

Although Falkenhausen's autobiography was highly self-serving, he demonstrates that even pro-GMD/Chinese voices within the Third Reich were often highly conditioned upon Orientalist images of adventure and improving the benighted Asian masses with enlightened European culture. Within this milieu it was highly unlikely that Germany would pursue a strategy of peace-making within China. Japan's support for Germany and the latter's increasing diplomatic isolation made pleasing Japan more valuable over time and led Germany's East Asian policy to favor Tokyo. But as a barometer of Germany's diplomatic apathy towards the Sino-Japanese War, their pro-Japanese stance never translated into an outright break with the GMD, hence publications like Das neue China.