Posted: Nov 13, 2021 04:49 GMT
Interrogations of Japanese military and officials after the end of World War II revealed that Tokyo designed a plan similar to the Nazi Operation Barbarossa to seize large territories in the east of the Soviet Union.
The Imperial Japanese Army intended to invade the USSR and seize vast territories in Siberia and the Russian Far East as the Soviet Union lost the war to the Nazi invaders on the Western Front.
These plans, which never came to fruition due to the resistance of the Red Army and the entire Soviet people, were exposed in a new series of documents declassified this Friday by the Federal Security Service of Russia in the 73rd Anniversary of the Dissolution of the Tokyo Tribunal, the main international process that tried the war crimes perpetrated by the political and military command of imperial Japan.
The documents date back to early 1946, when Soviet investigators questioned prisoners as they prepared their charges against Japanese officers and officials. The protocols of these interrogations and the translations of the written statements of four generals, a colonel and an adviser from the Japanese interior service were sent to the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, and his foreign minister, Viacheclav Molotov.
Some of these materials were later forwarded to the representative of the USSR in the judicial process, which lasted from May 3, 1946 until November 12, 1948, but the Tokyo Court did not specifically focus on this foiled plan of the Japanese Empire.
Waiting for a popular insurrection in the USSR
Among those statements is that of Toshio Hoshiko, who was Chief of Police in occupied Manchuria and revealed that a Japanese colonel he expected an “insurrection of the population” Soviet against Moscow, that the Imperial Army would take advantage of to begin its offensive against the troops of the USSR. According to his testimony, the Japanese officials were instructed on how to act in this scenario and at the same time prevent the Manchurian population from rebelling against the Japanese occupation.
“As early as 1941, Japan carried out in Manchuria all necessary preparations for the attack against the Soviet Union, “Hoshiko declared.
The Russian translations of the statements and writings of the Japanese military commanders also address the prehistory of the Soviet-Japanese conflict, since many of them intervened in the Russian Civil War (1918-1922) in territories invaded by the Soviet Union. “In 1922, under the push of the Red Army, Japan had to withdraw its troops from the Soviet Far East, but it did not abandon plans to attack the USSR,” declared Major General Shun Akikusa.
An analog to the Nazi Operation Barbarossa
All those high-ranking officials, noted then-Colonel General of the Interior Service and head of Soviet counterintelligence, Victor Abakumov, “testified that the Japanese government had been preparing a war against the USSR for many years.”
“The Japanese General Staff developed his own plan of attack on the Soviet Union, similar to Operation Barbarossa [invasión nazi de la URSS], with the codename ‘Kantokuen’ “, Ababúmov, the main person in charge of the inquiries, summed up in a memorandum to the Soviet Government dated February 13, 1946.
The Soviet-Japanese War ended in September 1945, several months after the surrender of Nazi Germany. After the victory of the USSR and its allies, the socialist country recovered the south of the island of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, lost after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905.
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