By Zou Haodan

The victory of World War II was not only a military triumph over the Axis powers, but also initiated an unprecedented process of accountability and moral reflection in human history.

From Nov. 20, 1945 to Oct. 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg convened the Nuremberg Trials. From May 3, 1946 to Nov. 12, 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East held the Tokyo Trials. These two landmark undertakings of international justice established three principal charges – crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity – breaking decisively with the pre-war international legal tradition of “state impunity” (shielding states from accountability). They proclaimed that launching a war of aggression (a crime against peace) was no longer an abstract act of state, but an international crime that demanded personal criminal accountability.

Yet in the aftermath of these trials, Germany and Japan, though both defeated, took sharply divergent paths in acknowledging and reflecting upon their war responsibilities.

Between 1946 and 1949, trials of war criminals were conducted across the United States, Germany (both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic), Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union. These trials prosecuted a wide range of collaborators, including doctors, judges, diplomats, military commanders, and corporate executives. To this day, Germany, in collaboration with the international community, continues to pursue legal accountability for surviving Nazi perpetrators to the present day.

In 1946, German philosopher Karl Jaspers argued in his book “The Question of German Guilt” that the responsibility confronting Germans extended beyond legal accountability to encompass political responsibility, individual moral choices, and even a metaphysical reckoning for the nation as a whole. Only through profound moral reflection, Jaspers insisted, could Germany truly return to civilization. 

Three years later, in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany adopted the Basic Law, which, together with a series of binding provisions, established the so-called “defensive democracy,” a constitutional framework designed to forestall the resurgence of extremist forces.

Over subsequent decades, German society gradually transformed the recognition of war responsibility into an enduring culture of education and collective memory. Anti-Nazi historical education became central to transmitting this memory across generations, while memorials and museums in public spaces served as focal points of remembrance. In this way, memory of war guilt became internalized into Germany’s national identity. Through sustained education and collective reflection, Germany rebuilt trust with Europe and the broader international community.

Japan’s trajectory starkly diverged. Following the Tokyo Trials, it failed to create an independent judicial system for further responsibility, creating a legal vacuum in moral reckoning. During the Cold War, government-sponsored “amnesty” initiatives systematically reintegrated war criminals into public life. This bypassing of societal self-examination resulted in a persistent accountability deficit within Japan’s historical memory.

Parallel to the Tokyo Trials, Allied military tribunals across Asia and the Pacific prosecuted thousands of individuals for conventional war crimes (classified as Class B and C offenses). Between 1945 and 1952, about 5,700 individuals were indicted; around 4,400 were convicted, and roughly 920 were sentenced to death. Most of the defendants were mid- and lower-ranking officers and soldiers directly responsible for atrocities. 

While Japanese media initially reported extensively on these trials, their visibility diminished as the Cold War intensified. Many convicted war criminals were later reintegrated into society, some even recasting themselves as mere “scapegoats of state policy” and denying responsibility for their crimes. This collective forgetting prevented Japanese society from developing a comprehensive understanding of the systemic nature of its wartime atrocities.

Japan’s war memory has long remained deeply divided. On the one hand, public opinion in victimized countries, along with segments of Japan’s intellectual community and civil society, stressed Japan’s role as an aggressor and demanded acknowledgment of atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre and the “comfort women” system. On the other hand, other segments of Japanese society maintained a “victim mentality,” framing the national war narrative around the atomic bombings and Tokyo air raids, thereby reinforcing Japan’s identity as a victim of war. 

This unresolved tension between “perpetrator” and “victim” narratives has never been reconciled within Japanese society. Instead, it evolved into a long-standing divide that shaped post-war Japanese political culture and profoundly affected the country’s foreign relations and national image.

The historical experience of the anti-fascist trial system illustrates that legal accountability, intellectual reflection, and institutional safeguards are closely interconnected. Without sustained legal mechanisms, reflection risks remaining superficial; without institutional and educational reinforcement, historical memory risks fading or being distorted. 

Germany, through persistent accountability, reflection, and institution-building, gradually regained the trust of the international community. Japan, by contrast, has failed to take a consistent stance  on historical issues, leaving deep scars across East Asia and exposing itself to continuing criticism and scrutiny from the international community.

The true significance of confronting historical guilt lies not in bearing it perpetually, but in ensuring that such tragedies are never repeated.

(Zou Haodan is a special research fellow at the Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.)