公文書焼却について

 

"Researching Japanese War Crimes" (2006)

Published by the National Archives and Records Administration for the Nazi War Crimes and

Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, 2006

http://www.archives.gov/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/introductory-essays.pdf

Introduction　by Edward Drea

p9より。

Factors Influencing the Number of Documents in U.S. Possession

U.S. government agencies held far fewer records pertaining to Japanese war crimes than to Nazi war crimes. A major reason is that at war’s end, the Japanese destroyed or concealed important documents, which dramatically reduced the amount of evidence available for confiscation by U.S. authorities. How could this happen? At the time the Third Reich surrendered in May 1945, Allied armies occupied almost every inch of Germany. Document collection teams and specialists were on the scene and already confiscating Nazi records for use in announced war crimes trials. While the Germans, beginning in 1943, did engage in substantial efforts to obliterate evidence of such crimes as mass murder, and they destroyed a great deal of potentially incriminating records in 1945, a great deal survived, in part because not each one of the multiple copies had been burned. The situation was different in Japan. Between the announcement of a ceasefire on August 15, 1945, and the arrival of small advance parties of American troops in Japan on August 28, Japanese military and civil authorities systematically destroyed military, naval, and government archives, much of which was from the period 1942–1945. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo dispatched enciphered messages to field commands throughout the Pacific and East Asia ordering units to burn incriminating evidence of war crimes, especially offenses against prisoners of war. The director of Japan’s Military History Archives of the National Institute for Defense Studies estimated in 2003 that as much as 70 percent of the army’s wartime records were burned or otherwise destroyed.12

A report filed by the 27th Marines, 5th Marine Division, on September 24, 1945, documents the systematic destruction of records by the Japanese after the initial surrender to the Allies but before Allied troops arrived. NA,

RG 127, entry 1011, box 23, folder: Intelligence–Japanese.